The Left and THE LEFT: Responding to the crisis of soft neoliberalism

I’m slightly puzzled about some of the divisions here, John, but particularly when we get to your ante-ante-penultimate paragraph referring to Rawls and Nozick, since what these liberals have in common in political philosophy is a strong defence of individual rights, which in Rawls’s case include basic liberties and political freedoms. The neoliberal centre and its adjacent parts to its left and right in real-world politics have been uninterested to downright hostile to those liberties, since their focus is on market-driven growth to provide jobs and to generate resources for limited redistribution. In today’s real-world politics, the only people standing up for those liberties in any numbers are the progressive left.

IMHO, the “left neoliberals” exist because there was for a period a dominance of “new dealers” and, further to the left, “marxists”, both ideologies that require a strong influence of the state on the market.
But when this “big government” kind of politics began to wobble, there was a strong turn to the market and the only kind of left that could survive were the left neoliberals, who did more or less the same things the right neoliberals did, but with more control and more care for social issues.

But in this sense, “left neoliberals” can only exist in a period where there is some dismantling of “big government”, otherways their theory doesn’t make sense.

The farther we go from the new deal compromise, the less the “left neoliberals” make sense, but for people whose political opinions were formed in the 70s this is not obvious.

“the market-friendly policies of soft neoliberalism (deregulated finance, charter schools, a Grand Bargain on deficit reduction)”

These positions are nowadays marginal to non-existent within the US Democratic Party, especially in the House (there are remnants in the Senate, and of course there’s still Sinemanchin). And Biden himself (who governs far to the left of Obama, Clinton and Carter) doesn’t care shit about any of this nonsense.

Could it be that “soft neoliberalism” in the US is only kept alive by pundits?

Haven’t listened to the podcast, but I distrust the summary of DeLong’s view, regardless of the fact that DeLong seems to endorse it.

DeLong’s argument, as I understood it, was not that neoliberals couldn’t get legislation passed after 2009, but that neoliberalism failed in its actual Clinton-era ascendancy because it relied on Republicans to be acting in good faith to carry out common goals such as reducing poverty.

If DeLong really is saying that there is a new cooperation with Republicans that has revived neoliberalism, well, that’s just making the same mistake he made in the past with considerably less excuse.

I also am puzzled by this choice of groupings and whom they’re supposed to represent; for that matter I’m puzzled by Brad DeLong, who seems to be at the far right end of Democratic Party preferences, distinguished from those only because he’s an expert in economics and therefore knows what those preferences actually mean, and secondarily because he’s willing to read and learn (something unspecified) from Karl Marx. Noah Smith is even farther to the right from what I can tell: maybe a bit more socially progressive but I don’t remember why I think that.

None of this has any connection with actual legislative politics (the ostensible topic of the linked post). It’s just more of the usual context-free exhortation to “the Democratic Party” to “do more progressive stuff.” It’s pretty much entirely disconnected from political and electoral realities.

The only possibilities are (1) these people live in a fantasy world, either entirely wrong about how the world worlds, or at best (ironically) where their peer-reviewed articles have a magical effect on the world, or (2) they know what they’re saying has no connection to reality and have some other purpose in mind. Either way, this raises the question Chris Bertram poses in the other post, why I should grant them extreme charity in deciding to use my time to interpret their words.

I have my own beliefs about what the political divisions in the US really are, but those are based on the self-representations of people who are probably liars, aren’t they?

Yes, this motte-and-bailey is a tactic, and it often comes with the claim of the existence of a slippery slope where health care or anti-trust regulations are the first step on the path towards the gulag. Not sure what to say, because this is so silly but also so predictable: When presented with the choice between higher taxes and strengthening the far-right, centrists neoliberals (and libertarians, and their equivalents before those words even existed) will pretty much always side with the far right, because, well, money!, but rationalise it as having to defend freedom from the left. Because when neoliberals say freedom, they mean the freedom of a rich person to spend their money as they see fit, and the freedom of a business owner or CEO to act as a totalitarian dictator in their company, and that’s the sum and end of freedom. Worker’s rights or the freedom that comes from not having to worry where the next meal is coming from don’t even register on their radar, because they don’t count people who aren’t rich enough to be above those things as real people.

If Elizabeth Warren is a prominent representative of the US left, then there really isn’t much to that left. Her topic is stronger consumer protection, which isn’t nothing, it’s great and badly needed, but it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what is needed to share prosperity justly and to address the global crises that are starting to stack up. Also, if Elizabeth Warren et al. are the left, in what sense did they ever have a baton? It rests currently with Biden and his advisors, meaning that the leftest policy that appears to have been enacted is an investment program, i.e., something that a functional right-wing party would also do.

(Which is what the Democratic party overall is. Even in the early 1990s, my English teacher at the time said that the problem with the US political system is that voters have what amounts to the choice between the CDU and the CSU, the two conservative sister parties of Germany. He was conservative himself and still recognised that as a problem for any country claiming to have a healthy democracy. And these days, since Trump, the choice is between fascists and conservatives.)

I know that “it hasn’t really been tried” is a tired old trope, but in the USA of the last generation and a half, no left wing policies have actually ever been tried. Even ObamaCare, the greatest improvement that was enacted, was a watered-down variant of an originally Republican plan, and it still got the red scare treatment. The Western World, and the USA in particular, currently have their Overton Window so far to the right that it is difficult to speak of a left at all. What actually deserves that label is restricted to a handful of young activists and academics with zero political power. It is therefore very puzzling to me what DeLong is talking about, at least in economic and tax terms. Or has he joined those who thinks that the left is in power because universities have diversity and inclusion programs?

“in what universe has this group received a “baton”? they got obliterated in 2020. they hold no positions in biden’s executive. biden is ruling from the center even on centrist positions that are extremely unpopular “

DeLong’s original post, which I am sad to see him walking back as it seemed like a beacon of integrity in a sea of right-leaning classical economists, was that what you say may be have been true as of that date, but (1) the neoliberal [fn1] policies have not delivered their promise to the ordinary citizen [fn2] (2) the neoliberals and those who declare themselves centerists to further neoliberal policies are aged, probably half a generation past where traditionally they would have given up office, and aren’t going to be around much longer. Someone will, as you say, take the baton, and DeLong thought at that time that the rational left progressives such as AOC were the people who should do so.

What no one counted on was (I) the hard Radical Right and their Republican party clinging with a literal cliffhanging death grip to policies of hatred and actual physical brutality to their “enemies” (which is to say, ~58% of their fellow citizens) and their continued support of a criminal fascist as their leader and (II) the aged and worn-out centerists, nominally Democrats, clinging equally hard to their perquisites and badges of office as their policies continued to fail and Mitch McConnell outmaneuvered them at every turn.

[fn1] modern US definition thereof

[fn2] DeLong has served as a professor at UC Berkeley and an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. I cannot accept that he is naive enough to believe that the US neoliberals, all the way back to Charles Peters, had any thought or intention that the policies they advocated would help the ordinary bel0w-the-median citizen of the United States or the world, but he has written consistently for 20 years as if he does believe that so…

Cranky Observer,

It is sometimes puzzling how people get high on their own supply. What you write in your last paragraph brings to my mind the social democratic chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder, who appeared to me to be a cynical neoliberal simply serving the interests of business when he cut and deregulated unemployment benefits and set-benefit pensions. And then, after losing his final election, I saw he gave a speech or interview (memory fails me on that detail) where he bitterly complained, apparently in earnest, that business leaders had told him that they would hire a lot more people, driving down unemployment, if he just cut and deregulated unemployment benefits.

If he really was earnest on this, the stupidity is mind-boggling. Why would any company hire more people just because they get lower unemployment benefits and for a shorter time and are constantly harassed by their case manager to turn in twenty pointless applications per month that will be binned anyway? Maybe it drives salaries down a bit? But then again, why would a company that needs 200 staff hire 210 when they are a bit cheaper? No, they would still hire only 200, because they only need 200, and hiring another ten is a waste of money. It is really a case of “he can’t be that stupid, can he?”

So, maybe Brad DeLong is too, maybe he actually thought that making the rich richer and even more rich and then even more rich would somehow lead to trickle-down… somehow. Mechanism of action is unclear, but, well, somehow.

Which Biden policies are neoliberal? Asking for a friend.

It’s true: New Labour sugared the pill of their market agenda with a technocratic apparatus of targeted transfers to “deserving” groups (which the Tories swiftly dismantled) and splashed money on the NHS and some extraordinarily ugly buildings via their management consultant and financier friends. All the while they did nothing to reverse Thatcher’s privatizations and attacks on unions and further deregulated banking in the run up to the crash. Whether that makes them more or less neoliberal is for others to judge.

Cranky Observer @13
I’m reasonably sure that a review of Charles Peters’s writing would show that he did think the policies he advocated “would help the ordinary below-the-median citizen of the United States or the world….” Whether Peters was right to think so is, of course, a separate question.

“Whether that makes them more or less neoliberal is for others to judge.”

This makes me want to ask JQ for a definition of neoliberal, so I can judge which policies are and aren’t (in the post he links to, which has over 1000 comments!, it doesn’t sound like he thinks New Labour is neoliberal — but maybe some of their policies are). Since hardly anyone (Brad DeLong is an exception) calls themselves neoliberal its not Among policies you don’t like some seem to me neoliberal (banking deregulation, non-reversal of privatisations and union law), while others (detention without trial, hoody bans, ASBOs) don’t.

Halving child poverty rates so that they were closer to European levels than American levels doesn’t strike me as neoliberal even if done the way Brown did it, but maybe that’s because I’m used to people using ‘neoliberal’ as a value judgment rather than a description.

The second comment was a list of things I thought were awful, not neoliberal.

If “left neoliberal” is a non-empty concept I’d have thought reducing child poverty via tax credits was one of the most obvious candidates for it (after stakeholder grants, which Brown also liked). It’s consistent with a punitive attitude to working age poverty, with investing in human capital, and avoiding regulating employment or housing.

How about this: there are two ways, two approaches, for a government to handle and stabilize a capitalist economy.
The first is corporatism (sort of a ‘fascism, in a good sense’), where the government controls the economy, serves as an arbiter in disputes between interests groups (business, labor, etc.), while making sure the economy benefits the country and its citizens in general. That’s Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia.
The second is liberalism (or ‘neo-liberalism’), where the economy runs by itself (by ‘market forces’), and the government redistributes the excesses by the tax-transfer mechanism. Taxing the winners, transferring to the losers. That’s the US, UK.
The idea behind the neoliberal approach is that the economy running wild, uncontrolled, will generate more wealth, and the final result will turn out to be more beneficial for everyone. How it turns out in reality is a different question.
They are both “the Right”, of course. Just two ways, theoretical ways, to run a capitalist economy.

Combining the requests and references to the correct definition of new-liberalism with motte-and-bailey arguments, perhaps we can rule out some possibilities with a list along the lines of No true neo-liberal would … . In an ideal world, having made the suggestion, I would start this; or rather, no true good-faith commenter would neglect to provide an example. But there you are.

Deregulated finance is a policy of “soft” neoliberalism? I should think it a quintessence of “hard.” John what is your example of a hard neoliberal financial policy?

@John

I really don’t think it makes sense to think of Rawls as a “soft neoliberal”. Insofar as he has institutional commitments they are inspired by those of James Meade.

so if we understood it –
right? – Brad DeLong (in a recent post summarising a joint podcast with Noah Smith)
thinks:
‘It is therefore time to snatch the baton back, and give it to the supply-side progressivist policy-politics core, and then grab as many people to run alongside that core in the race as we possibly can’.
but otherwise? :
‘The principal business of “Leftist” activists over the past five years really has been and continues to be to try to grease the skids for the return of neofascism—just as the principal business of Ralph Nader and Naderites in 2000 was to grease the skids for upper-class tax cuts, catastrophic financial deregulation, and forever wars’.they writing about
and then
these supposedly ‘Leftist’ are former Bernie staffers who regard Elizabeth Warren as a neoliberal sellout.they podcasting about??!
AND ‘
the principal adversaries to good governance and a bright American future are reactionary theocrats, neofascist grifters, and true-believer right-neoliberals to the right and cost-disease socialists to the left’.

so does that mean – that there is some truth to the theory that in the US there is some kind of coalition between ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’? which supports the silly theory of Greenwaldians that the Dems and the Repugs are – ‘just the same’?
(because some member of these two completely different parties agree on certain ‘sinks’ – as Elon would call it – like for example progressive supply side economics’ BUT on some far more important ‘sinks’ they don’t – like that the World is flat or immigrants are ‘the enemy’)

SOOO wouldn’t it much easier to NOT put ANYBODY who doesn’t believe in supply-side progressive economics int ‘the Left’ and instead call them what they are – part of the ‘reactionary theocrats, neofascist grifters, and true-believer right-neoliberals’?

AND the point that they once were part of ‘the Left’ (just like Glenn Greenwald) has become irrelevant – or should we just say… ‘completely confused’?

Here’s Delong recently on whether he would call himself a neoliberal:

I would not grab “neoliberal” unless prodded on the Internet. If it were possible to be a social democrat in left-neoliberal sheep’s clothing and be effective, I would be eager to be one. But my judgment is that joining and strengthening the neoliberal current is in the end not going to lead to a good place, because it’s already too strong. And you shouldn’t make social democratic arguments in neoliberal language. You should make social democratic arguments in social democratic language.

Delong promotes fools like Noah Smith and Larry Summers, but I don’t think he’s one himself. (Come to think of it, I think I’d make the same defense/critique of Yglesias and the racists that he amplifies.)

I take Delong to be saying that the left neoliberals were hoodwinked by the right neoliberals. Delong doesn’t say this, but I think that this con job is most obviously seen in the neoliberal consensus, left and right, about unions.

Unions should be sacred to left Neoliberals. Unions employ market mechanisms to achieve just social results. If neoliberalism ever made any sense from a left point of view, unions would be at the center of it.

An actual leftist neoliberal program could include, for example, cap-and-trade (which I am skeptical of) or congestion pricing (which makes a lot of sense to me).

Rawls’s argument seems to be “since we know redistribution is wrong, but we also know keeping people in poverty is wrong, how can we justify both a system that helps the poor and a system that produces inequality?” Most people slide past the first part without explaining why it doesn’t matter, and assume the right wing attacks from the 70s were accurate. Forrester helped me see how the initial public reaction to ToJ turned into the current ways he’s used in economics departments. But she doesn’t explain how he overcomes the contradiction between real egalitarianism and the “egalitarianism” that says “we’re all free, white, and 21 here so I’m as good as you are!” I also wish she’d spent more than a couple of lines on Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, or even Taylor, and maybe not so much on Walzer.

To say Rawls is the same as Rand is silly, otoh Forrester’s claim that Walzer is the same as MacIntyre ia equally silly. (She puts Lasch on the left too, a not uncommon mistake but one that shouldn’t still be being made in the 2010s when the book came out.)

A lot of Kantian liberals seem to confuse “you disagree with me” with “you’re completely irrational” and “I believe in universal values” with “everyone who disagrees with me is an irrationalist who puts community and tradition higher than reason.” In return, a lot of leftists shrug and walk away. We might get a progressive, intersectional social democracy out of their decision to focus on other things than trying to persuade economists. Or we might get a white supremacist populism that gives lip service to Poli Sci 101. It’s hard to say.

“Unions should be sacred to left Neoliberals. Unions employ market mechanisms to achieve just social results. If neoliberalism ever made any sense from a left point of view, unions would be at the center of it.”

But they’re not, because left neoliberals are a mere fraction of the greater neoliberal body, and because ‘just’ means different things to different people. To most leftists a just society is one in which anybody who plays by the rules (more or less, give or take) can get ahead and lead a decent life, but to right-wingers a just society is one in which the deserving are rewarded, full stop. (The official position of most of them up till now has been that once the deserving have been rewarded the undeserving are welcome to scrounge up whatever they can wrestle out of the residue, but that’s starting to change, as one can gather when one notices that in their circles market language is beginning to go out of style, and that ecclesiastical language is beginning to supplant it.) And neoliberals, including left-wing neoliberals, are philosophically and temperamentally right of center. They may concede a degree of success to the undeserving person, but they’re never really happy about it. The aim of a society, in their view, should never be to make second-rate people too comfortable. In their book, the undeserving man is at his best when kept on the qui vive. If an undeserving man manages to make himself comfortable, well and good — it would be counterproductive to shoot him down at high noon in front of a crowd on 5th Avenue — but there’s still no reason to welcome him into the camp of the righteous. Hasn’t he just demonstrated that he’s doing fine exactly where he is?

IOW, the reason neoliberals (including neoliberals who are perceived by themselves and others as left-wing) are fond of market mechanisms is that market mechanisms do not reduce inequality. Market mechanisms sideline and marginalize the undeserving, which is what they’re supposed to do. ‘Undeserving’, like ‘just’, is a word which means different things to different people, which can make the question of who is or is not undeserving into a tricky one, especially when the stakes are high. The excellence of a reliance on market mechanisms resides in the fact that market mechanisms can put an end to the debate, or can seem to. They can separate the wheat from the chaff very effectively — on their own.

But what, OTOH, do unions do? What effect do unions have? Well, the effect of unions is to throw a spanner into the works. Unions gum up and debilitate the system sketched above. They interpose a great big bourgie bulge into the middle of an elegant two-tier plan. So (rationally) neoliberals don’t like them — and (rationally) neoliberals never will.

engels @37 wrote:

Iirc Katrina Forrester’s “In the Shadow of Justice” has a lot of interesting detail on the anti-statist sympathies of the early Rawls

What Forrester says is that the early Rawls had some anti-statist sympathies, and then Rawls spent a year at Oxford, where he came in contact with some of the Labour Party “revisionists” (who, while they might have been skeptical about nationalization, were not anti-statist) and Rawls’s perspective changed. More specifically, Forrester writes that Rawls “grafted their [i.e. the Labour revisionists’] commitment to equality onto his early barebones liberalism,” thereby giving the notion of “a property-owning democracy” a “new ideological valence” (Forrester, p. 29).

[I read the Forrester book and reviewed it, though not for an academic journal.]

J, not that one @40

I really have no idea where the notion that Rawls thinks “redistribution is wrong” comes from. I know J. Quiggin doesn’t like what Rawls said about taxation in ToJ, but Rawls’s theory requires some redistribution if you start with a less-than-just society (which most or all are).

Btw, Raymond Geuss’s comparison of Rawls to Ayn Rand is … hello? what planet are we on? stuff. There are plenty of serious critiques of Rawls by plenty of people and from different angles, but Geuss’s is not one of them.

“That seems false to me, but I’m curious why you believe it is true”

Forrester describes several occasions where Rawls takes very seriously the criticisms made of the welfare state in the 70s and 80s, including the charges from the infant neoconservative/neoliberal movement that welfare was bad because it supposedly caused the recipients of government benefits to become “dependent.” This was behind the whole neoliberal push to cut benefits from Carter on. I think a lot of what he says only makes sense if you assume the right-leaning economists were right about most things – that in ToJ he took himself to be writing a synthesis including the current left-liberal worldview shared by most educated people, the most up-to-date findings of economists including the Austrian school, and a Kantian and Augustinian worldview that ordinarily would probably be mildly center-right.

Rawls was writing at a time when the right was still politically on the defensive. Eisenhower was anti-communist but didn’t dare reverse the New Deal. Tax rates on the highest incomes were still high. (91% until 1964, 65% after that.) The movement against welfare hadn’t begun, and the backlash against the Great Society (with its intensified racial overtones, and its invitation to socially conservative white ethnics to demonstrate their class affiliations by dunking on the morals of the Black poor) hadn’t begun either. Opposition to bureaucracy was widespread on the (especially anti-technology and youth) left and tied up with opposition to the military, to corporations, to huge impersonal universities with their punch cards. There was a left tradition in the US, both anti-communist and socialist, which I don’t believe Rawls engages with at all.

Jennifer Burns’s book on Rand shows how the almost-underground writers of the new conservative movement used Rand as a conduit for their ideas. They weren’t well known by then. Hayek was, but he was also still counter-hegemonic. It isn’t clear to me why Rawls would be taking anti-Keynesian economics so seriously at that time.

If Rawls had been writing in a vacuum and teaching people for the first time how not to be capitalists, how to understand that culture and institutions matter, and so on, that would be a different story. The problem isn’t that his theory can’t accommodate more social democratic politics. In theory, it can. In practice, the veil of ignorance is set up to permit only “abstract” considerations like the findings of scientific economics, which aren’t open to debate.

LFC

I understand “redistribution” to mean something more significant than taxes and benefit payments. It’s a kind of a shibboleth to divide socialism from liberalism.

In this new moment, Rawls’s theory—with its commitment to public, democratic institutions and to improving the lot of the least well off—looked less like a vision of pluralist civil society regulated by a minimally interventionist state and more like a robust defense of a welfare state committed to significant redistribution. When Michael Harrington called for a “passion to end poverty” in his The Other America (1962), he had diagnosed America’s problem as “one of vision. The nation of the well-off must be able to see through the wall of affluence and recognize the alien citizens on the other side.”8 Rawls’s theory was read by many as facilitating that vision: it showed what a society would look like if it were justifiable to a nation of equals, and what moral persons would be like if only they saw each other clearly. For a generation of philosophers, it was a justification for social democracy, aimed at reducing inequality and fostering reciprocal relations between citizens—a philosophical “gloss on the domestic programs of the 1960s” of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “After the deed,” one critic wrote, “comes the rationalization.”

Forrester, Katrina. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (p. 105). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

IOW, Rawls couldn’t have predicted the environment his book would be published in, and its subsequent reception was significantly influenced by Harrington.

MisterMr:
You probably shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia here. At least go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which, I assume, has to be better).

On the question of how much inequality R. tolerates, I would suggest that the answer is “less than many people suppose.”

One of the themes — not saying it’s a main theme but it’s there — in ToJ is that people not only have to cooperate in certain ways to exist as social (i.e., not completely isolated) beings but also that they in some way “appreciate” each other’s activities, presumably whether mundane and supposedly “lowly” or, on the other hand, “elevated” (fill in these descriptions however you want). Hence the “members of a community participate in one another’s nature” and “the self is realized in the activities of many selves….” (p. 565, 1st ed.)

I suppose one could dismiss this as quasi-mystical bloviating or simply false or whatever, but it would seem to have little to do with economic theorems, nor would the argument that self-respect is the most important “primary good.” If I recall correctly, the parties to the original position are assumed to know some basic facts about human psychology and that’s pretty much it.

Btw, would Ayn Rand or Hayek have written “the self is realized in the activities of many selves”? Rawls says in the preface that he wrote the third version of ToJ in 1969-1970. Is it reasonable to assume that Rawls was completely unaware of the youth “counterculture,” celebrated most notoriously in Reich’s The Greening of America (1970)? As the kids say, asking for a friend.

politicalfootball,

Unions employ market mechanisms to achieve just social results. If neoliberalism ever made any sense from a left point of view, unions would be at the center of it.

That’s not what market mechanisms are. Market mechanism would be if every worker was by themselves, negotiating a salary while the boss points out that five others are outside the door waiting to take the job instead. Unions employ collective action to achieve just social results. Collective action is anathema to both free markets and to neoliberalism, which works to turn every human activity into a low-regulation, for-profit market structure, and that is why neoliberalism never made sense from a left point of view. (And why in an earlier comment I wrote that parties that adopt neoliberalism shouldn’t be called left.)

John Q @54,

Why do Rawlsian liberals need to engage with the left, and with what left? If this is about political action, the problem is that the left in most countries doesn’t break single digit vote percentages or is a marginalised minority inside a nominally centre-left but actually centre-right party, so engaging with them would be nice IMO but may not exactly feel like a need to an academic philosopher. Why talk to somebody who can’t achieve anything anyway? If, on the other hand, it is about academic discourse, then I don’t see what keeps a philosophical school from happily remaining in its bubble. What is the worst that can happen – being cited by a few less colleagues? Sorry if I misunderstand; not my field, more used to controversies in biology than in economic policy.

One of the things which interests me about all this is the way in which shrieking reactionaries operating within right-wing ex-social-democratic parties love to brand themselves as liberals in some sense of the word (invariably a sense which makes no sense). They then describe the (latterly) shrieking reactionary parties which they adore as “centrist”, which is rather like redefining missing the dartboard completely as hitting the bullseye.

They then redefine anybody mildly liberal (cf. Sanders, Warren) as leftist, segueing this into marxist and communist where available.

Ironically, they themselves, by the same techniques, are treated in the same way by the openly right-wing parties, so that Biden and Starmer are denounced as Marxists by their opponents.

If intellectuals had not decided to abrogate all responsibility for promoting some connection between political language and political reality — a task which is now in the hands of the dwindling number of actual political satirists out there — this might not have happened, at least not so grotesquely.

Rawls is very explicit in rejecting a society that comprises laissez faire capitalism + redistributive welfare state. See. eg Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, pp. 135-6.

So I actually went to the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” on rawls and skimmed it, and there are various points that leave me cold, however I will cite this about Rawls ideas of an ideal society:

Rawls explicitly rejects the welfare state (JF, 137–40). Welfare-state capitalism leaves control of the economy in the hands of a group of rich private actors. It therefore fails to ensure for all citizens enough resources to have roughly equal chances of influencing politics, or to have sufficiently equal opportunities in education and employment. The welfare state therefore tends to generate a demoralized under-class.

Laissez-faire capitalism is even worse for equality than the welfare state along these dimensions. And a socialist command economy would put too much power in the hands of the state, again endangering political equality and also threatening basic liberties such as free choice of employment.

Justice as fairness, Rawls says, favors either a property-owning democracy or liberal (democratic) socialism. The government of a property-owning democracy takes steps to encourage widespread ownership of productive assets and broad access to education and training. Liberal socialism is similar, but features worker-managed firms. The aim of both systems of political economy is to enable all citizens, even the least advantaged, to manage their own affairs within a context of significant social and economic equality. “The least advantaged are not, if all goes well, the unfortunate and unlucky—objects of our charity and compassion, much less our pity—but those to whom reciprocity is owed as a matter of basic justice” (JF, 139).

It is evident from this that Rawls, in his own head, was for a rather egalitarian society, but IMHO the concept of a “property-owning democracy” means that he really doesn’t understand how a capitalist market works: I take it as to mean a capitalist society where more or less everyone has the same amount of capital stock, but how can this work if factories are private? Is everyone supposed to own a small, personal-sized factory? Are all businesses supposed to be listed on the stock exchange, and then everyone owns a more or less equal amount of stocks? How do we get to that point and how would id be differnt from the soviet system (with stock managers instead of politicians)?

So from this I think that rawls was basically a social democrat, he tried to develop a theoretical basis for social democracy, he didn’t understand the limits of social democracy (that is, that if you want to reach the level of equality that social democrats say they want, it becomes almost indistinguishable from socialism, and with the same problems).

@MisterMr as it happens, I’ve been editing a piece I wrote for a conference a few years ago, which is essentially a commentary on ch.11 of Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History. In that chapter, Cohen explores two forms of society that fall short of socialist central planning but which are more egalitarian than capitalism: one is market socialism and the other is something that rather closely resembles Rawls’s POD. He rejects both of these on the grounds that market dynamics will eventually generate inequality and domination. The trouble is, later in his career, he rejected socialist central planning too …. I’ll try to post the piece here in a few days.

@MisterMr

I take Rawls to be a small-town ex-Christian who retains most of his Christian upbringing, who feels his country should be better than it is, and who thinks small-town values are great except that there has to be more care for the poor and less greed. And who is very proud of the Western academic tradition and believes it should be able to produce a grand theory of how society should work both effectively and morally. But who tends to think in terms of rules rather than people.

@LFC, Harry

My misgivings about Rawls don’t derive just from Forrester. I’d be curious what passages Harry or Chris assigns as an introduction. My own introduction, in the 80s, consisted in (1) an extract focusing on (a) the modification of the social contract concept and (b) the modification of utilitarianism, i.e. the purely numerical aspect of Rawls’s theory that seems like it would be most attractive to economists – from a pretty standard anthology, and (2) an extract focusing on the modification of Kantianism (assigned by an older professor who was I believe a Columbia Pragmatist and a socialist, as well as a Kant scholar).

Every time I look up something to read by Rawls — and I admit this is a function of coming from other books on philosophy, not on socialism or economics — I find painful, painful point-by-point arguments about how it could actually be okay to tax away some small part of some person’s wealth even though interference with others is wrong; or explanations that very much appear to be defenses of an elite with extra privileges and stuff because that will help the poor.

And absolutely Rawls seems to be used as a way of keeping discussion confined to a relatively small set of initiates, just like Marx or like today’s official economics. It’s not clear what purpose actually reading the whole book (and which one?) would serve someone like me, any more than reading the Bible from cover to cover. Nor does the label “Rawlsian” tell me anything at all what policies any particular Rawlsian would prefer except in the broadest terms.

With an overtly Kantian “socialist” like Susan Neiman at least I know where she stands.

PS I assume any economist who’s a Rawlsian is reading Gaus? Whose approach is not “philosophical” in the sense that anyone would teach it in a philosophy course. Forrester doesn’t mention him except in the notes (“For the persistence of rational choice interpretations of the original position, see”) for what that’s worth.

[Summary of missing comment] Rawls began as an anti-gubmint liberal, melded that with the Labour right moralising he encountered at Oxford (mostly the high table front of Crosland’s assault on Clause IV), slept through the 60s and belatedly birthed his big book just as neoliberalism was cranking up—because of which it was received as the swan song of Great Society America: what a mistaka to maka.

P.s. Then there’s Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples. I don’t think the latter was particularly well received.

engels @ 64 I think that does explain an awful lot, though not how a theory about how socialist states should accommodate inequality could be used in building a plan for reforming an entirely different kind of state. There’s nothing wrong with describing ideal societies, though.

LFC How neoliberal/stereotypically Rawlsian an answer! I ask for a reason and a book recommendation and your answer is essentially “you either want to read this guy for no particular reason at all, or you don’t care.” It’s my choice.

My suggestion, actually, would be to read Samuel Freeman’s book, Rawls. It’s very long and comprehensive, but not a difficult read (unlike Rawls himself) and fairly represents and examines the theory. Better still, but not yet available, two of my undergraduates are writing comic book, about 75 pages long, explaining the theory, and exploring objections (basically Nozick and Cohen) and how it brings insight to non-ideal problems (drawing on Shelby’s book Dark Ghettos, and on Okin’s and our own Gina’s work on the gendered division of labor). I’ll promote it here once its completed and publicly available.

I get undergraduate students to read Justice as Fairness: A Briefer Restatement, but if I taught a whole semester on Rawls I’d probably do parts of Theory of Justice, parts of Political Liberalism, J as F and some essential secondary literature.

Rawls’s account of a property owning democracy is not much more than a sketch: given the sketch, yes, capitalism plus the welfare state is to its right. Not at all mind boggling if you actually read it. Doesn’t Forrester at least explain the idea? There’s a very nice essay by Richard Krause and Mike McPherson called “Capitalism, ‘Property-Owning Democracy,’ and the Welfare State,” in a volume edited by Amy Gutmann, Democracy and The Welfare State, which gives more flesh to the idea and shows its relationship to captalism and the welfare state. Everything you’ve said about Forrester’s book suggests she’s not studied political philosophy or talked with her colleagues at Harvard (eg Scanlon, Shelby, Schouten) about Rawls’s theory, but that can’t be true can it?

A recent Policy Exchange pamphlet (enthusiastically blurbed by Keri Badenoch) considers:

…the origins of the idea in the political thought of Noel Skelton, the uptake of the concept by Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, and its transformation in the era of Margaret Thatcher. Attention will also be paid to alternative traditions that have endorsed the ideals that sit behind the property owning democracy, including the Labour Revisionists of the 1950s and 1960s and the British Liberal Party, the political theory of John Rawls, and the “Ownership Society” platform of George W. Bush’s Republican Party in the early 2000s.

Fun fact: Noel Skelton (an obscure Scottish conservative from the early C20th) attended the same Oxford college (Christchurch) as Rawls.

Link to Policy Exchange:
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/The-Property-Owning-Democracy.pdf

I don’t know what Rawls meant by property-owning democracy. You said above his account was “not much more than a sketch”. It has a right-wing lineage from the 1920s to Thatcher and beyond and evidently also had currency in the Gaitskellite milieu where Rawls’s mature ideas were formed.* I would assume its function there was to park the issue of state ownership and that also seems consistent with how Rawls used it. In 2024 we need some new thinking to get us out of the shit (literally).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68665335

I seem to remember Forrester casting some doubt on Rawls’s Meade attribution but it’s a long time since I read her book and I don’t have a copy.

I have the impression that ideologies of “the left” don’t envision individual property owners. They are, in one form or another, collectivist ideologies. Workers’ collectives, populaces, syndicates own things, and when individuals have to be allowed to own something, it’s considered but a necessary evil.

Real existing property owning democracy:

Karly, a mother of three from Bideford in Devon, was made homeless in December 2020 because of a relationship breakdown. After two months in temporary accommodation, she was able to move into social rented housing, for which she pays £470 a month rent. “People on the same road who rent privately are paying anywhere between £850 and £1,100,” she said. “They’re the same council houses, but they were bought [under right to buy], so they’re now privately owned.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/09/social-rent-homes-in-england-fall-by-more-than-quarter-of-a-million-in-decade

Property owning democracy: 40 acres and a mule (Brits get 40 square metres and budgie)

LFC: thanks for locating the passage I was referring to.

I honestly can’t see “property owning democracy” and think of anything but Jefferson.

Also, I did think predistribution was an invention of John Quiggin. Obviously that’s something I should read about. But combined with a strong distaste for interfering with families or individuals, though, it might become a relatively minor variant on “equality of opportunity,” focused only on making that true in reality and ignoring almost everything that goes into the facts of inequality.

Forrester gives context for some things I wouldn’t expect context for in the academic debates. It’s not a surprise that insiders wouldn’t always agree with writers who attempt to apply external criteria to their fields. My own objections have to do with her tendentious characterization of anyone she’s decided has to do with “identity politics”; her ascription of communitarianism to the “Third Way” may be accurate for Blair but not for Bill Clinton.

What role do you think unions would play in an ideally just society?

Predistribution is an idea with a long long history on the left. As far as I understood him Marx was in favour of it, like Rawls. And unlike Rand, funnily enough. Or Brand.

“Forrester gives context for some things I wouldn’t expect context for in the academic debates.”

I think she’s an academic herself.

Yeah, I see that. I think my point is that Forrester’s is a book in a different field, which isn’t really on the field that Rawls was in, but about something else entirely (from your and engels’s description, and from the BR excerpt I read). As I say, the best introduction to Rawls’s thought, long as it is, is Samuel Freeman’s (long, but very accessibly written). I wrote about it when it was published:
https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/
As I also said, a far shorter and still excellent introduction is the not-yet-finished comic book my undergraduates are writing.

I don’t believe there is an ideally just society. “Predistribution” can mean anything from decolonisation to discounted rail fares. Without workers organisations it’s more Ed Miliband than Mick Lynch.

“Without workers organisations it’s more Ed Miliband than Mick Lynch”.

And yet, exactly what worker’s organisations do is demand (and enact) predistribution.

I agree with the thrust of John’s #86 but I think the anachronistic term predistribution confuses things and I don’t think it’s exclusive of neoliberalism (or Rawls). Neoliberalism aims to mould everyone into participants in a pervasive market competition, the “left” versions are concerned to make that “fair”. Sometimes that’s attempted via ameliorative transfers to (deserving) losers, more ambitiously it can be done by attempting to equalise starting places or fine-tuning the game. Predistribution can mean the latter (as can Brown’s focus on child poverty and “baby bonds” discussed above). None of these things challenge the fundamental logic of markets as Cohen and others pointed out ad infinitum.

redistributive policies, which highly educated and affluent voters like over predistribituve policies, which working class and poor voters like

This summary gives the examples

labor market interventions such as the minimum wage, unions, protectionism, trade policies, and public employment

which sounds nothing like “property owning democracy”. It’s about education, not class. And it doesn’t assume poor voters aren’t working class or claim that affluent voters like redistribution (I can’t even…)

https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/26/how-the-democratic-party-lost-less-educated-voters/

Chris B. @88 and Harry @100 make similar points: Rawls wanted institutions to be designed so that they naturally — i.e., in Chris’s words, “as a consequence of their normal procedural functioning” — generate just distributions. Then redistribution would only be needed to take care of certain unanticipated results. The question, of course, is — assuming some rough agreement on distributional goals — how to design such institutions. This question is one that leftist economists (and leftist non-economists) have been pondering and debating for a long time. I doubt that an answer has emerged that has been validated in practice on any significant scale. This includes those answers (e.g., “participatory economics”) that reject markets.

Unions, the minimum wage, and trade policies, things mentioned by engels @101, don’t add up to a comprehensive institutional design, though they can doubtless help. Although Rawls did, as has been noted, prefer “predistribution” (as defined by C.B. @88 and Harry @100) over redistribution, his main effort, istm, was directed toward working out what a just distribution (and just society) would look like, rather than specifying how to get there. Properly functioning, reasonably competitive markets, as is well known, have virtues (e.g., efficiency, responsiveness to consumer demand) and vices (e.g., they tend, or so it seems, to generate a sizable amount of inequality). Successful predistribution would presumably have to find a way to keep the virtues of markets and eliminate their inequality-generating tendencies. That seems, though perhaps not impossible, like a tall order. Hence, letting markets operate, subject to appropriate regulation and antitrust enforcement etc., and then redistributing the results may be the most practical alternative, even though it is not one that Rawls (according to the earlier comments) favored and has (like everything else) its own problems. Btw, a measure like universal basic income could be seen as either predistribution or redistribution, depending on exactly how it’s framed, justified, and implemented.

AND
the ‘The Left and THE LEFT: Responding to the crisis of soft neoliberalism’
is so confused – that of all people Glenn Greenwald redefines the Rise of Right Wingers and Fascists at the European Election as ‘neoliberal losses’ and then he adds:
Even right-wing parties like Marie LePen’s, which Israel long hated as anti-Semitic and even full of Holocaust revisionists led by her father, have changed to become intense and loyal supporters of Israel and he posts a picture of the Deutsch Right Winger Wilders with the flag of Israel in the background?

And WE thought that it
NEVER EVER
would be possible
AGAIN
to thusly redefine the basic nationalistic HATE of any Right-Wingers and Neo Nazis as
Anti-Neoliberalsim or Anti-Mainstream –
and especially NOT in France or Germany
BUT somehow – some Americans DO IT
and did it by bringing
of all issues
ANTI-Semitism in play.

What a nasty NASTY game!

I’m afraid I’ve exhausted my patience for a discussion where we (me, Harry, LFC) patiently explain some aspect of Rawls to engels and others, none of whom can be bothered to do the reading themselves, and they immediately come back with objections they’ve obtained from Dr Google or have no more basis that “X sounds a bit like Y”. If you want to take part in the seminar, do the reading. Otherwise, sit quietly at the back.

Apologies for exhausting Chris’s patience.

For the record #104 was posted before I saw #103, not as an “immediate” reply to it (my reply, 12 hours later, didn’t appear). I have read Theory of Justice but not Justice as Fairness (it was a very long time ago and I cop to skipping). And if thinking property owning democracy “sounds bit like” property owning democracy is illegimate then I cop to that too. I will try to get hold of Krause and McPherson.

I’m quite certain that no amount of reading Rawls could answer the questions I’ve been asking here, particularly because what is really at issue (going back to the OP and the post it links) is not what Rawls believed but what conclusions “Rawlsians” (in particular self-declared Rawlsian economists and policy makers forced to confront a world Rawls didn’t live to see) draw from whatever reading and discussion they were exposed to some time in the past.

I’m sure understanding Rawls’s teachings at a fundamental level is a good thing but possibly not for everybody at every moment, I’ll think about JQ’s new left taxonomy quite a bit more though.

It is odd to seem so interested in what somebody thinks but be so uninterested in reading what they say. Or listening to people who have read what they say.

Except that I have read a moderate amount of Rawls, this thread wasn’t a Rawls seminar and I have mostly been discussing with Harry a book (Forrester’s) I’ve read and he hasn’t. But I get it: depreciating Rawls means you haven’t read Rawls. That’s already been said that about Geuss and Forrester and I’m honoured to be placed in such company.

MisterMr: you are focusing on how the political economic context was different, which I agree with. My question goes in a different direction. How is it coherent to criticize people like Rawls or Warren – to name two who have been mentioned here – as neoliberal sellouts if their political positions are rather close to bogstandard social democracy?

I’m assuming, and everybody else in this thread seems to agree, that neoliberalism is a turn away from social democracy. By that account I don’t see how Warren‘s positions count as neoliberal. Especially if Sanders, whose positions are hardly different, is presented as a „socialist“…

@TM 117

I do not know Warren’s or Sanders’ policies in enough detail, but I suppose that is mostly about self presentation, that one says “capitalism sucks” and the other “capitalism is good but needs correctives”.

In my experience, it is perfectly logical to rely on these self presentation things, as politicians in reality do in the long term act based on their preferred ideologies.

By the way I spoke of free trade in my comment, but it turns out that Biden just slapped some tariffs on some Chinese exports, and clearly Trump also wanted to, so some parts of neoliberalism are already going down, for good or for bad.

The power exerted by unions is something the people who join them can exercise directly (at least they can when the stars are right) for themselves and on their own behalf. They don’t have to have it given to them by academics, philosophers, bureaucrats, oligarchs, or billionaires. The idea behind unions is that they’ll be able to sit down at the table openly under their own power and won’t have to operate as crumb-catchers by proxy. (That the idea behind unions isn’t one which always works out perfectly is a point I’m willing to concede.)

engels:
According to your link (and Forrester says this too) Rawls became a member of MPS and withdrew three years later.

“depreciating Rawls means you haven’t read Rawls”

I don’t think that criticising views someone didn’t hold really counts as depreciating them. Attributing those views to that person when others who have read that person’s work — and are pretty clearly experts — patiently explain why they are misattributions — just seems an odd combination of intellectual laziness and unwarranted self-confidence. It’s a favourite move of anti-Marxists as you know. But yes it does seem that you haven’t read Rawls.

BTW I can’t speak for LFC but neither Chris nor I are Rawlsians.

Engels 106: I’m not sure why you mention the Bruenig article but what the „old welfare state diagram from 1940s Switzerland“ featured in the article illustrates is the need for social insurance. Social insurance was conceived (and first implemented in Bismarckian Germany) as a solution to the problem how to care for the sick, the disabled, the old and the unemployed. Switzerland did in fact have neither universal health insurance nor a public retirement program until after the war.

Is there any suggestion that Rawls opposed social insurance or that his theory is somehow incompatible with it?

And you also appear to have wildly misattributed to Naidu’s paper ridiculous right-populist conclusions about “working class” antagonism to the poor and to social assistance.

What bekabot said about unions.

I suppose I shouldn’t blame Rawls for the people who said to me “no that isn’t allowed by Rawls” when the experts here say it is. I do have to consider whether I live in the world with those people or with the ideal Rawls who’s understood perfectly by everybody all the time.

Most people only know about the original position and the gist of maximin, and have no idea about the basic structure or public discussion or legitimacy. If those lead to different conclusions it isn’t clear how fair it is to say that the obvious stuff would read differently if you knew about the rest.

When Rawls wrote, unions were strong, de-industrialization hadn’t begun, and there was every reason to believe that people with good manufacturing jobs would never be among the “worst off.” If all you know about is maximin the theory does seem to tell them their needs aren’t the object of justice.

It seems that world has disappeared very quickly and just in the past couple of decades perhaps.

FWIW, I knew Political Liberalism came out in the mid 80s (around the time I was first assigned parts of ToJ) but I thought the second edition of ToJ came out around the same time. It only came out in 1999 and the book version of Justice as Fairness came out in 2001. That’s a big gap and depending on how much changed I imagine few outside of philosophy departments are aware of both versions.

I think I may have somehow acquired the belief that the popularity of Rawls as a provider of economic policy meant his revised theory had abandoned the social contract and the deontology. Some reading today suggests that’s wildly incorrect. I frankly still don’t grasp how a theory that concludes inequality is OK if inequality has good effects is construed as egalitarian — surely the equality is only notional as persons are construed “in the original position”. No more do I see how one is prevented from concluding that the best way to protect the least well off is to ensure the subordinate position of women in the family, or to divide communities along ethnic lines to ensure “social cohesion”. (I also wish people who say “this is entirely value-neutral” would consider whether it is in fact derived from their own now-rejected religious upbringing.) But surely the people saying “the left needs Rawls” are not saying that at least.

Henry, thanks for that. Value-neutrality is probably the wrong term; I mean things like where in Political Liberalism Rawls assumes that his view equals “liberalism” pure and simple and the demands for pluralism are something else. (Also I suppose there is the view of pluralism where it calls for more acceptance of the religiosity and folkways of those whom a Kantian academic might see as the “unenlightened”, and a view where it calls for more acceptance of things like LGBT folk, Marxists, and the highest reaches of Confucian culture.)

There was a mini trend of explaining Augustine’s view of the person as a way of explaining liberalism, which . . . if your view of the secular is one you learned in religious school and is best understood only by your fellow coreligionists, maybe it’s not all that secular actually. That’s what I had in mind.

J not that one @137 wrote:

I frankly still don’t grasp how a theory that concludes inequality is OK if inequality has good effects is construed as egalitarian — surely the equality is only notional as persons are construed “in the original position”.

Rawls never uses (afaik) the phrase “good effects,” and this is not an accurate statement of his views. Since a previous comment of mine seems not to have gone through (at least so far), I’ll leave it at that.

LP entails Rawls is a strict egalitarian and the DP is a MacGuffin is my favourite Rawls fork because who can possibly say it’s wrong?

Still not sure what the OP was trying to do with devising a concept of left-neoliberalism but the extensive exchange on Rawls strongly suggests that it’s not going to work very well as an analytical tool. (My addressing DeLong directly is not acceptable.)

PS Charles Larmore’s recent book “What Is Political Philosophy?” might be interesting. The first chapter is titled “The Relation Between Moral and Political Philosophy.”

Larmore’s book What is Political Philosophy is indeed good – relatively short and clear. Among other things, it shows how what’s interesting and important in the “realism” of people like Williams and Geuss is seperable from their less plausible views. Larmore’s position is, as he is happy to say, very similar to Rawls’s in Political Liberalism, though there are some differences, too. (Some of those come from very different views on the value of Kant, but not all of them.) I’d recommend it.