Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Rawls and Liberalism

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response. These challenges were, in the main, the same radical challenges that liberalism has faced since its inception. That inception did not take place in a hypothetical “state of nature” but rather in a real era of slave states and imperial conquest on a planetary scale, and it was these forces that spread its putatively universalist tenets around the world as it developed ever more incisive criticisms of injustice and inequality. That liberal vision had long been wedded to theories of property and popular sovereignty formed in response far more to imagined histories of political and economic inheritance than to the actual history that explained the distributions of income, rights, and privileges that liberalism and liberals promised to equitably manage. By every indication, Rawls really meant what he said about equality, fairness, and justice in his personal and intellectual life, though he came to a partial and selective understanding of what those things required of him and the structures around him.--Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò "Selective Conscience: John Rawls’s doctrine of fairness." The Nation, December 13, 2021 issue.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's elegant and provocative review of Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (a book I have procrastinated on reading carefully) closes with the remark quoted above. A key point of the review is that "by redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawls’s book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice." I am generally not a friend of the Rawlsian vision of liberalism, but I am curious about the claim because there are a series of papers that have tried to develop Rawls to fill the gap on the academic side (Janna Thompson here; and Erin Kelly here, both published in Ethics). That made me wonder whether Táíwò thinks such attempts fail intellectually or whether, and more interesting to me, he thinks such attempts are unsuited to informing and shaping the "popular attention" to the topic. I have long been struck by the fact that Rawls' Theory of Justice appeared at the turning point of the New Deal settlement, and when the culture's and political (ahh) zeitgeist moved against it, Since Táíwò has a book (which I also aspire to read) out/forthcoming on the topic consider this advertisement for it. 

As an aside, when Táíwò describes Rawls' rise in biographical terms through the academy he does not mention one of the more remarkable features of it, that is, that Rawls had a quite noticeable speech impediment (something I encountered first hand in 1991 or 92). (I think this may be missing from Forrester's book.) In her remembrance of Rawls at the memorial servive, Christine Korsgaard leads with a touching story about this. The Guardian's obituary claims that "as a child, he was traumatised by the deaths of two brothers from infections they had contracted from him; Rawls later admitted that this tragedy had contributed to the development of a severe stutter, which afflicted him for the rest of his life." I mention this because the academy is not an especially easy place to function in with such a limitation. And it also would have undermined the effectiveness, alas, of a lot of more public facing political activities.

Be that as it may, the quoted passage uses Rawls as a stand-in for liberalism. In a certain sense this makes sense because from a theoretical point of view, in the Anglophone academy, Rawls is the only liberal game in town. But liberalism as a living political practice, institutionalized in constitutions and institutions, draws on sources that generally predate Rawls and have been capable of sustained creativity and re-invention. It is worth noting that when in the late 1970s Foucault turned to the question of the liberal art of government, Rawls has no place in his narrative: instead he focuses on eighteenth century sources, and (from the twentieth century) ordoliberalism, Walter Lippmann, Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Chicago economics. (Foucault largely skips Keynes, who thought of himself as saving liberalism, and, more oddly -- given the list -- Popper.)*

The list of names in the previous paragraph hints at many polemics against the 'radical tendencies' of their day. For many those polemics were existential because they thought it possible that liberalism could collapse, and had collapsed in many places. Because Rawls is writing in the shadow of pax americana there is a complacency to his thought absent from others. For all his flaws (and there are many) Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, for example never bores (despite the lengthy and sometimes bizarre footnotes) because he takes these tendencies extremely seriously. And none of the  characters I have just mentioned are interested in state of nature theorizing or even popular sovereignty, which many of these liberals  associate with the dangers of totalitarianism and the dangerous afterlife of Rousseau's Social Contract. All of them try to imagine democracy in ways that would screen of such a doctrines.

I mention ordoliberalism, especially, in this context because in its foundational moment (recall here), as a politically potent force, on the ruins of Nazi Germany, it relatively quickly recognizes the principle of reparations for historical injustice. The Federal Republic of Germany has paid out to Israel and Jews (and some other victims) everywhere since. So, the idea that liberalism (sharing) in power is incapable of addressing historical injustice rests, I fear, on the Anglo-experience. (Of course, I don't deny that liberalism in power does a lot of evil, too.)

And if we go back a bit, to the nineteenth century, the most vital age of liberal politics, there is quite a bit of liberal complicity with racialized empire. But the most interesting liberal political characters of the age, Richard Cobden and John Bright, are implacable enemies of slavery (Bright especially), of militarism (including Britain's), and imperialism. (Interestingly enough, their names are generally only associated with free trade; but for them that was a moral and political crusade against militarism and poverty.) And it is interesting to me that philosophers happily teach and discuss Mill, warts and all, in the undergraduate curriculum, but ignore (recall) Cobden and Bright.+ And I don't think Cobden and Bright are somehow odd exceptions. They are drawing on what one may call the Adam Smith-Condorcet-Wilberforce heritage.

Noam Chomsky (not a liberal apologist), writing in 1970, in "Government in the Future," recognizes this heritage and articulates it through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Limits of State Action,” which he even treats as a kind of founder of libertarian and a certain species of anarchist thought or at least its most profound exemplar. And, crucially for present purposes Chomsky (correctly) opposes Von Humboldt to the state of nature tradition (especially Rousseau) and ideas of popular sovereignty. (In 1995 he links Smith and Von Humboldt.) Smith and Von Humboldt take state political violence (of Mercantilism) as their target.

I mention all of this in superficial form because there is liberal social theory and a liberal political philosophy that takes its own complicity with social evils seriously, and also has articulated responses to it. Nearly everyone mentioned here believed in relatively open borders in order to welcome refugees and immigrants, and instinctively rejected Rawls' "closed society." Many of my past digressions are invitations to the material mentioned above. (My friend Jacob T. Levy has been very inspirational on these issues, and his work is, perhaps, a better place to start.) I do not suggest that these responses would be compelling to the present radical tendencies and radical critics, but Rawls' shadow also blots out a lot of liberalism worth rediscovering if only to understand our recurring predicaments. Perhaps, some of you may wish to join me in rebuilding a theoretical liberalism worth having from the building blocks scattered throughout history.

 

 

 

*Foucault is also interested in radicalism/utilitarianism, but at some point that tradition turns illiberal.

+Hobson, who is well known to Marxists, also fits in this category. But he embraces racial superiority and so I distance myself from him despite the many interesting insights in his work. (Cobden is less a principled critic of settled colonialism, but often scathing about its practice.)

Comments

[Aaron Lercher]

Rawlsian theory can be used to justify reparations for historical crimes and oppressionss. It is part of our general knowledge, admissible in the original position, that human groups have frequently conquered other groups, and then suordinated the conquered or captive groups. Then the hypothetical participants in the original position may argue that this could be their situation.

Rawlsian reasoning might be applied this way. But must it? That's the problem. Rawls's idealizations seem detached. Maybe our immersion is a world formed by massive crimes makes us unable to see beyond it to Rawls's idealized world of moral persons. Rawls himself talks about "redress" just briefly in Theory of Justice.

Or maybe it is merely very difficult, requiring civil disobedience and extreme patience and care for justice.

But this dynamic of a fallen world and gleaming ideal is not unique to Rawls.

[Matt]

This is good, and I'm pretty sympathetic to it. (I'd find it interesting and surprising if Rawls's stutter isn't mentioned by Forrester at all, but I haven't read the book.) I do want to push back on something you suggest about Rawls, where I think you endorse a common reading, but one that seems to me to be wrong and pernicious, although very common - the idea that he endorses a "closed society" in some important sense. This is usually inferred from the bit in the Restatement where he talks about "political society" being something we "enter by birth and leave by death." But note that Rawls says that's "something we may assume for the moment", and it's important to ask why it's assumed, given that it's obviously not a real feature of the world and that it's incompatible with a lot of rights he'd endorse. The answer, I think, is that it's a way to help model the "strains of commitment" - we want to think of principles that we'd accept no matter what place we end up in, and that we'd be willing to live with after the veil of ignorance is lifted. If people are able to leave if they don't like how they end up, they will be less willing and able to meet these requirements. The "closed society" bit models this. This is, I think, all that it does. It's not part of a real-world ideal, nor an assumption of what real-world just societies would be like. Maybe it's not a good way to model the point, or can be criticized in other ways, but I'm pretty sure that this is all the idea does in Rawls, despite how it's often talked about.

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt,
Thank you for engaging. (I haven't spent time with Rawls for a few years now, and I do start worrying then about my grasp of the details.)
I can see why my post can misleadingly suggest that Rawls' project is hostile to immigration or open borders (or cosmopolitanism). Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò had used the phrase "closed society." And I liked it enough to draw the contrast with the liberal traditions i wanted to highlight.
I agree with you that it would be a mistake to infer such hostility from the modeling conditions. (I am also aware that by now folk like Carens simply model, at least at one point, the original position in terms of a global society.) But I also think that the implied audience for the modeling exercise of a closed society -- I apologize, but I have forgotten where I picked up this point -- is other citizens in order to form a people (this is the republican strain in Rawls' liberalism). This is why Rousseau looms so large, and why I granted (and still grant) Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's description of Rawls and respectfully don't quite take your push back wholly on board.