Perry Anderson on Rawls

I didn’t understand what Rawls is saying in the last quote. Anyone want to elaborate?

As I recall, Rawls also says that a liberal socialist regime (market socialism) also satisfies the principles of justice as fairness. A laissez-faire and capitalist welfare state fall considerably short.

Interesting: “The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states.” The argument Anderson is making is obviously that the inverse is not considered. The U.S. might well be a democracy, but it might vote into office a power that , for instance, is intent on legalizing the American generation of pollutants to an extent actually harming the health and welfare of other nations in the world. Just to take an obviously fictitious example. And they might continually re-elect such a faction. So: is there a right to intervene, militarily, to prevent the Americans from causing harm to the rest of the world? What if it could be proven that the American government, or, say, the U.K., intentionally and with forethought encouraged the sale of weapons manufactured in those countries to despots and human rights violators who used them in systematically immoral ways. Could the citizens of these countries, stop this heinous action by force? Would Rawls approve? If the Sandinistas, for instance, had mined the Miami harbor, would Rawls have out there, cheering them on?

Anderson is asking a fair question: is the liberal world order of infinitely beneficient interventions by democratic powers merely a camoflaged continuation of an old colonial order, founded on the slave trade, conquest, and genocide? Is it possible that the liberal powers, heirs of their illiberal forefathers, are continuing the work of their forefathers? And if it isn’t, why is it that no other forms of restitution and change than intervention are considered?

If Rawls is right, surely one can look around and find acts of pure benefit that emerge from liberal interventions. So, where are they? If Anderson is right, there should be material benefits flowing to intervening nations that have couched their interventions in liberal terms. Are there any?

On Anderson’s side is history: for example, the seizure of half of Africa, by the Brits, was done in the name of stopping the slave trade, and ended up benefitting white British farmers, ranchers, and miners enormously, while displacing and destroying native African groups. On Rawls side — Bosnia has not recently suffered the massacres it suffered last decade.

The dispute between Rawls and Anderson isn’t about misreading, then, it is about interpreting social facts. Nor is Anderson’s position simply nihilistic — for instance, if he is right, a positive liberal politics would recognize past and current patterns of economic and ecological oppression. A good place to start would be to stop the use of the World Bank to jimmy wealth out of third world nations after investors have systematically corrupted a ruling elite with bribes and saturated these countries with huge and unproductive debts by calling for a massive debt cancellation. For instance, the vast majority of the money loaned to Venezuala in the 90s was robbed by the governing class that contracted the debts, with the knowledge and the connivence of the lenders. Let’s simply make those debts uncollectable. A nice form of liberal intervention, n’est-ce pas?

Matt, your claim seems to be, then, that there were no liberal democracies a la Rawls until … when, exactly? To which I have to ask the question: Where did they appear? How are they connected to these non-liberal entities they used to be? If I were the heir of a mafia fortune, and I decided to engage in good works, wouldn’t I have to ask myself first — where did this money come from?

My claim is pretty simple — that philosophy is not so distant from social fact that you can’t look around in the world to make judgments about conflicting claims. And certainly one of the great social facts during Rawls life time was the explosion in debt in the third world . And that debt had a pattern — money from poorer countries poured into rich countries. So I am thinking, hmm, if we really want our liberal interveners to be liberal, maybe they can start their intervening at home. I also notice that the liberal intervenors in Bosnia were, simulatanously, arming to the teeth various non-democratic countries — for instance in the Gulf. And I think: well, if Anderson is right, I’d expect that these for profit enterprises will be given some ideological covering to make them seem democratic.

I refer you to the speeches of Bush, vis a vis Pakistan.

Roger,
I agree that the things you mention are very bad. My point is, Rawls agrees too- quite clearly. This is _obvious_ to anyone who reads him. He _Agrees_ that the US is far from just, and should change its behavior at home and abroad. So, why is the bad behavior of a system (the US) that Rawls thinks is bad a criticism of Ralws? I just don’t get it. Notice that I didn’t say the US isn’t a liberal democracy. Or that nothing done by a liberal democracy is wrong- certainly Ralws says nothing like that either. I think it’s clear that you’re either fighting a straw man or are misunderstanding something about what Rawls says, or what his project is, or both.

Matt, are you saying that Rawls was not an advocate for a liberal interventionism? In which case, if you are right, I am wrong. Or are you saying his case for liberal interventionism, acknowledges the interests and structural ‘problems” of the liberal interveners, but still advocates a policy of military interventions? In which case I’d want to know more about how we value and what we do about that acknowledgement — is there a threshhold beyond which we acknowledge that intervention is vicious because it is being carried out by the illiberal to shore up an unjust system? Or are our judgments wholly dependent on the monstrousness of the rulers of the state intervened upon?

Practical reason would instruct us that intention is not the whole of morality — both means and character are also factors. To give a concrete instance of this — when Truman intervened in Korea, he also decided to desegregate the armed forces, realizing that it was impossible to hold the moral high ground and still hold to outright racism. So here’s the question — if we have a theory of intervention that is only one way — that has no channel that changes the bad behavior of the intervenors — doesn’t this rather explode the very base of liberal intervention?

Roger and Louis are wrong to see Rawls as thinking of America as a just society, but they would be right to see Rawls as having a more benign (because more balanced) view of the US than Anderson does.

Notice how Anderson characterized Rawls’s service in the war against aggressive Japanese militarism:

bq. Service in America’s war to regain the Pacific.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. My reference to the US as moral actor was broader than WWII. From what I understand, Rawls had a honorable position on Hiroshima.

I was referring instead to the notion that American capitalist politicians act out of some moral consideration. In Rawls’ case, this led to a wild exaggeration of Lincoln’s virtues.

Any impartial study of Lincoln’s career would reveal not the slightest willingness to abolish slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was adopted in order to shore up the North during a particularly perilous moment in the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa082800a.htm

In his new book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, black American author, Lerone Bennett, presents historic evidence supporting the theory that Abraham Lincoln was, in fact, a devoted racist harboring a life-long desire to see all black Americans deported to Africa.

Bennett suggests that as a young politician in Illinois, Lincoln regularly used racial slurs in speeches, told racial jokes to his black servants, and vocally opposed any new laws that would have bettered the lives of black Americans.

Key to Bennett’s thesis is the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which, Bennett argues, Lincoln was forced into issuing by the powerful abolitionist wing of his own party. Bennett asserts that Lincoln carefully worded the document to apply only to the rebel Southern states, which were not under Union control at the time, thus resulting in an Emancipation Proclamation that did not in itself free a single slave.

At one point, Bennett quotes William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who referred to the proclamation as a hollow, meaningless document showing no more than, “our sympathy with the slaves by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Henry Clay Whitney, a close friend of Lincoln, is quoted by Bennett as saying the proclamation was “not the end designed by him (Lincoln), but only the means to the end, the end being the deportation of the slaves and the payment for them to their masters – at least to those who were loyal.”

Bennett asserts that Lincoln often put forth plans for deporting the slaves to Africa both before and during his presidency.

The tone of Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream is decidedly angry, as if Bennett feels betrayed by what he calls the “myth” of Abraham Lincoln.

“No other American story is so enduring. No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false.” — Lerone Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.

Any impartial study of Lincoln’s career would reveal not the slightest willingness to abolish slavery.

Readers may want to look at “James M. McPherson’s NYT review”:http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=980CE1D9153EF934A1575BC0A9669C8B63 of the Bennett book that Louis P mentions.

I see you are not familiar with the Mel Blanc-like talents of Mr. Onstad. Start here:

http://www.achewood.com/

From my extremely limited reading of Rawls, I have a good opinion of him. That aside, I agree with most of what I think Roger is saying–whether it is a fair criticism of Rawls might be doubtful, but it’s a pretty good criticism of liberals who are constantly urging the US to intervene here and there and don’t spell out the difference between what moral principle distinguishes Darfur from situations when the US is the chief villain, a circumstance which has occurred with depressing frequency throughout its history. (Though I think we were the good guys, relatively speaking, in WWII.) People think we should send military forces into Darfur. So who should have intervened in Vietnam, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, El Salvador, Angola, Zaire, etc… when the US was either killing people or helping other people kill people? And shouldthere be a humanitarian military rescue mission to liberate the people being tortured by the US in various places? The answer, of course, is no, for the same reason we aren’t about to liberate Tibet.

I think the liberal interventionist types would have more intellectual credibility if they’d forthrightly admit that they advocate going after weak countries like Serbia and the Sudan and not against powerful countries like the US and China because military force can accomplish something against the weak, but will lead to catastrophe if employed against the strong. It’s the use of Chomsky’s reasoning in a way Chomsky never intended–you speak out against the atrocities you can stop, and it’s easier to stop the Serbs than it is to stop the Americans.

In the heat of composing the previous rant, I forgot to thank Matt for the explanation of Rawls. Thanks. I gather, then, that the US would be like the capitalist welfare state and maybe Sweden would come closer to the democracy which has private property but tries to spread the wealth around a bit more.

I gather, then, that the US would be like the capitalist welfare state and maybe Sweden would come closer to the democracy which has private property but tries to spread the wealth around a bit more.

Although Rawls is pretty vague on this point, I would actually think that Sweden is an example of a capitalist welfare state rather than a property-owning democracy. As far as I can tell, Rawls’s favored regime types have never actually existed. There are a few relevant passages from Justice As Fairness about this, but I’m afraid I don’t have the book with me to cite them.

I find it difficult to separate McPherson’s comments on the first Gulf War from his scholarship actually. If it isn’t difficult for you, then be my guest. It’s a free country.

I just don’t see how its relevant at all…If McPherson supported the first Gulf War, does that mean his historical analysis of Lincoln is wrong? I fail to see the connection.

In any case, Lerone Bennett’s basic point is not that controversial. You’ll find the same observations made in Eric Foner and other Marxist historians too numerous to mention.

While I’m not a Lincoln scholar, I have read several scholarly books about Lincoln over the years and I do find Leorne Bennett’s contention to be controversial (not to mention badly supported) and, from what I can tell, I believe many historians do as well. Perhaps it isn’t controversial among Marxist historians–but I doubt this as well.

McPherson’s point seems basically correct: “There is, of course, no doubt that Lincoln shared many of the racist convictions of his time. But while he was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it.”

Anyway, this hardly seems relevant to the topic of the post, so I’m going to drop it.

I am no expert on the slavery and the Civil War myself but I did review a fair amount of the literature, especially Marxist, in a series of email postings answering a fellow by the name of Charles Post who teaches sociology at Sara Lawrence. Post, like me, is a former member of the Trotskyist movement in the USA. He is also politically close to Robert Brenner, a fellow member of Solidarity. After I discovered that Post had adapted the Brenner thesis to American slavery, I replied using an approach that I had developed through reading and discussions with the late James Blaut, who regarded the Brenner thesis as Eurocentric.

In general, my approach was to critique the notion of a revolutionary bourgeoisie being forced to demolish a precapitalist economic institution. I regard the Southern planter class as throroughly bourgeois, even though it used slave labor.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a series of articles that can be found at
under the heading “Capitalism, Slavery and the Brenner Thesis.” As should be obvious, despite everything that John Rawls has written, I am not inclined to be deferential to Enlightenment figures such as Locke, Hume and Kant.

—

In her July-August 1998 Monthly Review defense of the Brenner thesis (http://www.monthlyreview.org/798wood.htm), Ellen Meiksins Wood singles out John Locke as the philosopher par excellence of agrarian capitalism. With Locke’s emphasis on “improvement”, which revolved around soil cultivation techniques, etc., he stood as an implacable foe of feudal or precapitalist waste, presumably including chattel slavery.

However, the slave masters of the New World did not quite see things that way. According to James Oakes in “Slavery and Freedom”, not only were they receptive to Enlightenment ideals; they played a vanguard role in adapting Locke to the revolution of 1776. Oakes writes:

“The writings of eighteenth-century Southerners were steeped in Lockean premises, never more thoroughly than during the American Revolution. ‘Men in a State of Nature are absolutely free and independent of one another as to sovereign Jurisdiction,’ Richard Bland of Virginia wrote in 1766. They enter into society ‘by their own consent,’ he explained, just as ‘they have a natural Right to quit the Society of which they are Members . . . [to] recover their natural Freedom and Independence.'” (p. 60)

Indeed, Locke, a slave-owner himself, wrote the state constitution of South Carolina in 1669 that stipulated: “But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in the same state and condition he was In before.”

If the Brenner thesis posits market coercion as a sine qua non for capitalism, and if John Locke is the quintessential philosopher for the newly emerging system, then how does one reconcile this contradiction? The answer to this question highlights an essential flaw in the Brenner thesis, namely its failure to appreciate the role of racism in the development of capitalism in the New World. Specifically, if indigenous people and Africans are seen as subhuman, then Enlightenment ideas about freedom, including the freedom to compete in labor markets, do not really apply to them. You might as well talk about the right of a mule to vote or teach school.

Some of the most advanced thinkers in Great Britain believed that Africans were a species midway between apes and white men. In a footnote to “Of National Characters”, David Hume writes:

“I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences… Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people, without education, will start up amonst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly”.

It’s been a long time since I took Eric Foner’s classes, but I don’t remember him having that point of view about Lincoln. I may be getting him mixed up with James Shenton, though, who taught a very “great man” version of the Civil War.

I don’t remember Foner writing that way about Lincoln in RECONSTRUCTION, either, though I believe he did write about the “repatriation” idea.

To Mox: It depends on what you mean by “writing that way”. Basically, Foner applies a class analysis to the Republican Party. The workers, farmers and small-scale industrialists oriented to the Radical Republican wing of the party, while the big bourgeoisie sought compromise. Lincoln was closer to the compromise faction, but was not above appointing Radicals to important posts. It a matter of historical record that the Republican Party sought mainly to prevent slavery from being permitted in the western states rather than being uprooted in the South as demanded by the Radicals. As I have stated previously, the Emancipation Proclamation was prompted by the exegencies of warfare rather than upon some principled opposition to slavery. Even James McPherson admits this. Southern victories in 1862 convinced the European powers that the Confederacy might succeed. In his book on Antietam, McPherson says England was moving close to that point, so was France. By making slavery a war issue, Lincoln hoped to forestall an alliance between Europe and the Confederacy. In other words, the abolition of slavery was completely contingent on geopolitical questions. In some ways, the vacillating back and forth is reminiscent of the liberal bourgeoisie’s relationship to Hitler before WWII.

To Chris: Of course there is an inconsistency between Locke’s highminded treatises on freedom and his support for chattel slavery. This is exactly why it was necessary for Marxism to prevail against the Enlightenment. It is only by establishing the economic basis for freedom (abolition of private property, including chattel slavery) that political freedom can be won. Marxism brings the Enlightenment to fruition while simultaneously abolishing it.

Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime”: “The Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish. The difference between the two races is thus a substantial one: it appears to be just as great in respect to the faculties of the mind as in color.”

—

Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query XIV: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”

—

Montesquieu, “The Spirit of Laws”: “You will find in the climates of the north, peoples with few vices, many virtues, sincerity and truthfulness. Approach the south, you will think you are leaving morality itself, the passions become more vivacious and multiply crimes… The heat can be so excessive that the body is totally without force. The resignation passes to the spirit and leads people to be without curiosity, nor the desire for noble enterprise.”

—

Voltaire, “Lettres d’ Annabed”: “It is a serious question among them whether [the Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.”

The quotes prove that Enlightment figures were backward on race. These quotations and many more can be found in “Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader” by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. The interesting question, of course, is why you don’t find this kind of naked racism in Karl Marx or Engels’s writings. (This is not to say that they haven’t been charged with racism on account of scattered backward comments in their private correspondence.) There are two reasons for this, I believe. The Englightenment thinkers tended to adopt the class outlook of the bourgeoisie whose prejudices corresponded to the real material need to maintain empire and slavery. Even at the height of the French Revolution, the Haitian rebels got short shrift from the new democratic government. For its part, Great Britain only moved against slavery as a way to undermine French commercial interests in the Western Hemisphere.

The other important thing to take note of is that Marx and Engels embraced materialism. Once you proceed on the basis that history advances on the basis of changes in the mode of production, it is much easier to dump racialist essentialism of the sort found in Hume, Kant et al.

Louis,

this is ridiculous. Even if individual enlightenment figures were racists, that tells us nothing about whether commitment to the values of the enlightement implies racism. If I were to find racist tropes in individual marxist thinkers, would that mean that marxists were necessarily racists? No, quite clearly not.

As someone too ignorant to have firm opinions (not that this always stops me), I feel qualified to referee this little quarrel. Some observations–

1. I didn’t know it was controversial to say that most famous Enlightenment figures were racist. I think I’ve seen Louis’s quotes or similar ones before, and every American knows or should know Jefferson was a racist.

2. It is at least possible that widespread racism in Enlightenment figures might be telling us something about Enlightenment ideas.

3. On the other hand, if Locke was a racist, one could argue that this explains his defense of slavery and that the rest of his political philosophy can be safely separated from his unfortunate views about non-white people. I’m not saying this is correct. I wouldn’t know. You probably aren’t going to settle such an issue in a blog comment section, but please try. It’s educational.

4. Like most naive folk, I don’t mind the use of words like “backwards” when referring to the thinking of otherwise brilliant people who were racist.

5. My impression of the Russian Revolution is that one of the areas where it went wrong was in privileging the vanguard party’s views over the actual needs of the poor (most Russians). Thus you get catastrophic famines like that under “war communism”.

Yeah, what Donald and Javier said.
Appeals to the truth of marxism when what is essentially at question is the truth of marxism are not very helpful. If Enlightenment ideals – the rule of law, limited private property rights, popular sovereignty etc – are inherently racist, show the ideals are inherently racist. The fact that some Enlightenment thinkers were racist does not necessarily impugn those ideals.