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The Art of Political Liberalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Duncan Ivison
Duncan Ivison
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
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Abstract

This article considers John Rawls's recent turn to “political liberalism.“ Rawls has revised his argument from A Theory of Justice in order to establish a more realistic account of a “well-ordered” society; that is, creating legitimate political stability amidst a plethora of conflicting yet reasonable conceptions of the good. The aim here is to consider the extent to which Rawlsian theories are at once open to the deep diversity of late-modern political communities, and yet seek to manage and constrain the liberty of “difference” for the purposes of maintaining a distinctive liberal political order. This involves trying to persuade people to comply with liberal norms despite themselves. But it has been the claim of Rawlsian liberalism that citizens be presented, without pretence, with reasons they can accept and live by in the course of establishing a well-ordered society. The drive for transparency here—through seeking out agreement on first principles of justice—obscures the “arts” of political liberalism and prevents us from thinking about the diversity of political communities in other ways.

Résumé

Cet article scrute le libéralisme politique de John Rawls. Dans ses récents travaux, Rawls a révisé la thèse de son livre.A Theory of Justice, a propos de la sociéteé bien-ordonnée, pour la rendre plus réaliste. Rawls cherche a créer une stabilité politique légitime parmi plusieurs « plans de vie » incompatibles et pourtant tous raisonables. Ce texte souhaite montrer comment les théories rawlsiennes sont ouvertes à la diversité profonde des sociétés modernes, mais qu'elles cherchent aussi à orienter et à restreindre l'espace de la « différence » pour préserver un ordre politique qui soit proprement liberal. Cela signifie que l'on doit persuader les gens de se conformer aux normes libéralesen dépit d'eux-mérnes. Mais c'est justement l'un des arguments du libéralisme de Rawls que Ton doit présenter au citoyens, franchement, des raisons qu'ils peuvent accepter et respecter en e'difiant une socidtd bien ordonne'e. La quéte de transparence—gràce à unconsensus sur les principes fondamentaux de la justice—obscurcit les habiletés du libéralisme politique et nous empéche de penser autrement la diversité dans les communautés politiques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 203 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1995

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References

1 Bodleian, MS. Locke), f.5 fols 77–83; also in Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 29Google Scholar.

2 See Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” in Burchell, Graham et al., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)Google Scholar, and below for further lectures. Also Todd, Margo, Christian Humanism and Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Viroli, Maurizio, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuck, Richard, Philosophy and Government: 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 126-27.

5 Thus in Political Liberalism, Rawls identifies two kinds of circumstances of justice: “objective” circumstances of moderate scarcity and “subjective circumstances” of modern pluralist societies (66).

6 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, 127; also John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New York University Law Review 64 (1989), 233–55Google Scholar.

7 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxiv, xvi-xvii, 36.

8 Political stability involves a “secure ” and “enduring” democratic regime, not divide into contending and doctrinal confessions or hostile social classes, and “willingly ” and “freely” supported by a “substantial majority of the population“ (ibid, 38). Here he keeps to a tradition in political thought which takes stability and longevity as reliable indicators of a good-that is, successful-regime. See, for example, Aristotle's Politics, V, 1307b26–1309a27.

9 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 146f.

10 See Locke's, classic formulation in Laslett, Peter, ed., Two Treatises (student edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, II. 22,57.

11 I am indebted here to discussions with John Charvet, and his unpublished manuscript, “The Idea of a Contractarian Communitarianism,” London School of Economics Government Department, 1993.

12 See Lukes, Steven, Moral Conflict and Politics(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58–59Google Scholar, 65; and Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 6–8Google Scholar, who calls Rawls and Dworkin “revisionist” theorists of liberty.

13 Rawls. A Theory of Justice, 204. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 5.

14 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 202,203.

15 The first principle was amended from “the most extensive total system of equal liberty” (in ibid.) to the one quoted above (in Rawls, John, “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 3 [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982], 1–87Google Scholar; Rawls, Political Liberalism, 289-371,Amended principle on 291), in response to criticisms from A. Hart, H. L., “Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority,” Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 161–62Google Scholar.

16 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 61.

17 See Rawls, , “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), 515–72Google Scholar; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, Part 1, Lecture III.

18 Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism, ” 518; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19, 103-04.

19 Rawls, “The Basic Liberties,” 15; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, 301.

20 Ibid.

21 Thus reasonable people are those who have realized their two moral powers, and have a desire to honour the fair terms of social cooperation (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 54-58).

22 For my purposes here, I shall simply say the original position is intended to model the sense in which it is appropriate to regard people as free and equal when thinking about justice. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 19, 21; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, 22–28, 89–103. See the helpful discussion in Mulhall, S. and Swift, A., Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 9Google Scholar; and Okin's, S. M. excellent “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,” Ethics 99 (1989), 229–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 23 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 167.

24 Thus it is not surprising that Rawls (in A Theory of Justice, 71-72) explicitly rejects a Smithian “system of natural liberty”: “Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors (that is, the prior distribution of ‘natural assets’ -natural talents and abilities) so arbitrary from a moral point of view The liberal interpretation, as I shall refer to i t … seeks, then, to mitigate the influence of social contingencies and natural fortune on distributive shares.” Also, because individuals and their associations offer up “definite ideals and forms of life” that have been developed and tested when drawing up our plans of life, “we do not start de novo; we are not required to choose from countless possibilities without given structure or fixed contours” (563-64). The hierarchic structure of the principles in the theory does not aim at “the complete specification of conduct,” rather, “the idea is to approximate the boundaries, however vague, within which individuals and associations are at liberty to advance their aims and deliberative rationality has free play” (566).

25 See Hindess, Barry, “Liberty and Equality, ” in Barry Hindess, ed., Reactions to the Right (London: Routledge, 1990), 24Google Scholar (who says they do not).

26 See the important discussion of the need for a liberal “context” of choice in Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

27 On the “categorical force” of a principle, see Dworkin, Ronald, “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 11 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 24–31Google Scholar. See Klosko, George, “Rawls's Political Philosophy and American Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science Review 87 (1993), 348–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rawls's discussion of American constitutional history with regard to his rank-ordering of the political liberties, and specifically in relation to freedom of speech, can be found at Political Liberalism, 340-63.

28 See Klosko, “Rawls's Political Philosophy,” 352-55. Joseph F. Fletcher, “Is an Australian Bill of Rights about Rights? Surveying Public and Elite Attitudes,” Australian Rights Project, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, August 1993 (showing that support fora Bill of Rights has more to do with “regime” issues-such as national identity-than with civil liberties, and then more to do with equality than liberty per se). Also Tully, James, “The Crisis of Identification: The Case of Canada,” Political Studies 42 (1994), 77–90Google Scholar; and Taylor, Charles, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Laforest, Guy, ed., Reconciling the Solitudes (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 155–86Google Scholar.

29 This is an important strand in the work of Raz, Joseph, for example, “Rights and Individual Well-Being,” Ratio Juris 5 (1992), 127–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also A. Sen, “Freedom and Needs,” The New Republic, January 10–17, 1994, 31–38Google Scholar.

30 I am indebted to conversations with Barry Hindess for bringing this out more sharply.

31 See Foucault, , “Governmentality”, Resumé des cours 1970–82 (Paris: College de France, 1989)Google Scholar, especially “II faut déendre la société” ”

32 Rawls, John, “Reply to Alexander and Musgrave,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1974), 641Google Scholar.

33 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 175-76; and Rawls, “The Domain of the Political,” 242.

34 Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism,” 538-39.

35 Ibid, 533.

36 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 157.

37 As Barry (Theories of Justice, 394) makes clear: “a Rawlsian would not simply regard a law as a tariff setting out the penalty for certain conduct if he is caught and convicted; rather he would be moved to compliance by the sense of justice. ”38 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 171.

39 But note that “the political” is not itself an absolute good; it is a “significant” good within a political conception of justice. See ibid., 201–06, distinguishing political liberalism from civic humanism, but not classical republicanism (as Rawls takes it to be in Quentin Skinner's characterization of Machiavelli, and de Tocqueville in Democracy in America).See 299 for his remarks on Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberties. See Dworkin's attempt at defining the constitutive elements of liberal community. The communal life of liberal community lies within the “formal political acts” of liberal government-the legislative, executive and judicial institutions. These provide the means of “integration” with the community for the liberal citizen, whereby one's own interests come to be identified with those of the political community. See his “Liberal Community,” California Law Review 77 (1989), 479–504Google Scholar; and the useful comments following it by Philip Selznick and Bernard Williams.

40 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 3-4.

41 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 15 8-64.

42 Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism,” 545.

43 Rawls, A Theory of Justice,31; and Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 37.

44 Mullhall and Swift (Liberals and Communitarians, 209) say it entails a kind of “schizophrenia,” and Williams, Bernard (“Left-wing Wittgenstein,” Common Knowledge 1 [1992], 33–42)Google Scholar that it introduces elements of “dissociation” or “alienation” at the social level, and generates a form of citizenship motivated by fairness, but “not much more.” See also the discussion in Barry, Theories of Justice, Appendix C, 393–400.

45 Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism,” 544; and Rawls, Political Liberalism.

46 Ibid, xxvii, 11–15,59–61.

47 Ibid, 63.I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article for pointing out the significance of this point, and the confusion of an earlier formulation of mine. For a more explicit argument that political liberalism requires that citizens embrace at least some form of scepticism in relation to the holding of their conceptions of the good, see Barry, Brian, “How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions” and “Social Criticism and Political Philosophy,” in Liberty and Justice: Essays in PoliticalTheory, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 9–39Google Scholar.

48 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 150.

49 Ibid, 12–13.

50 Ibid, 18–19.

51 Mabo and Others v. State of Queensland (1992), 66 ALJR, 107 ALR 1.

52 See R v. Sparrow, [1990] 1 S.C.R. See Mecklem, Patrick, “First Nation Self-Govemment and the Borders of the Canadian Legal Imagination,” McCill Law Journal 36 (1991), 382–456Google Scholar.

53 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 563-64; and Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 166-78. One of Kymlicka's clearest statements of the extent of the recognition of cultural structures can be found on 197: “supporting the intolerant character of a cultural community undermines the very reason we had to support cultural membership-that it allows for meaningful individual choice. ” See 59-60: “there are two aspects to the liberal conception of freedom of association Liberals have historically insisted (quoting Rosenblum) ‘that the public sphere should limit not only the political power of religious groups but also the power private groups exercise over their own members.’ Tolerance defends the first of these components of freedom of association, but not the second Plurality and mutual respect do not seem sufficient to defend the full range of liberal freedoms. ”

54 For a helpful and timely discussion of the importance of “recognition” in contemporary political argument, see Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”: An Essay, ed. by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25–73Google Scholar.

55 I am assuming that in evaluating political systems we always use some kind of consequentialist reasoning, since we should be concerned with political outcomes as much as we are with the nature of the processes themselves. See the excellent discussion by Hardin, “Liberalism: Political and Economic,” to which I am greatly indebted.

56 See the discussion in Rawls, Political Liberalism, 195-200, 199: “Political liberalism is unjustly biased against certain comprehensive conceptions only if, say, individualistic ones alone can endure in a liberal society, or they so predominate that associations affirming values of religion or community cannot flourish” (see the quotations from Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, n. 52). See also Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 424: “people are justified in taking action to assimilate the minority group, at the cost of letting its culture die or at least be considerably changed by absorption [but] Gradual transformation of these minority communities [for Raz, groups who reject the value of autonomy] is one thing, their precipitate disintegration is another.”

57 Note, though, that if this power was abused there was a de facto and de jure case for an appeal to the right of revolution. The point at which legitimate power became “abuse” was precisely the judgment individuals must be capable of perceiving and acting upon. See also Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 318-20. It is important to note the amount of effort Locke spends on discussing the nature of the distortion of most people's cognitive capacities in relation to their ability to judge and act, and the extended consideration of alternative practices he proposes to correct these distortions. This is arguably the main theme of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (especially at 2.21 - “Of Power”-the composition of which he struggled with throughout his life). See also the more blatant Some Thoughts Concerning Education (first published 1693), the Report to the Board of Trade (1697) and The Conduct of the Understanding (1697).

58 See Waldron, Jeremy, “Locke, Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in Mendus, Susan, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. SeeHardin, “Liberalism: Political and Economic.”

59 See Rawls, , Political Liberalism, esp. Part 2, lectures iv-v; and “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985), 228Google Scholar.

60 See the discussion in Tully, “The Crisis of Identification.”

61 See Galston, William, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Macedo, Stephen, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 257Google Scholar.

63 See ibid, 66.

64 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 160.

65 Which I think accounts for the rather crude charges made against Rawls that the kind of political theory he has spawned is generally irrelevant to (or too distant from) the modern political world. The most brazen example of this charge is made by John Gray (“Against the New Liberalism: Rawls, Dworkin, and the Emptying of Political Life, “ Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992, 13-15) who accuses Rawls of attempting to build “Kantianism in one country,“ based not on the intuitions of modern liberal democracies, but on the ” unexamined intuitions of the American academic nomenklatura. “For a different view see Barry, “Social Criticism,” esp. 22: “The Rawlsian approach of identifying principles of broad scope and universal aspiration and using them to attack entrenched inequalities has to its credit the success-partial but still significant-of the anti-racist and anti-sexist movements within the past thirty years.”

66 Note in Political Liberalism, Rawls's trepidation with regard to educational policy (199-200), though he muddies the water somewhat by saying there are similarities between political liberalism and the liberalisms of Kant and Mill.

67 Barry, Brian, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 127Google Scholar.

68 See Taylor, Charles, “Self-Interpreting Animals” and “What Is Human Agency,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 See McClure, Kirstie, “Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 36l–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, 533,422. See the discussion of this “second conversation of justice” in Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and the excellent analysis of Cavell on justice in Mulhall, Stephen, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1994), 271–73Google Scholar.

71 For the beginnings of a possible alternative answer, see Amy Gutmann and Thompson, Denis, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” Ethics 101 (1990), 64–88Google Scholar.

72 See Rawls's account of capacities atPolitical Liberalism, 183–84.

73 Ibid, 217.

74 See the survey of theories of citizenship by Kymlicka, Will and Norman, Wayne, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics 104 (1994), 352–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.