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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.
1 J. Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979; Practical Reason and Norms, London, Hutchinson, 1979; 2nd edn., Princeton University Press, 1990; The Concept of a Legal System, 2nd edn., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.
2 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. See also his essay collection, Ethics in the Public Domain, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994.
3 Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Commuunitarians, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, pp. 249–294.
4 Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 24.
5 Acceptable options are, however, still unavailable to them. Therefore, Raz argues that even if his outlook is basically conservative, there are limits on that conservatism. ibid., pp. 23–4.
6 ibid., p. 18.
7 J. Raz, ‘Liberalism, Skepticism, and Democracy’, Iowa Law Review, 74, 1989, pp 762–3.
8 ibid, p. 762.
9 ibid., pp. 763–9.
10 ibid., p. 771.
11 Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 167.
12 The Morality of Freedom, p. 417.
13 Ethics in the Public Domain, pp. 155–176.
14 ibid., p. 159.
15 ibid., p. 159.
16 ibid., p. 169.
17 ibid., pp. 169–70.
18 Liberalism, Skepticism, and Democracy’, p. 785.
19 Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 170.
20 ibid., p. 172.
21 The Morality of Freedom, pp. 412–29.
22 ibid., p. 417–8.
23 ibid., pp. 318, 320.
24 ibid., p. 320.
25 ibid., pp. 380–1.
26 On this point, see John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic’, in Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), The Invention of the Modern Republic, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 206–225.
27 The Morality of Freedom, p. 4.
28 ibid., p. 415.