John Rawls Isn't Going to Save You
The economist Daniel Chandler, a professor at the London School of Economics, has been engaged for the last year or two in a full-on and well-received revival of the political philosophy of the eminent thinker John Rawls. The Democrats are in trouble, the headline writers at The New York Times declare above Chandler's recent essay, and this man can save them. Rawls, writes Chandler, offers "an unparalleled, and as yet largely untapped, resource for shaping a broad-based and genuinely transformational progressive politics—not just for Democrats but for center-left parties internationally."
I think that Rawls, the overwhelmingly influential Harvard political philosopher who died in 2002 after articulating a new justification for classical liberalism, is an unlikely savior for the Democratic Party and the mainstream left anywhere, and not only because he's dead, which hasn't presented a problem to the messianic careers of Jesus and the Buddha, Joseph Smith or Jimi Hendrix. It's because he writes in a highly technical and grindingly laborious manner. And because there's an awful contradiction at the heart of his philosophy which vitiates it, and liberalism in general, as a practical program.
Plucking down Rawls's magisterial (= very long) tome A Theory of Justice, let’s examine a typical passage. (It will be important to Rawls scholars to note that I'm consulting the first edition, as Rawls revised the book repeatedly to short-circuit objections. The problems I’ll enumerate go for all the editions.) "Assume there is a fixed stock of commodities to be distributed between two persons, x1 and x2. Let the line AB represent the points such that given x1's gain at the corresponding level, there is no way to distribute the commodities so as to make x2 better off than the point indicated by the curve. Consider the point D = (a, b). Then holding x1 at the level a, the best that can be done for x2 is the level b."
This is part of the initial statement of Rawls's theory of justice, and it gets more technical. In his popularizations, Chandler rarely quotes the scripture itself. You can see why. Putting it mildly, A Theory of Justice doesn't have the elegance and profundity of the Tao Te Ching or the rollicking intensity of the Book of Revelations. But prose style isn't really the problem, and Chandler’s trying to address it by converting Rawls' book into a more widely comprehensible series of "manifestos." It sounds like he thinks a Rawlsian liberation front is just about to burst out from campus and redeem us from Trump.
When it does, however, it’ll need to address some internal problems. Though Chandler refers to Rawls' "vision," there’s another difference between Rawls and scripture, namely that scripture calls for faith, but Rawls stands or falls with his rational arguments. There’s a contradiction at the heart of Rawls' theory that not only tends to collapse the theoretical edifice, but which also shows a basic contradiction at the heart of political liberalism.
Classical liberalism in general is an enduring political philosophy associated with the work of John Locke, James Madison, John Stuart Mill, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, informing the founding documents of the United States and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It rests on individual rights (freedom of expression and religion, for example) combined with democratic or republican political forms, including elections. It prescribes free markets tempered by state regulation, and it tries to ameliorate the inequality that might otherwise lead to its collapse by creating government programs of redistribution of various goods.
As a set of economic prescriptions, we could say that classical liberalism is compatible in its outlines with welfare-state capitalism or with various forms of democratic socialism. It seemed triumphant after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, but since the rise of Trump and of Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Kaczynski, many commentators have claimed to experience "the collapse of the liberal world-order." It’s from this collapse that the previously-alive John Rawls can, it’s hoped, save us.
Rawls' argument (and it is an argument, not merely a vision or gospel) is this: people who were designing a society for themselves from scratch and didn't know where they’d end up in the social order would try to assure themselves that, even if they ended up in the worst possible position—even if they ended up in an oppressed gender or ethnic group or social class, for example—this wouldn’t be a mere disaster for them. People operating in that situation (the "original position") would come up with some basic principles, restated by Chandler (not quoted, note) as follows: "First, all citizens should be free to live according to their own beliefs and to participate in politics as genuine equals. Second, we should organize our economy to achieve equal opportunities and widely shared prosperity, only tolerating inequalities where they improve the life prospects of the least advantaged." The second sentence, the "difference principle" is really Rawls' distinctive contribution to political theory, and that's what all those x1's and level b's are getting up to.
I’m going to do this quickly here, but I've done it at greater length elsewhere: There’s a contradiction at the heart of Rawls' procedure that vividly shows the practical problem with liberalism in general. The people emerging from the original position are charged with achieving a society that’ll realize the two principles of justice. But the first thing they’ll do as they pursue this goal, according to Rawls (as according to Locke) is to constitute a government that’s adequate to institute an initial distribution of all goods (food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education, for example) and to correct unjust distributions later on. Rawls almost tries to conceal this fact, which is a bizarre elision. But he does imply it throughout, especially in his discussion of a "well-ordered society."
Political power, as Rawls occasionally remarks, is itself a good to be distributed according to the two principles of justice. So, presumptively, political power should be distributed equally. That’s impossible in a society that features the sort of government that Rawls demands. Some people are in the state; they’re its officials, its police, its tax collectors, its prison guards. And they operate, Rawls concedes occasionally, by coercion of the rest of the population.
We can temper the extreme asymmetry of power in statist societies by recommending democratic procedures of participation, which Rawls certainly does. But a vote in the presidential election, as you might’ve noticed, is an infinitesimal bit of political power at most. The president, however, could deploy the armed forces domestically, he could institute surveillance of the whole population, etc. Such things happen, even in "liberal" societies, all day every day.
Rawls' argument that some people should have direct access to the power to tax and incarcerate others, must be that this is directly to the benefit of the people they’re incarcerating and taxing, or at any rate of "those lowest down." I’d say that, demonstrably, for reasons that are pretty obvious, this is unlikely to be the result. The actual results, in actual liberal democracies, are more like mass racial incarceration and wildly profitable state capitalism.
Political power’s a particularly fundamental good in Rawls' precise sense: the distribution of all the other goods tends to flow with the distribution of political power, for obvious reasons. Political power is the power to distribute all the other goods. People who wield it show the usual human trait (central to Rawls' conception of rationality): they by and large pursue their own interest as they understand it. People with access to political power will assign to themselves and people like themselves greater access to education and health care and food clothing and shelter, but also wealth and freedom.
This isn’t an academic problem: it’s at the heart of every liberal polity. It’s what liberalism is, though it's not aware of that fact: a system whose most basic procedures and institutions directly contradict its most basic values. Liberalism is often held to be "a balancing act" between freedom and order, but it's less a balance than a raging contradiction. Rawlsian liberalism leads directly to oligarchy, and real liberalism really has.
People in Rawls' original position couldn’t rationally choose to constitute a state. So they couldn’t rationally choose to constitute a liberal state.
Meanwhile, when it’s time to tell the Democrats how Rawls can save them, Chandler’s a lot less grand. It seems like Democrats need to appeal to the working class, just as every pundit is now agreeing. "A political party inspired by Rawls would stand up for an inclusive and tolerant society, a vibrant democracy, equality of opportunity and fair outcomes." Yay? There’s nothing there but the vaguest of ordinary verbiage, just a reiteration of liberal clichés, nothing that JD Vance isn't already snickering about.
Speaking of Vance, Chandler's Rawls ends up echoing him closely. A Rawlsian society "would include huge investment in vocational education and left-behind places, forming an effective industrial strategy to create good jobs," Chandler writes. Vance didn't need Rawls to reach those conclusions a decade ago, and no one needs him to reach them now.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell