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In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Patrick Neal
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Extract

The relationship between Kant and Rawls is apparently an obvious one; Rawls himself acknowledges the Kantian foundations of his approach to questions of justice and political right, and identifies the precise points at which his theory departs from that of Kant. This essay attempts to show that when one examines those points of departure carefully, they turn out to point not merely away from Kant, but directly and inexorably toward the account of political right given by Rousseau in The Social Contract. The essay argues that it is impossible to fully understand Rawls' theoretical project until one sees the (unstable) position it occupies between the Kantian and Rousseauian accounts of political right. Moreover, it argues that the theoretical project undertaken by Rawls, that of revising the Kantian conception of autonomy in an attempt to show how it could be coherently “expressed” politically, was actually undertaken and “completed” by Rousseau — though with ironic, and unsettling, results.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , Summer 1987 , pp. 389 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1987

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References

Notes

1 The works upon which I draw in this discussion include A Theory of Justice and Rawls's main articles since 1971 elaborating the theory worked out there. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; “Reply to Alexander and Musgrave,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 88, no. 4 (1974): 633–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Basic Structure as Subject,” in Values and Morals, ed. Goldman, A. I. and Kim, J. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Rediel Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 47–71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “A Well-Ordered Society,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fifth Series, ed. Laclett, P. and Fishkin, J. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), pp. 6–20 Google Scholar; “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory; The Dewey Lectures, 1980,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (1980): 515–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Rawls, , “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” pp. 516–17Google Scholar, and also p. 534 where the role of a “conception of the person” is distinguished from that of a “theory of human nature.”

3 Ibid. p. 517.

4 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 251.Google Scholar

5 Ibid. p. 256.

6 Ibid. p. 255.

7 Ibid. 255–56.

8 Ibid. p. 256.

9 Ibid. p. 257.

10 Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 14.Google Scholar

11 In “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Rawls allows that “moderate scarcity may possibly be overcome or largely mitigated …” (p. 539)Google Scholar, but argues that the circumstances of justice would still obtain due to “deep and pervasive differences of religious, philosophical, and ethical doctrine.” Justice as fairness, he grants, does presuppose the existence of such “non-materially based” differences, but it is hard to see how this could be said to be an ideologically biased presupposition.

12 To the extent that one takes the “Kantian interpretation” of justice as fairness to be the preferred one, many of the early critical points leveled against Rawls are undermined. An interesting speculative question is whether Rawls's work would have attracted the amazing amount of attention it originally did had he stressed the Kantian interpretation from the outset.

13 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 257.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. p. 257.

15 See Kant, Immanuel, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 41–53.Google Scholar

16 Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” pp. 552–53 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

17 Rawls, John, “A Well-Ordered Society,” p. 9.Google Scholar

18 Rawls, John, “The Basic Structure as Subject,” p. 68 Google Scholar; See also “A Well-Ordered Society,” pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

19 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, The Social Contract, ed., Sherover, Charles (New York: Meridian Books, 1974), bk. 1, chap. 8, p. 31.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid, p. 33.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 31.

25 Ibid.

26 Reiss, Hans, “Introduction,” Kant's Political Writings, p. 11.Google Scholar

27 Korner, Stephen, Kant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 150.Google Scholar

28 Rawls, , Theory of Justice, p. 264.Google Scholar

29 See, for example, Pateman, Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 22–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Kant, Immanuel, “On the Common Saying, ‘This May be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice,’”Google Scholar Reiss, , Kant's Political Writings, p. 79.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., p. 79.

32 Ibid., pp. 79–80.

33 Ibid., p. 79.

34 These are “… that a certain class of subjects must be privileged as a hereditary ruling class …” and (2) a law “.… which declares permanently valid an ecclesiastical constitution” (ibid., p. 85).

35 Ibid., p. 85.

36 Ibid., p. 85.

37 Rousseau, , Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 69.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 63.