On Freeman's Review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 1

Katrina Forrester's book is an engaging history of John Rawls's intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls's theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls's notable critics and reviews alternative positions by significant philosophers and political theorists of the era. These include Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Goodin, H.L.A. Hart, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Susan Okin, Onora O'Neill, Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Peter Singer, Judith Shklar, Charles Taylor, Judith Thomson, Michael Walzer, Bernard Williams, and other leading figures. Forrester concisely summarizes their core ideas and discusses how their work responds to or is critical of the left-liberal position Rawls advocated, liberal egalitarianism. The book provides a significant summary, with few distortions, of the philosophers' ideas it reviews, and is a notable contribution to the history of ideas.

The development and critical response to liberal egalitarian theories of justice has been a central concern within political philosophy since Rawls's Theory of Justice. This is the "shadow of justice" Forrester invokes in her book's title. Her primary thesis is that for the past fifty years, Rawls and the liberal egalitarianism he inspired have defined the intellectual environment of political philosophy, coloring the work of political philosophers of all persuasions. Rawls's shadow also defines the terms of engagement that must be adhered to by political theorists who reject justice as the proper place to begin, or even end, discussions in political philosophy and theory. "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined." (p. 275)--Samuel Freeman reviewing Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2019 at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

When back in the day I first read Samuel Freeman's review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, I was a bit puzzled by it. If the thesis of the book was really, as he reported, that [A] "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined," why, from Section II onward, which starts with the observation that "We are in a period of heightened criticism of Rawls's views," did he spend most of the review defending Rawls' theory from criticisms? For the thesis attributed to Forrester [A] is a thesis in the sociology of knowledge or the historical epistemology of philosophy. It's an empirical (with an accompanying modal) claim orthogonal to criticisms of Rawls' views.

Taken as reported, and at face value, [A] is akin to, neither strictly analogous or identical I hasten to add, the claim that [B] in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis and that this acted as a formal constrain on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics.  [A-B] are claims about professional frameworks -- oh damn you Kuhn, I almost wrote 'paradigm' [Forrester uses "philosophical paradigm" [xx].* And while claims like [A-B] are never innocent -- they might well function in unmasking projects or limit theorems -- by themselves they cannot do the work of criticizing claims discussed within the framework or even about the framework.  Yet most of Freeman's review is a defense of the framework (and some of its specific commitments).

From the review I could not infer how Forrester's argument was supposed to work or what it really is. And when I re-read the review, I noticed that most of Freeman's references to Forrester's book where from the start and end of the book. (I now know they are nearly all from her preface and epilogue.) I left it at that. 

Well, that's not quite true. As regular readers know, back at NewAPPS I have blogged a bit about Rawls' annotations in his books (recall here;) and so knew he had read Robbins and Knight carefully (recall also here), and so back in 2015 I had some fun pointing to Rawls' esotericism in The Theory of Justice (really, go read the post). And yes, I lectured and blogged more about Rawls (especially on Knightian uncertainty and how his lectures on history shaped our perception of the past and present (recall), but except for contextualizing Rawls a bit in this essay (here), I held off on doing scholarship on him. Meanwhile, ever since I heard about a historicizing Rawls conference (2017) at Oxford that culminated in this special issue of Modern Intellectual History, edited by Sophie Smith, Teresa Bejan, and Annette Zimmermann, and with the appearance of Forrester's book, I knew that my time to pontificate about Rawls was up. There were now legitimate experts out there who had put the the pearls I had briefly touched but had put away in a safe, to work in important scholarship. (Not my first academic blunder.)

But then I read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's fascinating review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, in The Nation (here), which prompted a response from me (recall here). That review (which does not mention Freeman's review) attributes to Forrester a mechanism that might support an inference from [A] to a conclusion worth attacking by Freeman: [X] "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." But from Táíwò's review it's unclear if that claim [X] is in Forrester or Táíwò. [X] could at least explain why the constraint(s) mentioned in [A] would be taken as a criticism of the framework.  But as I noted in my response to Táíwò, Rawls' work had been (repeatedly) used to tackle historical injustice at least in journal articles.

Now, in reading Táíwò's review I had come under the impression that Forrester's book is a kind of intellectual biography. (He doesn't say this, but a lot of the material he discusses is presented in terms of Rawls' biography.) And in going back to Freeman's review after reading and blogging about Táíwò's, I realized that I could not triangulate from both reviews what Forrester's book was about. And since I felt a bit guilty in blogging about Táíwò's review without having read the book, I read the awe-inspiring book over break and even 'life-tweeted' my impressions by chapter. 

The book is difficult to summarize, but Forrester is admirably clear about its main aim: [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi) Notice that Rawls is not mentioned in [I]. (The whole paragraph that explains [I] does not mention Rawls!) So, strictly speaking the thesis of the book is not about Rawls or his framework at all. Rather, Rawls is an example of [I] or is supposed to illustrate it [I]. Now, if one were to quote [I] out of context it would be puzzlingly ahistorical. The politics of political philosophy has shifted as philosophy has shifted sites and ages. We will never know exactly the circumstances of how Speusippus ended up succeeding Plato and not, say, Aristotle, and it is hard for us to grasp fully if this had effects on the important conceptual choices in the way political philosophy was pursued in (say) Hellenistic times, but we can know that it is institutionally different from the far-reaching effects (as Forrester shows) of the founding of Philosophy and Public Affairs by a then relatively close-knit group connected to (a reading group known as) Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF). So, we cannot take [I] at face value like that. But in context it is pretty clear what she means; the first words of the book -- "political philosophy in the English speaking-world today" -- supply the required context that makes precise the implied reference of [I].

It should be noted that it is by no means obvious one needs to discuss the politics of philosophy in order to discuss the political implications of conceptual choices. One can, for example, discuss inductive risk of a scientific theory without discussing the way science is organized. But plenty of philosophers of science (myself included) have discussed the two alongside each other. So, I understand the pull to do so. Implied in [I] is a non-trivial and controversial causal assumption that [a] the structure of academic discussion (at least in political philosophy), or at least the way such structure shapes the content of what is taken to be authoritative, has some downstream effects on the way the content of academic discussion is taken up in political life. And while I called it a causal assumption, one might equally suspect that lurking in [I] there is a more normative claim [b] that (a) political philosophy [worth having] ought to guide politics in some sense (and in a good way).  And, in fact, in Forrester's book [b] or something close to it is attributed to Stuart Hampshire (in his critique of utilitarianism, 82 & 242), and Alisdair MacIntyre (p. 82), and at times she is clearly tempted by it herself. 

In the book, the political implications of conceptual choices are primarily or perhaps I should say most recurringly investigated through left-leaning Oxford philosophers (many of whom influenced Rawls and, in turn, were influenced by him) and their aspirations to shape the British Labor party's politics. But is not limited to that, we also get a number of American case studies about how Rawlsian ideas were taken up in areas of applied and global ethics (but oddly not Norman Daniels' attempt to shape Hilary Clinton's healthcare plan along Rawlsian lines). We also learn how these fields came to be known as 'applied' (see, for example, 73).

As an aside, and briefly returning to my remarks on Táíwò's review, 'historical injustice' is indeed one of the cases Forrester discusses. But her argument is that it was Nozick who put historical injustice on the agenda for Rawlsians. For, the need for reparations' for historical injustice(s) falls out rather neatly from his argument because original ownership matters a lot to Nozick (see Forrester's pp. 130-135). And by using Bedau, who stands in as a 'left-liberal' (but whose intellectual formation precedes Rawls' main works), as a kind of guide to the debate, she helps explain why it took so long for Rawlsians to really develop an account of historical injustice (perhaps still insufficiently so to Táíwò). To put it as a joke: Rawlsians had to be invented first before an approach to historical injustice could be articulated by them.

In its arguments, Freeman's review ignores the politics of political philosophy. And so fails in the minimal requirements of reviewing; it does not accurately convey what the book is about. It is not a work in the "history of ideas" as he claims. By this I mean it is neither the history ideas in the technical sense of Arthur Lovejoy (and now barely practiced), the history of tracing unit-ideas (we would say, Memes) through different historical epochs (recall), nor is the presumably  more informal sense that Freeman intends by the the phrase, that is, a work of tracing influence or, as he implies, the evolution of a debate.

I do not mean to imply that Freeman's review isn't shaped by the politics of political philosophy. Note that in the first paragraph Freeman lists an alphabetized group of names he treats both as "significant philosophers and political theorists" and "leading figures." Those honorifics suggest we are not far from today's politics of political philosophy. But his first paragraph fails to convey how when Forrester is practicing history -- which to repeat is in the service of an a-historical claim [I] -- she does it.  

As I noted, Forrester's method, when she is practicing something like history of ideas (in the informal sense--it's more common to call it 'contextual history of philosophy' or 'history of political thought'), is to use a privileged well informed contemporary of Rawls to shed light on how Rawls transforms the debates within political philosophy and even establishes a new vocabulary or register for the field. And while some of the names Freeman mentions are, of course, important to her story, her methodological strategy is not to focus on the all-stars in depth. Rather she uses particular guides, most notable she uses Brian Barry for this very purposes. Not infrequently (but not as prominently as Barry) she uses Hugo Bedau (who is clearly not significant enough for Freeman to be listed among the leading figures). When she focuses on her Oxford theme, she uses Richard Titmuss' work to fascinating effect (and David Miller's). And as I hinted above, Stuart Hampshire shows up throughout the book for such illuminating purposes too. 

Because I have run on long as is, let me note one other aspect of how she understands [I]. She does not treat the politics of academic disciplines as autonomous. By this I mean, that she sometimes suggests that academic influence is itself a consequence of larger social forces. The most explicit example of this is after noting the malleability of communitarianism, her claim that "communitarianism...became influential within political theory because it did not seriously threaten the assumptions of the postwar liberal order." (257; emphasis added). The fuller significance of this is, and it is another way in which 'shadow' in the title of the book functions (and Freeman almost gets this right), is that in Forrester's analysis political theory as distinct from political philosophy becomes constituted, at least for a while, as a field that is un-Rawlsian.

Here she leaves hanging what the source of this status quo bias is (is it ideology, subtle disciplinary pressure from political scientists on appointments, is it funding sources within universities, etc.)? While she is very interested in themes like journal capture, and the way centers promote fields, Forrester is relatively quiet on such mechanisms. But I'll postpone my own more substantive criticisms of the book until I engage with more of the actual argument of the book (and perhaps I'll also return (eventually) to Freeman's effort to refute some of the claims of the epilogue). To be continued.

*Regular readers know I consider this a contradiction in terms.

Comments

[Matt]

Have you read Brian Kogelmann's review of the book, from The New Rambler? I thought it was very good. (It has some similarities with Freeman's, but differences as well.) It's here: https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/philosophy/political-philosophy-and-the-search-for-the-possible

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you Matt. Kogelman's review gives at least a decent summary of what's in the book. And because he also focuses on the founding of Philosophy and Public Affairs and its aims, I think he does a good job of conveying what I think at least part of the explicit thesis of the book is. (But he too misses its connection with the politics of political philosophy.) He makes a plausible case that Rawls' own view of what political philosophy should be is not what Forrester's is. And he offers an elegant defense of it. But his response does not really address her arguments for her thesis. I may blog about this.

[Aaron Lercher]

It's good that premise [X] is not in Forrester or Táíwò, since Rawls says the moral persons behind the veil are able to appeal to any social science. That's a wide open invitation!

Freeman's irate review fits my mood when trying to read Forrester's erudite book. I am annoyed because the book bypasses normative argument, while at the same time it tries to enjoy the benefits of normative criticisms of Rawls. I managed to make use of Forrester's book by reading it as an elaborate commentary and bibliography, rather than as history of philosophy. Thank you, Professor Forrester, for the reference to Boxill's Blacks and Social Justice!

History of philosophy, I think, requires one to do philosophy. History of political philosophy requires one to spell out normative premises and arguments, which can be boring and awkward. Forrester gives us fragments of arguments. The discussion of Wittgenstein's influence on Rawls and Hart in Chapter 1 is one example among many. Is this a criticism of Wittgenstein's influence, or Rawls and Hart, or both? Forrester seems to assume that any use of Wittgenstein is "right Wittgensteinian" (Williams) and hence conservative. A detour into Wittgenstein interpretation is required here if Forrester wants to pursue this, but Wittgenstein interpretation requires many years of work.

Normative argument in political philosophy, then, also in turn requires us to make our non-normative premises explicit too. For example, if one thinks that Rawls's theory is inadequate to deal with gender inequality, then the fact of humans' extreme interdependency, in childhood and old age especially, demands a clear discussion. Nussbaum's normative criticisms of Rawls does that. Then we can start to come up with the normative premises that are missing from Rawls's theory.

No one is required to be a philosopher in every part of life. Ethics, however, comes closest to imposing that requirement, but only in cases in which the failure to inquire into normative matters would lead to morally wrong actions. Forrester's avoidance of normative inquiry is a mistake, because her topic really requires it. But, like the political philosophy she criticizes, her mistake is not a moral failure.

Now, about "ideal theory" (because that's behind all of this): it seems to me that in an increasingly non-ideal world, it is increasingly necessary to refer to an "ideal" in order to talk about "justice" at all. How is one to reason about this thing, justice, if one never can refer to any example of it in a non-ideal world? (That is, if it is anything at all.) In an increasingly non-ideal world, one is compelled to refer to an abstract justice of some kind.

[Aaron Lercher]

My previous comment argues that Forrester's book does not uphold an obligation of fair play for the practice of normative theorizing. Forrester seems to reject such obligations.

Here's a different interpretation: Forrester is crypto-normative. Her book attempts to shift the burden of normative judgment (and the risks of judgment) onto the reader. By refusing to make explicit normative commitments, and by describing the practical situation in great detail, Forrester hopes the reader will grasp for herself what the reader's obligations are. (This is like Foucault. But I think Thomson's use of hypothetical cases does this more explicitly.) Freeman describes Forrester's book as "deconstructive," which seems to me to be a less successful attempt to make a similar point.

The normative risk-shift, however, is pointless for readers who are already engaged in normative political philosophy or other normative ethics. They already feel the burden of coming up with better accounts for all the areas where Rawls fails to deliver conclusions that they feel are lacking. (Among others: rights of immigrants, rights against environmental pollution, abortion rights, the right of workers to go on strike, the claim to reparations for past oppression and conquest, the claim to childcare and elder care institutions that do not privatize these tasks.)

For myself, I do not see these issues solely from the view of a normative theorist. Anyone who engages in political struggle wants to win, while normative theory is not really for the winners. As Rousseau says at the beginning of Social Contract: "If I were a prince or a legislator I wouldn’t waste my time saying what should be done; I would do it, or keep quiet."

[L. Cooper]

Posting this rather late, but if anyone is interested in my short-ish review of Forrester, at the S-USIH blog from March 2021, it's here:

https://s-usih.org/2021/03/review-of-in-the-shadow-of-justice/

I don't think her normative commitments, while they may not always or often be explicit, are especially hard to discern. Just to take one example, she doesn't like (although she never says that directly) what she calls "the shift to abstraction" in theorizing about global justice (see the end of ch.5) -- I don't discuss this in the review, actually. That's tied in with her sympathy to criticisms of "ideal theory." (Maybe those are methodological preferences, not normative commitments?) She is clearly sympathetic to feminist criticisms of Rawls, though the reference to the feminist critics is rather brief. And she faults Rawlsians for not giving "the kind of account of collective politics in a class-divided society that might have enabled" their agenda or "vision." (p. 237)