Political Philosophy After Rawls – Quo Vadis?
It’s Time for Mainstream Philosophy to Embrace Critical Race Theory
Carolyn Franano
What does a just society look like, and how should it be created? Liberal philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice begins by answering this question from the assumption that society is a system of cooperation aimed at the common good of its participants. Rawls conceives justice through the way in which a state’s political, economic, and social institutions distribute basic liberties, duties, and societal advantages; he calls this the basic structure of society. According to Rawls, the basic structure of society should be designed through principles of justice that are mutually accepted by its members and carried out by its social institutions. Rawls conceives what free members of society would rationally accept as just principles for regulating the basic structure of society from the so-called original position. The original position places people under a hypothetical veil of ignorance in which they are not aware of the social position of themselves or others, preventing prejudice or personal interests from influencing their desired governing principles of justice. Rawls asserts that principles of justice chosen in this situation would include equal basic liberties and an arrangement of social and economic inequalities that benefit everyone and result from fair equality of opportunity for positions of authority.
Rawls’ work is ideal theory which focuses on distributive justice and is often criticized by philosophers who focus on non-ideal theory and corrective justice such as Charles Mills, an important figure in critical race theory (CRT). Whereas distributive justice theorizes an ideal distribution of rights, liberties, and resources, corrective justice aims to rectify past and present injustice by calling attention to the non-ideal ideal nature of reality. Rawls’ conception of justice provides an egalitarian approach to creating a framework for the development of a just society, however, his distributive, ideal theory of justice fails to address the global institution of White supremacy and thus upholds the Racial Contract as conceived by Mills.
The corrective justice that critical race theory calls for is necessary for overturning the Racial Contract and creating a just society for all, not only “whites.” Mills defines the Racial Contract as a set of agreements between a subset of humans designated as “white” to “categorize the remaining subset of humans as ‘nonwhite’ and of a different moral and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled politics” (Mills, 1997, 11). This understanding of the structure of society as a system of “white” supremacy and “nonwhite” subjugation is in direct conflict with Rawls (1999, 4) conception of society as “a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it” and reveals that Rawls’ entire theory of justice is built off the false portrayal of society as devoid of a political racial hierarchy. In a criticism of Rawlsian ideal theory, Mills argues that “the ‘whiteness’ of ideal theory draws a curtain over the past and focuses instead on the depiction of an ideally just order that supposedly has the potential for addressing everybody’s concerns, transracially, but in its very metaphysics, in that a Rawlsian well-ordered society would be raceless” (Mills, 2019, 113). Critical race theory calls for a recognition and understanding of the history of structural racism to rectify past oppression, which is entirely contradicted with a raceless conception of justice.
Rawls’ (1999, 8) reasoning for the use of ideal theory in conceiving justice is that it supplies “the only basis for the systemic grasp of these more pressing problems,” those problems being “the principles that govern how we are to deal with injustice … such topics such the theory of punishment, the doctrine of just war, and the justification of the various ways of approaching just regimes.” Any aim to address the issues which Rawls is referencing here through a raceless perspective would only perpetuate the Racial Contract. In addition, Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness through the veil of ignorance might prevent people from constructing society based off of social bias, but it would also result in a failure to understand structural racism which CRT informs is essential in dismantling the Racial Contract. Rawls’ theory of justice is undermined by its racelessness and to create a truly just society, the legacy of the Racial Contract must be ended through corrective justice and nonideal theory.
Mainstream political philosophy and theory, the majority of which is written by White authors, upholds the Racial Contract by failing to address the global institution of White supremacy. Although Rawls’ theory of justice would hypothetically lead to a more egalitarian society, the racelessness of his philosophy prevents it from having any utility in advancing true justice which must entail ending White supremacy. Although Rawls’ work is important and can give society an egalitarian structure to aspire to, past and present racial injustice must be acknowledged, the time has come for mainstream philosophy to embrace critical race theory.
A Marxist Critique of Rawls
Matteo Perardi
John Rawls was an influential political philosopher whose work on justice, equality, and liberalism has significantly impacted contemporary political theory. His political philosophy is characterized primarily by his theory of a just society, in which he argues that justice is the foundation of societies and any policies and laws created in a society must be just or reformed if they are unjust. He describes a just society as one where all people have equal rights and opportunities to compete for public office and employment. A just society is also one where social and economic inequalities work for the benefit of the most disenfranchised. He argues that a shared conception of the just background structure of a society can facilitate and stabilize social cooperation, even if people often disagree on what justice constitutes. All of this sounds agreeable and foundational to how many of us understand politics today. So why then is John Rawls one of the most heavily critiqued political philosophers from both the left and the right? Here’s a leftist perspective on many problems with Rawls' arguments.
Nearly every school of Marxist thought would critique Rawls’ theory as one of bourgeois justice. Marx himself argued against the notion of a just society as something ahistorical and utopian. Marxism is a social and economic theory that is fundamentally driven by materialism and historical reflection, which is why it views the bourgeois philosophical fixation on “justice” in politics as more than abstract intellectualist theorizing with little emancipatory power. Instead of using a scientific and historical analysis of politics to reach his conclusions, Rawls instead uses philosophical discussions of justice to conclude how society ought to be run and function. Rawls and his theory fall into the Marxists categorization of utopian socialists whom Marx was heavily critical of and to whom he ascribed little value. Rawls’s theory of “liberal egalitarianism,” as it is currently called, seems to match up with Marx's (1847) denouncement of early socialists as “[mere] utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science.”
Rawls bases his philosophy on the liberal and bourgeois tradition of social contract theory. Rawls states that a just society comes from free individuals cooperating and jointly agreeing on principles of justice. From a materialist perspective both the traditional bourgeois and Rawlsian theory of social contract are inadequate at explaining the function and realities of human society. The theory of social contract relies heavily on bourgeois principles of individualism and property rights. To a Marxist, the prominence of the social contract since the middle of the 17th century to today (except for Rousseau, perhaps) has served as nothing more than a justification by the bourgeoisie of their own existence. Within a capitalist society, the social contract, rather than being the creation of free individuals’ mutual agreement is instead something easily swayed and molded by people who exert power in society. In a Marxist framework a social contract is false as the worker did not opt into this capitalistic system, has no way out, is constrained by a bourgeois notion of justice against which their material interests clash, and is forced to participate in such a system for their own survival rather than their mutual benefit. Within capitalism and liberal democracy, working class people are squeezed for profit. And if they refuse to work, they will simply starve to death and be unable to provide for their daily needs. The worker does not benefit from the system as much as the owner, and so, the idea that both are consenting parties who have the free will to refuse but don’t for the sake of helping each other is false.
A common critique of Rawls is that he often failed to engage in ideas of history and its repercussions. A Rawlsian model can be easily torn apart through the lens of orthodox critical theory as proposed by Marxists and critical race theory. Critical theory proposes the claim and assesses the result of a false consciousness in broader society. When, applied to class and race, critical race theory critiques the social contract as the supposed foundation of society when there are unspoken forms of oppression and exertion of power by one group over another which is masked behind the idea of equal opportunity. Critical theory suggests that the problems Rawls proclaims to address are empty as society has underlying social norms which will always oppress certain groups. Again, in Rawls’ theory of a just society, consisting of equal political opportunity, critical theory would identify that although the proletariat on paper has no restrictions towards political mobility and power, the bourgeois blocks such avenues of empowerment through its economic dominance. In terms of race as well, a society which claims to correct for social disparities would likewise fall short. In a society in which there is no legal barrier of entry for women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals, deeply ingrained social biases and systems still prevent such groups from being truly equal. How can a theory of an ideally just society, if carried out in an ahistorical manner, account for thousands of years of racial, sexual, and gender disparity? The effects of oppressive systems are so deeply ingrained in collective psyche and remain so prevalent in social structures and group inequalities that it is impossible to move closer to Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism without properly addressing this unjust past.
Through the lenses of both critical theory and Marxism, Rawls’s theory of a just society disappoints on the realities of the political world. Rather than building upon an ideal conception of a fully just society, one should strive to find concrete alternatives to the unjust status quo through a more historically situated, social-scientifically informed lens of a critical theory of society. Such a theory would have to identify how to achieve a society of better material conditions and greater collective prosperity. I and many others believe that Rawls' conclusions regarding liberal equality are just like his philosophical basis for them, that is utopian, unrealistic, unscientific, and ultimately falling short of both posing and answering the questions and problems that we are increasingly faced with in modern capitalist society.
Rawls’ Relevance
Fiona Fortunato
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice was published in 1971, and has retained its spot as one of the most important pieces of political philosophy written in the past century. Rawls, who died in 2002, was a former Harvard professor who had lost his religious convictions as a result of his devastating experiences as an infantryman during World War Two. He dedicated his academic career in philosophy to justifying a secular hope in the possibility of fair human cooperation. Even with his passing, his name remains in political discussions as well as in philosophical ones, as he has become one the foremost philosopher of Anglo-American liberalism. His search for the practicality of fairness in human cooperation led him to the conclusion that a perfectly just society is a practical possibility if egalitarian morality would be deeply entrenched into the rule of law.
While Rawls has remained immensely influential to liberal egalitarianism in the past century, liberalism has lost its potency and relevance in the eras that followed the 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice. The concept of a democratic state that seeks to realize political and socioeconomic equality hit harsh criticism from the emerging right leaning neoliberalism politics. The age of Reagan (1981-1989) and neoliberalism did away with much of Rawlsian-style public policy by dismantling welfare systems. Instead, the affinity for trickle-down economics increased the socio-economic divide. Rawlsian political philosophy was easy for political administrations to neglect since Rawls remained slightly vague in how to implement a system of justice that he derived on a thought experiment known as the “original position.”
In this original position individuals are meant to come to a consensus regarding certain governing principles of society’s basic institutional framework, and the environment in which they must collaborate to determine these principles ensures lack of bias. This absence of bias was represented by one of Rawls’ most famous ideas, the “veil of ignorance.” Individuals are ignorant of the social status, wealth, education, etc. of those that they represent, and they are likewise ignorant of these particular features concerning themselves. This removes the temptation that always exists in modern politics: choosing legislation based upon personal or group-specific advantage via identity politics. Rawls believes that within this environment of the original position, a consensus will be formed regarding two main principles of justice – one concerning equal basic liberties and the other concerning socio-economic equality.
The weakness of the original position is that a closed-system group of legislators will never exist in any large modern nation. Also, its idealistic principles’ appeals are met by the criticism that Rawls’ utopian aspirations have no hope to be fully implemented since bribery, corruption and prejudice characterizes the reality of politics. Thus, the opportunity to pass a set of laws ensuring social fairness would not emerge except in an overly simplified political environment.
This is not to say that Rawls’ thoughts are obsolete in our modern era. A brand of Rawlsianism emerged that was very successful, although it was skewed because its members were mostly wealthy white men of English speaking origins, hailing from Ivy Leagues and Oxford. Even in the light of its success, it must be taken into account that this group carried a narrow perspective of life experience – one that was shaped by privilege. Proclaiming a universalized concept of how to bring justice to the world without emerging from a diverse group of scholars is problematic, and likewise has added to contemporary critiques of cosmopolitan liberalism.
Nevertheless, Rawls remains relevant because his liberalism is highly adaptable to various theoretical perspectives and questions and has been a key component in building much of the philosophical architecture in modern politics. Whenever there is a philosophical vacuum after the failure of one body of thought, Rawlsianism still remains as a structural idealist model, regardless of the skewed environment in which it arose. While Rawls‘ relevance exists in tandem with valid critiques of the one sided perspective that served as the basis of his universalist theory of justice, it is important to analyze and understand his theory regardless of its shortcomings. It has become so deeply ingrained into the fabric of contemporary western political philosophy that it must not be ignored.
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. 1847, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. 1848, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/.
Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Cornell UP, 1997.
Mills, Charles. “Race and Global Justice.” In Bell, Duncan (ed.), Empire, Race, and Global Justice, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 94–119.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Harvard UP, 1999.
