I’ve been learning about political philosophy, mostly liberal political philosophy, lately. Political Liberalism by John Rawls, Black Rights / White Wrongs by Charles W. Mills, and Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young are currently sitting within ten feet of me. Of course, the stray online essay and podcast have also contributed. With this comes a lot to think about, so this essay partially summarizes some of their arguments, and partially provides my own thoughts.
There are a lot of ways that people have approached liberalism, but one of the most common is a focus on free and equal people. What precisely this means varies. In the introduction to Political Liberalism, Rawls says that people are free by virtue of having choices, even if the state tries to repress those choices. The equality comes into play when the state tries to get free people with extremely different viewpoints to be willing to live in the same country. Liberalism is the art of getting people to not murder or oppress each other, despite their differences.
Rawls tries to do this with his rendition of social contract theory. To be clear, the social contract is a metaphor, intended to get you to imagine an ideal set of rules. Rawls’ version is the “original position.” Imagine that you existed outside of or prior to a society. You don’t know your age, gender, race, class, family history, religion; you don’t know anything about yourself. All you know is that you’re with a bunch of other people in the same situation, and that once you all come to an agreement on how society should be shaped, you’ll be randomly assigned to one of the positions in it. What principles would shape the design of this society? To Rawls, this would be the most just society, because each person agreed with everyone else, as equals, that they would tolerate whatever position they got in the society.
There are some benefits to this way of looking at it. Rawls describes this notion of justice as fairness as “freestanding” because any reasonable person (in his definition of reasonable) could agree to it, even if they had very different worldviews. He contrasts this “political” liberalism to “comprehensive” liberalism, which entails a big set of ideas about the good and what is to be valued. In “political” liberalism, the main concern is that we’re fair to each other, because that’s what makes a society just.
Personally, this notion of justice seems thoroughly about toleration, which rubs me the wrong way. I think people should be able to do more than just merely tolerate their station in life. But there are other, more serious criticisms. Iris Marion Young says that justice, in real life, is a response to injustice. In the introduction to Justice and the Politics of Difference she explains that discourse about justice isn’t motivated by curiosity, but by a repulsion to injustice. “The sense of justice arises not from looking, but... from listening.” This approach drags us back to reality and forces us to listen for claims of injustice.
Charles W. Mills strikes a similar tone. He criticizes the “ideal theory” of Rawls and those heavily influenced by him as a philosophical sleight-of-hand that allows us to ignore the massive amounts of injustice happening around us. At what point do we stop theorizing about the ideal society and stare injustice in the face? Going further, he explains that the social contract more accurately describes what happened among white people (and among the rich and among men) to the exclusion of everyone else. Liberalism, in its dominant strands, arose as an equality among free rich white men. The early social contract theorists recognized this and didn’t mind it. If we do mind it, we should probably be careful not to repeat a philosophical methodology which whitewashes liberalism’s sub-ideal history.
Mills actually goes even further, in his lecture ‘Doing Injustice to "Justice": How Rawls Went Wrong’ making the astonishing claim that Rawls’ theory of justice simply doesn’t apply to the United States. He explains that Rawls did not see contemporary Western societies as having structural racism, and that structural racism rules out the possibility of his conception of justice. This is most clear in his last book, Justice as Fairness, where he says that justice as fairness is specifically applicable to modern democratic societies, and that democratic societies cannot be racist. Of course, there is deep reason to think that American society is deeply racist. As one of many potentially examples, only a few years ago a court ruled that a voter ID law was designed to disenfranchise African-American voters. I doubt things were much better two to four decades ago. The disturbing reality is that it seems that Rawls did not design his theory of justice in a way that makes it applicable to the United States.
Now, about Charles Mills himself. His project of a Black radical liberalism is compelling. He places his project directly alongside the projects of social democracy and feminist liberalism. Black radical liberalism looks to be an anti-racist liberalism, while social democracy is a liberalism against plutocracy, and feminist liberalism against patriarchal liberalism. It’s a very attractive proposition, and so far I largely agree with his arguments. There is only one point where I think I seriously, philosophically diverge with him. He argues that liberalism can acknowledge social ontology (the “realness” of social groups) because its individualism prescriptively places the individual over nonvoluntary social groups. In other words, it prioritizes the ability of the individual to buck groups over whatever advantages groups generally have. I take from Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young that the individual and the group are not very separable. An attack on a group is an attack on an individual, and an attack on an individual is an attack on a group. I don’t think this dramatically challenges Mills’ project in any way, except maybe making it sound a little less liberal.
When I read liberal philosophy, I find an incredibly diverse, rich, and interesting set of ideas with real applicability to today. Despite all his problems, Rawls can be relevant to our modern conversations. Take, for example, this footnote in Political Liberalism:
That there are doctrines that reject one or more democratic freedoms is itself a permanent fact of life, or seems so. This gives us the practical task of containing them—like war and disease—so that they do not overturn political justice.
Liberalism is flawed, but deeply fascinating to me. If a small collection of three books and a few essays and podcasts can generate all this, then I’m excited to learn more about the tradition.