St. John of Harvard yard.(Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition)(Book review)

Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition, by David Lewis Schaefer (Missouri, 368 pp., $24.95)

HARVARD philosopher John Rawls's death in 2002 generated obituaries even more embarrassingly pompous than the sort academics usually write for one another. He was, his colleagues averred, possessed of an almost superhuman kindness and humility. Several described him as "saintly" and judged that "we are privileged to have lived in his time." One of them related how Isaiah Berlin had been moved by Rawls's goodness to "liken him, mischievously, to Jesus," and another confessed that when Rawls had once telephoned him "it was as if God himself had called." The basis for such hagiography? Rawls was known to invite grad students for coffee, and to discuss their ideas with them over pizza. He would send a copy of one of his books to a colleague who was interested in it. And as clinching proof of supererogatory virtue, a favorite anecdote, told with reverent awe, has him standing in front of a window during a doctoral-dissertation defense, so that the candidate wouldn't be bothered by light in his eyes.

Evidently, the standards for canonization are considerably relaxed in the small-stakes-and-large-egos world of academe: Just being a normal, pleasant fellow suffices. Still, Rawls can be said to have provided the traditionally requisite miracle as well, having passed off the cloudy water of his prolix and vaguely argued writings as the finest philosophical wine. Indeed, he is often claimed (by Rawlsians, anyway) to have been the greatest political thinker of the 20th century, and to have rescued political philosophy from the dormancy into which it had purportedly fallen before his book A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971. This might come as a surprise to readers of Aron, Hayek, Oakeshott, Popper, and Strauss--thinkers active long before Rawls came on the scene, and whose works exhibit a detail of argumentation, clarity of expression, and breadth of historical, philosophical, and social-scientific learning that Rawls did not match. But then, I have neglected to mention that Rawls fulfilled one last criterion for contemporary academic sainthood: He was (unlike the other thinkers mentioned) very definitely a man of the Left.

Rawls's bloated reputation is long overdue for puncturing, a task David Lewis Schaefer undertakes in his important new book. Examining in detail both the large themes and myriad side issues addressed in Rawls's various books and articles, Schaefer clearly intends a complete demolition. Some of the criticisms he raises will be familiar to those acquainted with the vast literature on Rawls. Others, made previously by such right-of-center philosophers as Allan Bloom, Antony Flew, John Kekes, Wallace Matson, and Robert Nozick, are less well known--because Rawls and his disciples have largely ignored them. (For Rawlsians, it seems, only criticism from the left--by Marxists, feminists, and communitarians, for example--is worth taking seriously.) Schaefer does a service in collating these various pre-existing criticisms into a single sustained case, and adding some new points of his own. He is particularly keen to emphasize how radically at odds Rawls is with the American political tradition and the assumptions that have informed it historically and at present, Rawls's pretense to the contrary notwithstanding.

Rawls is best known for his defense of what he calls "justice as fairness," a theory according to which a society counts as just only if its "basic structure" is determined by principles that would be chosen behind a "veil of ignorance" in the "original position." By the original position, Rawls has in mind something like the "state of nature" of classical-liberal political philosophy, a condition in which moral, social, and political institutions do not yet exist and individuals have to create them by agreeing to a social contract. By the "veil of ignorance," he means that those within this idealized condition who are to choose the principles to guide the institutions in question ought to be thought of as knowing nothing about themselves--such as their race, sex, religion, or "conception of the good"--that might bias their decision in their own favor. Rawls realizes, of course, that no such circumstance ever has existed or could exist, but he thinks it nevertheless instructive to ask what people would choose if they ...