DISQUS

GilM · 5 years ago

No.

I think you're being to generous, and disrespectful of Rawls at once. I think he was perfectly capable of coming to his bad ideas on his own, without manipulation.

It's natural to imagine more good in someone one admires for some good qualities they have or work they've done, but I suspect that Rawls was always pretty leftist, and that his idea of what's required for a "social minimum" was very different from yours.

Will Wilkinson · 5 years ago

Gil, I wasn't talking about "manipulation," I was talking about influence. People are influenced by the people they talk to a lot.

That said, Jacob Levy tells me in an email that he thinks Rawls was always pretty egalitarian, and I'm inclined to defer to Jacob on such matters. Like I said, it was a baseless conjecture.

Bob McGrew · 5 years ago

I used to write for a conservative newspaper with Alec Rawls, John Rawls's son. He always insisted (as I recall) that his father was not nearly so left-wing as we all thought - that his contractarianism was a variety of classical liberalism rather than social democracy. And when I re-read the Theory of Justice, I could sort of see where he was coming from.

Javier · 5 years ago

My total baseless conjecture is that Rawls's students and some colleagues, who were far to Rawls's left politically, slowly drew him further left toward a more euro-style social democrat point of view.

Very interesting post. First, I think Rawls actually moved even further to the left than social democracy. By the time he published Justice as Fairness, Rawls say justice as fairness is a competitor to "capitalism." I don't have the book on me so I can't give you the page number, but he seriously says something as direct as that: capitalism is inconsistent with justice as fairness, including the capitalisms of social democratic countries. The only social schemes consistent with justice as fairness are market socialism and a "property-owning democracy," though I've never been able to figure out what the latter means.

Second, I'm not convinced that Rawls was actually the model of intellectual humility. I don't doubt he was a humble and excellent man in many respects, but it seems that he found it very psychologically difficult to deal with criticism of his work (he admits as much in one of the rare interviews he gave in his life) and perhaps even discouraged such criticism among his students. At least, this is what I've heard from two of his students who I know.

Robert Parker · 1 year ago

Please bear with me as I have only today discovered Flybottle. I skim through the above and am left feeling a need to just cry out, STOP! What are you doing, here? Isn't it enough to simply acknowledge that America has, over the last 50 years, somehow moved to an economic system operating in an environment which favors and nourishes the rich, while discouraging collective investments in others? Today the amount of wealth controlled by the top 10% of the population has grown to nearly 70%. This level of disparity has historically led to revolution or anarchy. We do not need to debate the nuances of economic literature, we need to analyze the root causes of our predicament and act to correct them. If that is what you are attempting to do, great. But I fear that, as the politicians today are saying, words, just words. We need grass roots action! We must focus on key problem areas and pressure decision makers into making changes. We must do whatever is necessary to understand and reverse a culture which, each day, becomes more polarizing, pitting one group against another with little real interest in searching for and examining the truth. We must somehow reverse a close - minded culture which immediately dismisses any new idea with platitudes, fear and anger born primarily of ignorance. We must work to create understanding and common ground upon which we can stand and begin to rebuild and stabilize America's attitudes, as well as it's economy. The current state of affairs is far from productive, to say the least. If there is a flicker of hope that things will change in January, let us fan that flame.

N. Page · 1 year ago

"it very psychologically difficult to deal with criticism of his work (he admits as much in one of the rare interviews he gave in his life) and perhaps even discouraged such criticism among his students"

This is wrong. Prof. Rawls's was in search of accurate criticism. A lot of the criticism misinterprets his work. In fact, the question from this blog -- what were his politics? -- is the wrong question. Prof. Rawls was a professional philosopher who wrote with rigor and understood himself to be continuing in the tradition of classical liberalism. For Rawls, the question of how TJ fits in with capitalism is an interesting as-applied question that was the subject of many papers. He was not a polemicist adopting a philosophy to reach a political result.

As a point of philosophy and a point of fact, TJ is completely consistent with modern Western capitalism.

As a point of politics, a lot of lesser academics tried to make a name for themselves by twisting TJ into a political tract and then debunking the supposed tract.

I found Prof. Rawls to be open to all criticism and to be especially grateful -- if not relieved -- to receive accurate criticism. It's lonely at the top, and it is hard to find very great criticism of his very great work. A fact he handled with some grace.

He was, in short, polite about being misunderstood and tried to take a higher, long-run view. I am sure he would think the question of what political theory he was secretely espousing in TJ is the wrong question. He was a confidant man who could have written a direct political tract if he had wanted to do that.

The lesson for today that he followed was generally to be polite and not complain about being misunderstood and misappreciated.

"We are all our riches, love, and fame denied.
I take my incompleteness with the rest.
God Bless Himself, can no one else be blessed."

/R. Frost, "The Lesson for Today"