Runciman’s Rawls

I’m not a Rawlsian, though I would admit to certain affinities, and, indeed, I’ve used the device associated with Rawls (though not invented by him) of the veil of ignorance in my own work. But when I disagree with Rawls, I hope I at least take the trouble to get him right. Sadly, one can’t say the same of the former Cambridge academic, political theorist and professional podcaster David Runciman. To be fair to him, Runciman’s podcasts are usually informative and entertaining and I’ve discovered things through them that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. He also often has some really good guests. That’s usually enough to make up for the annoying tics that litter his output, most notably his habit of telling us that “X was rather like Y, but also the complete opposite of Y”, as a way of introducing some thinker or other.

My patience has been somewhat tested, though, by his latest series on What is Wrong with Political Philosophy?, a series of conversations with the King’s London political theorist and historian of political thought Paul Sagar on Aristotle, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Bernard Williams and Judith Shklar (I’ve not yet listened to the one dealing with the last two). Now I don’t have much complaint about the positive exposition of these figures by Runciman and Sagar, and that’s a useful public service. Nor do I much mind, even though I disagree, with their view that political philosophy ought to be about something like giving useful guidance to those engaged in politics. But this view, and its associated claim that politicians need to draw more on history and psychology to develop their practical wisdom is set up via an opposition to a caricature of normative political philosophy.

The substance of this caricature is that political philosophy as practised in the academy and particularly by its dominant figure John Rawls essentially consists of the application to politics of a moral standard that is external to it and that this is a hopeless venture and recipe for conflict and civil war because people disagree about morality. The misrepresentation is so blatant that I wonder whether Runciman has ever read Rawls carefully at all, or just finds it convenient, for the sake of a good chat and to produce a foil for his own polemic, to hold up some sort of mythical “Rawls”, an invention of Cambridge political theory. You just wouldn’t guess from anything he says that John Rawls put the fact of moral disagreement at the centre of his political philosophy, nor that he took liberalism to be, historically, a response to the disastrous blood-letting of the 17th century where people did, indeed, attempt to impose their moral vision on one another by violence. Even if we focus narrowly on justice and leave Rawls’s view about legitimacy to one side, the view that Rawls applies and external ethical standard to politics just doesn’t fit with the fact that he’s in the business of developing normative principles that are proper to a context where people no longer co-ordinate their actions face-to-face according to shared morals but rather via institutions that mediate their often anonymous co-operation at a vast scale: i.e. a world of politics, law, and markets.

At the same time, Runciman and Sagar are content to talk about “democracy”, as a label for the institutions that we’ve had recently in many successful countries, which they take to be a successful model for the pragmatic containment of disagreement. Well those institutions are the very ones that Rawls is trying to think through. One possible rejoinder, I suppose, is to say that they accept (though they don’t say so) that Rawls is theorising under conditions where we have moral disagreement but their focus is on the value of “justice” specifically, which Rawls wants to impose, so the complaint goes through. But I don’t think this move works at all because “justice” doesn’t function for Rawls as a pre-institutional value in this way but is rather a property of the system of co-operation as a whole. It is just weird to spend time, as they do, telling us that Aristotle used the term “democracy” quite differently from the way they do when labelling our existing institutions, but then to reference Aristotle as a critic of the idea that “justice” could be the central political value without asking whether Aristotle and Rawls use the term quite differently to one another. (It is, of course, a key point in GA Cohen’s critique of Rawls that Rawls gives the name “justice” to what are merely rules of regulation.)

When Runciman and Sagar come to draw on modern political examples, one person they complain about is Keir Starmer, whom they suggest appears to have no beliefs at all. I’m not going to disagree with them about that, but it does rather raise the question of what beliefs Starmer ought to have. As far as I can see Labour in power has been happy to backslide on those commitments that fall under Rawls’s rubric of the basic liberties, while attempting to pursue a policy of economic growth that continues to be intensely relaxed (as Peter Mandelson used to say) about inequality as such. Without firm normative beliefs, Labour drifts around rudderless, while the people who voted for it defect to other parties in disappointment and disgust. I can’t be sure things would have gone better if they’d been more Rawlsian, as they might have been under Ed Miliband, but at least there would be some sense of their moral compass giving them direction. Now one can’t expect that Conservative politicians would endorse the more redistibutive elements of Rawlsian justice but we’ve seen them also weaken commitments to basic liberties and the rule of law in recent years and it is hard to to think that a firmer commitment to the shared groundrules that underpin democratic politics would also have served us better. That’s hardly a moralistic imposition of ethical principles that come from outside the political system but rather an insistence that everyone recognize the principles that make peaceful political contestation possible.