Conservatism, Liberalism, Partisanship and Varieties of Utopian Experience

I do not understand the the left wing cult that seems to have formed around Rawls. It is a big step down from Marx and Lenin. I can read Marx and even Lenin without falling asleep. I can also see where a developmental dictatorship like the USSR might be attractive to those of an extreme utilitarian bent. Sure 10% of the population is brutally exterminated in the process, but the descendants of the 90% that do survive are much better off materially. When applied to really poor countries like the Russian Empire, China, and Cuba the model has a certain appeal. But, Rawls doesn’t even offer that as far as I can see. His theory is only applicable in the already advanced capitalist liberal and social democratic states. It offers no promise of development for the vast majority of the world’s population living in poor and underdeveloped countries. It is just a plaything of the idle academic bourgeoisie in already rich countries.

Its built into the structure of contractualist accounts of justice- they have to exclude those who believe there is a non-political source of justice that trumps whatever rules (would) emerge from the need for political compromise.

Rawls’ problem with conservatives mirrors exactly Rousseau’s problems with Catholics. i.e. he has built a supposedly realizable utopia that rests upon a measure of ‘toleration’ that excludes half the subjects of any likely polity.

“Each man may have what opinions he pleases, without it being the sovereign’s business to take cognizance of them..BUT…there is a purely civil profession of faith which the Sovereign should fix the articles.” These articles include “The sanctity of the Social Contract and the laws, its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance.” (SC 3.8)

We MUST tolerate difference of opinion, but the one thing we can’t tolerate is difference of opinion on is where justice gets its sanction. I think Rawls ‘gets’ that some Conservatives will never be able to accept this, he is just certain that they are not possible partners in a system of Social rather than Divine justice.

I think that it’s a mistake to view pluralism in terms of liberals vs. conservatives. Both liberals and conservatives are actually coalitions of people with different political agendas, and it’s an artifact of the way politics is done that we pretend that everyone is one or the other.

The more interesting kind of political plurality is really the various “special interest” groups that everyone seems to think are so harmful to political discourse. Some people care more about the arts than other people do. Some people care more about the environment, or income inequality, or sexual inequality, or low taxes, or crime, or abortion, or freedom of speech or whatever. Even if we are all dedicated liberals, that doesn’t end the debate over these issues. Even if every issue has a clear “politically correct” position associated with it, there will still be squabbling over how much priority to give to each issue. Part of the squabbling is going to be about how to divide up scarce resources: Do we spend more money on health care for the poor, or on protecting the environment? Part of the squabbling is going to be about deciding between two or more incompatible notions of what the ideal is.

A utopian pluralism would be one in which disagreements could be settled through experimentation rather than debate. A place in which groups of the people who have dreamed up a system with a different set of tradeoffs could splinter off and set it up, attracting or losing members according to how successful their ideas pan out to be. That way you could have progress without the vitriol.

5: This

We are a collectivity of individual (rarely, actually) overlapping and conflicting interests, and it might more useful to model and study concrete instances of local politics before we go global and meta-meta.

Do we allow vendors in public parks, how many and how regulated? How is this to be decided?

It is interesting then to see how global and meta-arguments (urbanist, free-marketer) are used as authority in concrete disputes.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee! :(

Which Barry points up: is the point of Rawls that he defends something like libertarianism, or is the point of Rawls that even if you’re something like a libertarian, you need redistribution too?

The bit where you argue for Rawls’ pluralism w/r/t the good is interesting too. It seems obvious to me, but why wouldn’t someone–say someone who took naturally to all that pearly gates imagery–understand the good as obviously only one thing? He can’t possibly mean that there’s only one good life but people who want to be benighted and live in squalor can do so as they like.

LFC: You don’t actually accuse me of asserting what you think is the horrible, benighted belief that Rawls defends libertarianism, or even that it’s likely that Rawls defends libertarianism, but could you read my comment again? I think what I meant was pretty plainly expressed.

1. Adding “LFC says so” to my evidence isn’t all that convincing. 2. I think that if acceptable arguments from Rawls are necessarily defenses of something like libertarianism, as has seemed at times to be the case on CT and elsewhere, granting that “CT commenters say so” isn’t great evidence, it is hard to see how Rawls is not a defense of libertarianism. In that case, certainly, no one who wished not to defend libertarianism would spend a lot of time on him. My question’s whether that is the case.

From the OP:
But, strictly, saying we need some buzzing, messy pluralistic public square is strictly consistent with saying that, ideally, we should abolish the buzzing, messy pluralistic public square we’ve got and elect a new one.

Isn’t it fairly clear that Rawls thought the public square as currently set up in the US is not only buzzing and messy but fatally contaminated by the effects of money in politics (even worse after Citizens United, of course)? Perhaps the OP should have nodded in that direction. OTOH, I don’t fully understand the OP’s worry about whether Fox News watchers count as “reasonable.” To be a little flippant: if their conception of the good is watching Fox all day they’re going to be too occupied to do much real harm except on election day. So R. doesn’t have much to say one way or the other about whether conservatives pass his test of “reasonable” — I can’t get too excited about that. BTW, what if someone read Burke six hours a day instead of watching Fox six hours a day? Would that person count as “reasonable”?

Is it reasonable to say that, in an ideal – even just an optimal – world, no one would want to watch Fox News six hours a day? I would say: obviously so.

Last time I spent a while in America there wasn’t a US news station that was showing more news than Fox. So I watched it, imagining I could glean the real news through the filter.

arbitrista @4:
Trying to figure out what the most just feasible political community might look like is a different question from how to improve the material conditions of people in very poor countries. One is about justice, and the other about wealth.

In this case I agree with J. Otto Pohl that the questions of justice and wealth can’t be kept so separate. What Pohl misses, though, is that there’s been a lot of work, going back to the ’70s but esp. in more recent years, trying to extend Rawls’s views, in some way or other, to a global scale. (I should/would probably defer to C. Bertram’s knowledge about this. Mine is sort of out of date.)

In general, the question is whether what we need is, in effect, an improved version of what we’ve got, or something quite different.

It seems to me that an improved version of what we’ve got would indeed be something quite different. Must be something quite different, since the pit we’ve fallen into has been implicit from the beginning. I’m thinking of the wrestling matches of the Enlightenment, the outcome of which found its most concrete real-world expression, I would argue, in the U.S. Constitution, specifically in its attempt to balance the competing interests of the day. And if I’ve read the Federalist Papers and De Tocqueville’s musings correctly, the architects of that real-world expression were well aware of its fault lines, and did a fair job, if not a perfectly prophetic one, of imagining the stresses that the future might bring to bear on them. They were hopeful, these architects, but none of them were unqualified optimists.

Of course, once something is reduced to Holy Writ, as the Constitution has been in the U.S., it’s all that much easier to falsify, or to evade its obligations. In any event, if we’re to imagine our way out of the wreckage of the Eighteenth Century’s attempt at a rational novus ordo seclorum, we need to pay attention to the spirit rather than the concrete mechanisms of its politics. We also have to take serious account of what the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries should have taught us about how easily the powers unleashed by the rationality of the Enlightenment can be usurped by the irrational. The isms and the wars of our immediate predecessors have been banished temporarily, but what inflicted them on us in the last instance is still out there. We need to extend ourselves beyond what we already know if we’re to deal with their future manifestations. (It’s not that it wouldn’t help to stop electing apologists, nest-featherers and morons to public office; it’s that they’re a symptom rather than a cause.)

I don’t think Rawls has a blindspot for conservatism; I think he sees it foursquare, takes aim and fires. The whole point of using the original position to define justice as fairness is to disallow vested interest conservatism, and any principles or philosophies, which function as rationalizations of vested interest conservatism. In his view, the Social Contract standard, of defining “fair” as principles chosen from behind a veil of ignorance, entails (he believes) universal endorsement of egalitarian social cooperation for mutual benefit. Conservatism of the what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable variety, conservatism that favors hierarchy and domination as means and purpose for organizing social cooperation, is presumed to be deprecated by every reasonable person, from behind the veil of ignorance, and conservatism, as such, appears only in the corruption of actual politics practiced with the knowledge of particular self-interest and the possibility of overpowering opposition. There’s no possibility of an ideal society or an ideal politics; the ideal is the concept of fairness, which he hopes will guide and redeem an actual politics and political society.

Pluralism is a liberal desideratum because liberalism is the philosophy, which doubts that it knows what is right, at least in concrete terms. So, an ideal liberal society, in which all political discourse has collapsed into idealized liberal principles, is something of a contradiction. No actual legislature can enact laws from behind a veil of ignorance, nor can a judiciary arbitrate disputes, a priori. Politics has to discover how to organize society, in a world informed with the knowledge of good and evil, and particular situations, self-interest and power.

A fundamentally conservative, aka authoritarian, society could suffer a collapse of its political discourse. In fact, that’s what an authoritarian, as opposed to liberal, society is: a society in which deliberation on principles and rules has ceased, because conflict and negotiation has been resolved by the exercise of authority and power, in expedience. A liberal society seeks to perpetuate conflict and negotiation, ad infinitum, by means of deliberation (and in that deliberation, disinterested principle is persuasive), where a conservative society seeks to resolve the social conflict entailed by social cooperation into harmonious hierarchy, and replace deliberation and negotiation with authority and authority’s expedience.

So, while a liberal may reason from a concept of fairness, which abstracts from individual self-interest, the liberal does so in a real and messy world, introducing such an ideal as a guidepost, for arriving at rules and judgments through deliberation among equals. There’s an underlying presumption, I think, that a world of pure conservatism, where might makes right and no concept of justice apart from the concrete, situational good of the individual or individual-in-a-family can be conceived, is not functional; pure conservatism is a Hobbesian world without leviathan, but as soon as leviathan appears, the erosion of that conservative world into a more liberal world begins, as rationalizations of the role of leviathan emerge, and continue as society’s control of leviathan, as well as leviathan’s control of society, comes into dispute.

So, yes, a vested interest conservatism and its authoritarianism is the enemy of a liberal conception of democratic deliberation guiding the organization of society.

To me, the standard of heavenly utopianism is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — a state in which society no longer has to balance the distribution of benefits from social cooperation, against the need to call into operation the social cooperation that generates those benefits, with incentives and discipline. To me, Rawls does not do a particularly good job of outlining political deliberation over the organization of social cooperation, where the rules governing the incentives and discipline that drive production may be in conflict with preferences regarding the claims or suffering of those, who may not contribute much to production. Rawls is very big on honoring the plans and aspirations of the individual, but not necessarily all that clear on how we get people to do that stuff called work, that no one really aspires to do. It does seem to be that one could have a thoroughly liberal political society in which both right and left are liberal in Rawls’s sense, and the “conservatives” (who are just right-handed liberals) are arguing for more personal responsibility, discipline and less social insurance (and how do we know that there are no risk-lovers behind the veil of ignorance anyway?), while the left-handed liberals are the bleeding hearts, who want more generous social insurance, as a consolation prize for the ugly or handicapped, and the victims of accidents. American political economy circa 1970 came pretty close to that kind of division between right and left, in a political discourse in which everyone claimed to be a philosophical liberal, and justified their desiderata, in liberal terms; Nixon always claimed that he shared the goals of liberals — he just wanted to be smarter and more efficient in pursuing those goals.

Circa 2010, it is much more difficult to see what a right-left division of opinion in a thoroughly liberal society might look like, or why Rawls might seem to anticipate such a peculiar (to us) chimera as a conservative liberal.

Pseud. McGee @30:
As is fairly well known, Rawls was a Big Deal, to use your phrase, and not just in the U.S., partly because TOJ revived normative pol. theory at a time when many had assumed it was basically finished. As to your specific suggestion (a connection to constitutional interpretation), I don’t know; my sense is that some non-Americans perhaps tend to exaggerate the place of the Constitution in U.S. political culture but that would be another topic.

btw/fyi: Ch.6 of D. Rodgers’ prize-winning Age of Fracture (2011) discusses Rawls and others from an intellectual historian’s standpoint. (Have the book out from the library but have only dipped into it.)

Rawls is … not necessarily all that clear on how we get people to do that stuff called work, that no one really aspires to do.

Well, yeah. But that’s also not his topic, really. Rawls assumes a market economy (though he allows for collective ownership of the means of production). So I suppose he assumes that people work for whatever sorts of reasons people work in market economies. But maybe you’re thinking: given the assurance of a “reasonable social minimum”, people will be dis-incentivized to work (or something?). But look, Rawls, in TOJ, sets things up in very particular ways. He’s doing ideal theory—in one sense at least. So he assumes strict compliance. He has arguments against free-rider problems—arguments that are not half-bad, so to speak. Etc. So yeah, ultimately, he’s not worried about this kind of problem. But given what he’s doing, why should he be?

Two points of clarification: (1) I have no particular axe to grind here. My own views are way left of Rawls’. That said, I think it would just be stupid to deny that A Theory of Justice is simply a magnificent achievement. As LFC points out (sort of), there’s simply nothing remotely comparable, at least in Anglo-American political philosophy, in the decades prior. (2) Above, I’m only talking about TOJ; Political Liberalism I’m a lot less hot on, in more than one sense. (I’m also teaching TOJ right now, so that helps.)

A few things:

1) I should have mentioned Patrick O’Donnell above @23 as someone who is knowledgeable about the global distributive justice lit.

2) There’s a (political scientist) blogger who has been posting some stuff recently about weighted voting schemes (i.e., the worse-off get more voting power). He frames it as sort of an extension of Rawls. (I’m quite dubious that Rawls himself would have liked it.) It’s a little off-topic here, but I can supply the link if anyone is interested.

3) J. Otto Pohl @34: This comment is a bunch of crap, even by J.O.P.’s standards. The notion that atheists can’t do Biblical exegesis would be amusing if it weren’t so ludicrous. Leftish US academics embraced various writers but Lenin wasn’t high on the list. (And btw, stop calling China and the former USSR “socialist states.”)

LFC:
Fair enough. I’m assuming, for purposes of the comment, a kind of archaeological argument, whereby, if an argument that mentions Rawls with the implication that he’s an authority, the inevitable response will be a reminder that one has chosen an argumentative point of view in which it’s necessary either to defend libertarianism or to admit that one has inadvertently appeared to do so and had made a mistake. Obviously, the need or advisability of using blog comments as a kind of authority in themselves is open to debate (and creates other uncomfortable questions, far far far off topic, like whether it’s “OK” to post as a woman or as an obviously non-native English speaker or c.).

LFC:
You’re right, you’re really not following me. I’m suggesting that the definition of “libertarian” is a convention, and as such depends on how the word is used by people. If people stretch the meaning of “libertarian” to mean Rawls, I can’t talk to them without granting their definition some influence. That their definition of “libertarian” may be inconsistent, or wrong in some other way, doesn’t change the fact that I can’t talk to them without granting their definition some influence.

For myself, I’d be happy dropping back to the–probably more easily answered–question whether Rawls is better thought of a as liberal (American) or a liberal (Anglo-European).

39,40:Not intending to jump in this too deep, but Cato blogger Will Wilkinson has done a lot of work trying to reconcile (mashup?) Rawls and Hayek with a degree of success unknown to me. Perhaps he moved Hayek closer to Rawls? But googlin “Rawls Hayek Wilkinson” will get a page of links. WW calls it a “Fusion”

Not that Hayek was a libertarian, but I think Wilkinson is.

Bruce Wilder @ 42

I can’t fault your analysis of what is, but I can, I think, argue with your limits on what might be. Daydreaming, I imagine painting interstices, man, it’s all about the interstices between the paisleys on a modern rejiggeration of Kesey’s Magic Bus. I wonder at the pity that arises out of nowhere as I watch poor President Obama, perched on a stool in the Univision studios, doing his best to impersonate the expected icon of stability and good sense, which is surely less than what he had every right to expect his imagination, his curiosity, and above all, his finely-honed ambition would lead him to.

Because they have to move, things will move, and dousing everything that threatens your blocked intellectual bowels with pepper-spray or hellfire missiles can never afford you the confirmation that it seems to promise.

But enough with the hippie vapors of my youth. The appeal of authoritarianism is its promise of control over anything that threatens to become uncontrollable. The problem is that control as an ideology is sealed at both ends, closed to both past and future. In terms of military strategy, once you build a fortress, you’re immobilized, and even if you’re spies are good enough to tell you everything that’s going on in the countryside, you’re left without any way to analyze its significance, or to respond to it in context. To put it another way, whether sooner or later, anything that can’t bend will be broken, and given the forces in play today, I’d bet on sooner.