Giving new life to an under-appreciated part of John Rawls’s philosophy
LIBERALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE 304pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95).
THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF DAVID HUME The origins of liberalism and the modern political imagination
AARON ALEXANDER ZUBIA 386pp. Notre Dame Press. $70.
IN 1994-95, I was a visiting fellow at Princeton University. I had written a book on communitarianism – a theory critical of liberalism’s excessive individualism and which affirms the importance of communal relations – and John Rawls’s conception of liberalism was my chief target. But when Rawls visited Princeton, I had a chance to participate in a small seminar with him where we discussed Part III of his masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971). Few readers (including myself, at that time) get that far in his nearly 600-page tome, but it was Rawls’s favourite part. To my surprise, Part III answered almost all the challenges that communitarian critics directed at the book. Drawing on insights from psychology and philosophy, Rawls shows that loving families, trusted friends, vibrant civic associations and a governmental apparatus that makes citizens feel valued and respected members of the political community are all necessary ingredients that lead people to develop a sense of justice. A good political system, he argued, thereby promoted soulcraftthe education of individuals so that they acquire the virtues of reciprocity, freedom and fairness and do not feel the force of corrosive emotions such as envy and resentment.
For me, it was a transformative experience, not just because of the theory, but also because of the man. Rawls had an otherworldly gentleness and he seemed almost entirely free from ego. I lost the motivation to pursue my studies in communitarianism, not to mention criticism of Rawls himself. I moved to Asia and devoted my academic career to the study of Chinese political theory.
A Theory of Justice sold well, but I don’t think it had the same transformative experience for most of its readers outside academia. One reason is that Rawls’s next book, Political Liberalism (1993), rejected the theme of political soulcraft that had featured in Part III of A Theory of Justice. In the later book, he instead defended the more modest goal that people should live up to the political ideal of what it means to be a just citizen and dropped discussion of the more comprehensive ethical ideal of what it means to be a liberal person. Rawls argued that what he termed “justice as fairness” – a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and co-operating in an economic system that benefits the least advantaged – is a virtue meant to inform a public sphere marked by a diversity of world views rather than the way we think about the self. Another reason, frankly, that the book
