Review Essay John Rawls's Last Word

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John Rawls’s Last WordBart SchultzUniversity of Chicago

Although no one can deny the profound importance of John Rawls’s work in

political philosophy, which covered both an original theory of justice and

extensive work and teaching on the history of moral and political philosophy,

we are now at the point where his contributions more clearly suggest certain

historical limitations. Such topics as gender justice, racial justice, and envi-

ronmental justice figured in Rawls’s work only belatedly and in less than

satisfactory ways. Surely the wide influence of the Rawlsian revolution

should suggest that the erasures and blindspots in his historical reconstruc-

tions ought to be acknowledged and addressed, rather than avoided out of

some misguided conception of charity in interpretation.

Keywords: exemplars; feminism; gender; Justice As Fairness; Kantianism;

critical race theory; social contract; Straussianism; utilitarianism

Rawls, J. (2007). Lectures on the history of political philosophy.

Edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press. Pp. 476. $35.00.

In a famously asinine review of John Rawls’s masterpiece, A Theory of

Justice (1971), the conservative political philosopher Allan Bloom concluded

that Rawls’s great work represented “that sad lack of learning” characteristic

of analytical philosophy (reprinted in Bloom 1991). Since Bloom was wrongabout so many things, it is scarcely surprising that he was wrong about

Rawls, whose erudite lectures on the history of ethical and political philoso-

phy shaped some of the most influential generations of American philosophy

students, producing what has been aptly called the “Kantian revival” in

American philosophy (see, for example, Reath, Herman, and Korsgaard

1997). Rawls’s students, from Joshua Cohen, to Barbara Herman, to Christine

Korsgaard, to Daniel Brudney, to Samuel Freeman (the editor of this work),

have dramatically changed the landscape of political philosophy.For the better, to be sure. That Rawls was a scrupulous and illuminating

reader of many of the greatest texts of the Western philosophical canon was

Philosophy of

the Social Sciences

Volume 39 Number 1

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always clear enough to anyone who had the pleasure of knowing him, or of

reading him carefully. His theory of justice, justice as fairness, reflected a

very deep understanding of the social contractarian and Kantian perspec-tives, and of the utilitarian opposition to these, even if he tended to go in for

live argument over textual exegesis. But this new volume of his lectures—

billed by his literary heirs as his last work—now makes available in highly

polished form the historical lectures that so many talented students found so

enthralling, and it demonstrates beyond cavil that Rawls could be as Great

Book hugging as any Straussian. It is, in many ways, both more complete

than the actual lectures that he gave, and less complete. More, because it

includes a number of figures that did not always get featured in any givenyear—for example, Joseph Butler and Henry Sidgwick. Less, because it is

in many ways a companion piece to his Lectures on the History of Moral

Philosophy (Rawls 2000) and Justice As Fairness: A Restatement (Rawls

2001). The lectures that went into the latter usually served as the capstone to

Rawls’s later courses on the history of political philosophy, but this volume

only runs from Hobbes to Locke to Hume to Rousseau to Mill to Marx, with

appendices on Sidgwick and Butler. The chief point of overlap with the

Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy is Hume, and the chief surpris-ing omission, given Rawls’s fondness for calling his position “Kantian,” is

Kant, who figures in the work on moral philosophy and, famously, the

Dewey lectures of 1980, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” as well

as many other of Rawls’s works (see Rawls 1999). Apparently, for this con-

text, Rawls just had too much to say.

Thus, if one is looking for a complete overview of Rawls’s take on the

history of political philosophy, in connection with his own theory, this book

will not really serve the purpose. But it does provide a wealth of wonderful,

insightful reflection on the authors and works under consideration, and for

those with sophisticated Rawlsian interests, there is much valuable material

here on Marxism, and the utilitarianism of Mill and Sidgwick, that is not to

be found in Rawls’s other publications. Happily, this work also makes clear

what a firm grasp Rawls had on the classical political economy of Mill and

the critique of it by Marx—indeed, contra much cheap criticism, Rawls had

a better grasp of classical and neoclassical economics than most econo-

mists, and a better grasp of Marxist and neo-Marxist critique than most

critical theorists. The political liberalism of justice as fairness was not con-ceived in ignorance of these alternatives.

What is missing is, to my mind, somewhat more disturbing. It is gener-

ally allowed, even by such sympathetic readers as Martha Nussbaum, that

Rawls was slow to appreciate feminist critiques of liberalism. As Nussbaum

108 Philosophy of the Social Sciences




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put it, in her perceptive essay “The Feminist Critique of Liberalism”

(1999),

What is wrong with the views of the family endorsed by Becker, Rawls, and

others is not that they are too individualist but that they are not individualist

enough. They assume too much organic unity and harmony. They give people

too much credit for altruism and are not worried enough about the damages

of competition. For this reason they fail to ask rigorously their own questions,

namely, How is each and every individual doing? They fail to ask this, per-

haps, because they are focused on the autonomy and freedom of males, and

they want to give these males plenty of scope for planning their lives in the

private sphere. (P. 65)

Of course, in the domain of the theory of justice, these arguments have played

out in very constructive ways over the past few decades, with many feminist

critiques and reformulations of justice as fairness and/or political liberalism,

notably those of Okin (1989) and Nussbaum herself, with her version of the

capabilities approach (2006). But what the volume under review strongly

suggests is that Rawls came by the limitations of his earlier theory honestly:

his initial new and improved version of the contractarian and constructivistpositions recapitulated the masculinism of Rousseau, Kant, and so many

other classic authors. In a certain way, this volume still reflects many of those

limitations. True, in discussing the unfinished project of liberalism, Rawls

allows that “equal justice for and equality of women” is one of five reforms

“needed in the United States” (p. 12). And there are passing acknowledge-

ments, in footnotes, of the masculinism of Locke and Rousseau (pp. 127,

222). There are some more extensive remarks on Mill’s feminism:

I comment that Mill’s feminism, as we might call it, is different from much

of the more radical feminism of the present day. His feminism simply means

full justice and equality for women, and doing away with the subordination

to which women had for so long been subject. The position of women in

marriage Mill saw as intolerable. . . . Although this seems clear and perhaps

even obvious to many today, it was not so in Mill’s time. His contemporaries

thought him a fanatic on two subjects. One was the increase of population,

which he thought depressed the well-being of the working classes; the other

was the subordination of women. He was viewed as simply unbalanced onthese topics; people shook their heads and stopped listening. (P. 298)

But none of this amounts to a serious rethinking or reconstruction of these

authors in feminist terms; the commentary is strictly marginalia. And this

is illustrative of the limitations of these lectures and of Rawls’s general

Schultz / John Rawls’s Last Word 109




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approach to the subject, about which he was appropriately modest. As

Nussbaum elsewhere observed, quoting from Rawls,

Rawls wanted young philosophers to carry on “a kind of conversation with

the historical tradition that uses it as a resource to understand the present and

perennial problems of the subject.” He was convinced that the conversation

would teach them far more than the trendy conversations they might easily

have with new work in Mind , the Philosophical Review—or even Ethics.

(Nussbaum 1999, 426—a review published in Ethics)

This work is a rich case in point, with much helpful introductory mate-

rial from Rawls about his approach to the classics:

In talking about these people [the great political philosophers] I always tried

to do two things especially. One thing was to pose their philosophical prob-

lems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral

and political philosophy was. . . . Another thing I tried to do was to present

each writer’s thought in what I took to be its strongest form. . . . The text

had to be known and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form.

Leaving aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending. If I departed

from it—no harm in that—I had to say so. Lecturing that way, I believed thata writer’s views became stronger and more convincing, and would be for

students a more worthy object of study. (P. xiii)

As Rawls goes on to explain,

Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for example, that

the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they

were not, why was I wasting my time and the student’s time by studying

them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they [the philoso-phers] saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their

way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the

question need not be raised, or wouldn’t arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or

there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or hadn’t read. (P. xiv)

The upshot is that we learn moral and political philosophy, and indeed any other

part of philosophy by studying the exemplars—those noted figures who have

made cherished attempts—and we try to learn from them, and if we are lucky to

find a way to go beyond them. . . . The result was that I was loath to raise objec-tions to the exemplars—that’s too easy and misses what is essential—though it

was important to point out objections that those coming later in the same tradition

sought to correct, or to point to views those in another tradition thought were

mistaken. . . . Otherwise philosophical thought can’t progress and it would be

mysterious why later writers made the criticisms they did. (P. xiv)





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It would of course be foolish to deny that one can learn a great deal from

someone following this approach, especially if the someone in question hap-

pened to be Rawls. But it is not ultimately a coherent position. In fact, itinvites a good deal of arbitrariness when making sweeping professorial

judgments about conditions in “their day” and determining when and where

“to go beyond” the revered exemplars. Indeed, as the above remarks on Mill

suggest, Rawls’s claims about historical context instead of philosophical text

can be all too simplistic—Mill was, as Rawls himself allows, by far the most

influential intellectual of the mid-Victorian era, and he had more friends and

admirers sympathetic to his feminism—notably Sidgwick—than Rawls had

with his difference principle. The fact that there was much harsh controversyover feminism, which is still true today (in both the English-speaking world

and the rest of the world), should not be made into some complacent gloss

about the limitations of “Mill’s time,” on which Rawls betrays a more or less

Whiggish view of history, even when he is trying to be quite sensitive to

historical difference.

Moreover, these “exemplars” did not themselves think that their contexts

afforded “a way out” for bad argument; they did not recognize their argu-

ments as mistaken, and Rawls is in such lines simply owning up, not only tohow far he would go to make them look their “best,” but to what to his mind

their “best” meant. It did not mean “best” feminist reading, as in, say,

Annette Baier’s (1991) reading of Hume, or Nussbaum’s (2005) of Mill. It

meant, all too often, a deafening textualist silence—not unlike that of the

Straussians, with their narrow textualism—to forms of critique demonstrat-

ing just how much work “going beyond” the exemplars might involve.

Here feminism is only one case in point. There are many others, notably

GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) theory, critical race theory, and

Saidian critiques of the orientalist and imperialist backdrop to so many of

the exemplars, including Mill. There is not a word in this book about racism,

colonialism, or imperialism, even by way of flabby overgeneralized histori-

cal exonerations. Just as Peter Singer always found it stunning that Rawls’s

theory was so blandly unconcerned with global justice, so too one can find

it stunning that nothing in Rawls’s efforts to make the best of the exemplars

really suggests how deep and problematic the roots of racism and imperial-

ism have been in the Western philosophical traditions. Is it not simple hon-

esty to acknowledge that, for example, Kant, for all the fruitfulness of hisideas, represented a form of racism (see, for compelling proof, Bernasconi

2002)? The baseline for “making the best” of Kant should not be a polite,

patrician silence about the worst. This is not “cheap” criticism of Kant (or

of Sidgwick, Mill, Hume, et al.); it is appropriate candor, and the alternative





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is to suggest that coming to terms with the history of racism is less important

than philosophical hero worship. One can, like Nussbaum, admire Rawls

and his exemplars well enough, without airbrushing out those parts of his-tory that we really need to understand and that have so often been airbrushed

out for very sinister reasons. Surely, philosophers can learn to live with the

fact that the truth about such issues is more important than defensive postur-

ing that obscures just how much is being reconstructed, when the exemplars

are decked out in their Harvard best.

It is perhaps also suggestive of the dangers and peculiarities of Rawls’s

approach that his treatment of Sidgwick has a fairly helpful outline of

Sidgwick’s views on justice, but one entirely limited to the views Sidgwickadvanced in The Methods of Ethics, making no mention whatsoever of the

even more extensive discussions (covering international justice) to be found

in his Principles of Political Economy and Elements of Politics—and this in

a set of lectures on the history of political philosophy, delivered by a philoso-

pher famous for focusing on the basic structure of society, defending an

expressly political liberalism, and praising the classical utilitarians for their

comprehensive, more than narrowly philosophical work. The bits on Mill and

Marx are better, and the stuff on Hume best of all, but it is hard to shake thesense that a disproportionate amount of this book’s value derives from the

fact that this is Rawls, the defender of justice as fairness, pronouncing on his

great predecessors and sources. His reluctance to publish his historical lec-

tures (see p. xv) might have indicated his own fears on this score.

On a personal note, I should acknowledge that the vehemence of these

lines perhaps reflects my own indebtedness to Rawls’s work and struggles to

move beyond his approach. My historical work on Henry Sidgwick began in

a very Rawlsian mode (see Schultz 1992) but grew increasingly more critical

of that line as my archival research into the contexts of Sidgwick’s texts made

it clear how responsible readings of him had to come to terms with the themes

of race and empire, which weave through his writings as surely as they do

through Rudyard Kipling’s, albeit more subtlely (see Schultz 2004; Schultz

and Varouxakis 2005). And some of my critics have taken what is essentially

the stock Rawlsian line, putting to me, for example, the following question:

Is the reliance on the “consensus of experts” in the context of his [Sidgwick’s]

intuitionism . . . and elsewhere impugned when we discover that he relied on theauthority or expertise of a full-blown imperialist/colonizer (Seeley) and a number

of racists (Bryce and Pearson)? Or, again, do we simply have to be mindful of our

understanding of the notion of “experts” while retaining the Sidgwickian system?

It is not clear from reading Schultz how these revelations make a difference to the





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philosophical viability or plausibility of Sidgwick’s views, however much they

may change our views about the man. (Skelton 2007, 103)

The question is honest and appropriate, but the answer is simplicity itself: on

the first point, about impugning the Sidgwickian system itself, the answer is

“possibly but not necessarily.” If the reasoned interpretations and applications

of an ethical theory have been deeply and consistently problematic, for exam-

ple, by someone as intelligent as Sidgwick, that may make one want to think

that much harder about what the theory really means or entails. Beyond that,

surely any serious interpreter of Sidgwick’s works must be “mindful” about

the understandings of the terms involved, especially if being led to concludethat the way to salvage the Sidgwickian system is by using the notion of

“experts” in a very different way than he did. How is one supposed to do that

piece of rehabilitation without taking a more encompassing and critical

approach than the Rawlsian one? And obviously, Sidgwick himself would

have required a lot of cognitive therapy before seeing that this was what it

took to present his view in its “strongest form.” Indeed, he would probably

have taken such news from the future as confirmation of his fears about the

world’s possible downhill slide. In any event, it is enough if the type of criti-

cal historical work recommended above simply helps us count the costs and

understand better just what we are getting into when we converse with the

tradition. The high road of glossy abstractions can pass over too much and

leave one in a pretty embarrassing position, when the less than exemplary

particulars of a cherished exemplar’s views come to light. Sometimes, the

best conversations are also the most uncomfortable ones.

References

Baier, Annette C. 1991. A progress of sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise. (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press).

Bernasconi, Robert. 2002. Kant as an unfamiliar source of racism. In Philosophers on race,

edited by T. L. Lott and J. K. Ward. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Bloom, Allan. 1991. Justice: John Rawls versus the tradition of political philosophy. In Giants

and dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990, edited by Allan Bloom. New York: Touchstone Books.

Nussbaum, Martha. 1999a. Conversing with the tradition. Ethics 109 (2): 424-30.

———. 1999b. The feminist critique of liberalism. In Sex and social justice, edited by Martha

Nussbaum. New York: Oxford University Press.———. 2005. Mill on happiness: The enduring value of a complex critique. In Utilitarianism

and empire, edited by Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis. Lanham, MD: Lexington

Books.

———. 2006. Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.





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Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, gender, and the family. New York: Basic Books.

Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1999. Collected papers. Edited by S. Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

———. 2000. Lectures on the history of moral philosophy. Edited by B. Herman. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 2001. Justice as fairness: A restatement . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Reath, Andrews, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, eds. 1997. Reclaiming the

history of ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schultz, Bart, ed. 1992. Essays on Henry Sidgwick . New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2004. Henry Sidgwick, eye of the universe. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schultz, Bart, and Varouxakis, Georgios, eds. 2005. Utilitarianism and empire. Lanham, MD:

Lexington Books.Skelton, Anthony. 2007. Schultz’s Sidgwick . Utilitas 19 (1): 91-103.

Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Director of the Civic Knowledge Project

at the University of Chicago. His books include Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992),

Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington, 2005), and Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe

(Cambridge, 2004), which won the American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize in

Cultural History for 2004.



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Review Essay John Rawls's Last Word