I have argued that the gradual unfolding of Rawls’s thinking brought him to the verge of declaring that justice as fairness is realizable only in a liberal democratic socialist regime. The reader is entitled to ask why Rawls himself did not say so, and why, after creating numerous occasions in which it would be natural to make a declaration, he persistently refused the chance. He posed what I have called the property question in its sharpest form in the Restatement, published shortly before his death. He had already posed the question in the Guided Tour, a version of which had been circulating at least since 1989. In both, he raised decisive objections to welfare-state capitalism, the regime type he had, since 1971, been understood to have been defending. He cleared the field of all but two candidates, liberal socialism and what he calls property-owning democracy. But he says little more about socialism other than that it is as capable, ideally, of realizing justice as fairness as property-owning democracy is. Then he goes on to talk about property-owning democracy with not another word about socialism, other than to say that the issue between these two surviving candidates turns on their relative stability, and that property-owning democracy in practice might unleash destabilizing political and economic forces.
And that is all he said. But, as I have argued, the question he left hanging admits of but one answer within the system of thought Rawls had painstakingly erected and continually refined. Liberal socialism possesses all of the stabilizing essentials, and property-owning democracy does indeed, just as Rawls hinted, unleash destabilizing forces. The destabilizing forces have their source in the distinctive feature of property-owning democracy: its resolve to leave open the possibility of private ownership of the basic means of production on which all citizens depend. But, within Rawls’s system, there is no reason to take this chance, and many reasons not to. The only reason to leave the possibility of private ownership open is to have the benefit of possibly greater efficiencies if private financiers and entrepreneurs can be offered the incentive of what Rawls calls pure ownership. But Rawls is consistently adamant that the pursuit of ever-greater social wealth cannot justify putting justice in jeopardy.
It does not require a rehash of the preceding chapters, I hope, to remind the reader that Rawls’s dearest goal as a political philosopher was to deny the claims of utility in order to create a space for justice.Footnote 1 One need only recall that the most central aim of Theory was to present an alternative to utilitarianism, which Rawls took to be the dominant theory of justice in contemporary political philosophy.Footnote 2 Nor do I need to recapitulate what I have said to remind the reader that the importance of stability, that is, stability for the right reasons, and the related virtues of publicity and reciprocity, became increasingly central to Rawls’s thinking throughout the thirty-year interval between 1971 and 2001.
So why the reticence? In the third lecture on Locke, “Property and the Class State,” Rawls works it out that Locke’s view was compatible with the adoption of a liberal socialist regime (LHPP 150). As a jaunty preliminary, he remarks:
The idea of thinking political conceptions through is less familiar to us than, say, thinking through conceptions in mathematics, physics, and economics. But perhaps it can be done. Why not? We can only find out by trying.
The property question is not one that Locke faced, and in that sense working out what Locke was committed to is “merely academic.” But the property question, as Rawls confronted it, was not academic, nor is it the easy or trivial kind of problem appropriately left as “an exercise for the reader.” The problem is not easy and, far from being trivial, it is the most momentous question in the history of modern political philosophy. Millions of lives have been shaped or ended because of contention surrounding it. Did Rawls leave off because he believed he had taken the subject to a point beyond which, given the times, it could not “be fruitfully discussed” (LHPP xiv)? That cannot be right either, because Rawls in fact deliberately sets us the task of discussing it.
In the Introduction, I quoted what Rawls said about his needing coaching from Burton Dreben, to “be clear, to write forcefully and sharply, to be less guarded and muffled,” and to be less like those (unnamed) philosophers whose style was “muffled and cramped, somehow they held back” (Rawls Reference Rawls, Floyd and Shieh2000a, 426). Many readers of Rawls, sympathetic or not, would agree that such coaching was needed, and many of these might doubt that it took. The style is in certain ways consistent with the character of the man. His former student and then colleague Tim Scanlon once described him as “famously modest as a person” (Ponce Reference Ponce1999). This is consistent with his essentially Southern upbringing, in Baltimore, just south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Princeton of 1939 was still very much the “northernmost outpost of the Southern gentleman” when he matriculated, and Rawls proudly thought of himself a “Princeton man” who could smile at Harvard’s (Yankee?) pretentiousness (Rawls Reference Rawls, Floyd and Shieh2000a, 417).
Rawls extols as an ideal the person who acts “with grace and self-command” (TJ 514), but his writing evokes the latter more often than the former. Not only did Rawls’s writing style suggest that he “held back”; so did his demeanor. Rawls’s obituary in The Guardian speaks of his “bat-like horror of the limelight” (Rogers Reference Rogers2002). Ben Rogers, the obituarist, continues, “As a child, he was traumatised by the deaths of two brothers from infections they had contracted from him; Rawls later admitted that this tragedy had contributed to the development of a severe stutter, which afflicted him for the rest of his life.” Rawls was a determined avoider of interviewers. With few exceptions, he declined honors. And he worked mostly from his home in suburban Lexington, rather than from his office in Emerson Hall, a mere eight miles away. Rogers may exaggerate in describing him as “rather tortured” (Reference Rogers1999, 5), but it is fair to say that Rawls left the impression of being a man who always had far more on his mind than he was ready to discuss.
One need look no farther than his record of military service in New Guinea and the Philippines to be persuaded that Rawls was a courageous man. But Rawls was also aware that voicing advanced moral opinions could impose a personal cost while achieving little. The cost comes regardless of how correct and how, in retrospect, predictably triumphant the opinion may be. Rawls writes that because Mill voiced advanced opinions, “his contemporaries thought him a fanatic …. He was viewed as simply unbalanced on these topics; people shook their heads and stopped listening” (LHPP 298). The equality of women and population control are the topics Rawls refers to, not socialism; but the example of Mill’s reception, combined with Rawls’s innate aversion to unnecessary controversy, could have discouraged explicitness, especially as Rawls’s contemporaries recoiled from the leftish extremes reached during the late 1960s.Footnote 3 Already by the early 1970s one Harvard colleague, Hilary Putnam, had publicly resigned from the (Maoist) Progressive Labor Party, while another, Robert Nozick, was mounting a libertarian challenge to basic assumptions that Rawls might have regarded as fairly uncontroversial. Rawls’s not wanting to be careless with the literally incendiary power of ideas was no doubt another factor. The manuscript of A Theory of Justice had nearly perished in a radical firebombing in 1970, an incident I will return to in the next chapter.
Rawls’s Development and Mill’s: A Comparison
It is interesting to compare Rawls’s socialism with Mill’s in terms of its transparency and its development. Within a certain range, there are parallels. This is not the place to make a detailed comparison of Rawls’s and Mill’s specific doctrines. To do so would be illuminating and fruitful, but would require more care in expounding Mill than is fitting for a book that is not on the subject of Mill’s influence on Rawls – which was considerable – nor on the relative strengths of the two views, but on Rawls alone. I therefore borrow, at its face value, Joseph Schumpeter’s account of Mill’s socialist development, which is an account with which Rawls himself was likely to have been familiar.Footnote 4 Speaking of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Schumpeter (Reference Schumpeter1954, 531) writes:
For the sociologist of capitalism … nothing can be more revealing of the character of bourgeois civilization – more indicative, that is, of its genuine freedom and also of its political weakness – than that the book to which the bourgeoisie accorded such a [warm] reception carried a socialist message and was written by a man palpably out of sympathy with the scheme of values of the industrial bourgeoisie. J.S. Mill was exactly what is meant by an evolutionary socialist.
The following substitutions can be made in the paragraph salva veritate, that is, without altering its truth: we understand the book to be Theory, rather than Principles of Political Economy, the author to be Rawls, not Mill, and we replace “industrial bourgeoisie” with, simply, “bourgeoisie.” In Mill’s case, as in Rawls’s, it was not only the bourgeoisie who were fooled. Mill’s “admirable modesty” – indeed, his whole “judicial” habit of thought and expression – lent itself to misapprehension by Marx, who complained that “Mill never says a thing without also saying its opposite” (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1954, 531). In Rawls’s case, the obstacle is not so much a perception of “many tergiversations” as it is an accumulation of qualifications, disclaimers, postponements, and avoidances woven throughout a “strangely unpoetic mantra” (Rogers Reference Rogers1999, 1) of iterated phraseology: “well-ordered society,” “fact of reasonable pluralism,” “values of public reason,” “background culture,” and so on. These, on top of the intimations I cited in the Introduction and elsewhere, that although “some form” of socialism can satisfy the principles of justice as fairness, so can some forms of capitalism.
In both cases, there are successive writings. It would be a mistake, Schumpeter says, to take Harriet Taylor’s working up, after her husband’s death, of “exploratory sketches” that consist of “little more than critical appraisals of the French and English socialist literature prior to 1869 and of current socialist slogans” as the book on socialism that Mill would have written had he lived. Mill’s “socialism went through a steady development, the traces of which are but imperfectly discernible in the successive editions of the Principles” (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1954, 531). Schumpeter identifies four stages:
Emotionally, socialism always appealed to him. He had little taste for the society he lived in and plenty of sympathy with the laboring masses. As soon as he had gained intellectual independence, he readily opened his mind to the socialist – mainly French – ideas of his time. But, being a trained economist and thoroughly practical-minded, he could hardly fail to perceive the weaknesses of what a little later was labeled Utopian Socialism by Marx.
In this second stageFootnote 5 of development, Mill dismissed as “beautiful dreams” all but the Saint Simonian, “instruments-of-production” conception of socialism, while also concluding that private ownership of land could not be justified (Mill Reference 204Mill2006[1848 ] vol. 2, 201–203, 210–214, 227).
The third stage of Mill’s socialist development was the announcement in the preface to the 1852 edition of Principles “to the effect that he never intended to ‘condemn’ socialism ‘regarded as an ultimate result of human progress’” that had only to wait upon “‘the unprepared state of mankind’” (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1954, 532; citing Mill Reference 204Mill2006 [1852] vol. 2, xciii). Schumpeter cites the following passage in the 1852 edition as one “really amount[ing] to explicit recognition of socialism as the Ultimate Goal” (Reference Schumpeter1954, 532):
When I speak, either in this place or elsewhere, of “the labouring classes,” or of labourers as a “class,” I use those phrases in compliance with custom, and as descriptive of an existing, but by no means a necessary or permanent, state of social relations. I do not recognize as either just or salutary, a state of society in which there is any “class” which is not labouring; any human beings, exempt from bearing their share of the necessary labours of human life, except those unable to labour, or who have fairly earned rest by previous toil. So long, however, as the great social evil exists of a non-labouring class, labourers also constitute a class, and may be spoken of, though only provisionally, in that character.
A classless society – or, at least, a society not divisible into a class of pure owners and a class of workers – is plainly the ultimate goal, insofar as justice is. The final stage, according to Schumpeter, was Mill’s increasing optimism that “‘progress’ was accelerating wonderfully and that this ‘ultimate end’ was coming rapidly within view” (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1954, 532; but cf. Arneson Reference Arneson1979).
Let me summarize Schumpeter’s stages this way: (1) there is a pre-analytic ground-floor stage, in which young Mill orientates himself with respect to society as he finds it; (2) there is an analytical stage, at which the economically sophisticated Mill is receptive to but critical of utopian socialism; (3) there is a corrective stage, in which Mill completely rewrites the property-question chapter in Principles, and explicitly declares his approval of socialism as goal; and (4) there is a final, prospective stage, in which the mature Mill perceives a rapid progressive improvement in social conditions and projects this movement into the future that will survive him.Footnote 6 Rawls’s development can be divided into roughly the same stages.
The Youthful Stage: A Brief Inquiry
Mill’s education was entirely secular and he was a lifelong freethinker. His opinion of society was therefore entirely this-worldly. Rawls, in contrast, was brought up in the Episcopal Church, and was sent to Kent School, a boarding school operated by clergy of the Order of the Holy Cross, in rural New England. The posthumously published Brief Inquiry tells us a great deal about Rawls’s conception of society at the time when he was finishing his undergraduate degree at Princeton and preparing to enlist in the military, and considering whether to enter the clergy after the war’s end. In December 1942, the undergraduate Rawls wrote:
[T]he capitalist seems merely to use his employees. He treats them as so many cogs in the machine which piles up wealth for him. Hence, he seems merely to be an egoist; he seems to want nothing more than concrete wealth, bodily comfort, to which ends those he hires are means.
There is nothing uncommon here. Rawls is unlikely to have been adverting to the theory of surplus value, but he does add one of his surprisingly few citations to Kant. He implies that Kant did not grasp the heart of the matter, and he goes on:
But all the time this use of persons is justified by a tacit abuse of them. In the mind of the capitalist those persons are inferior, while he is superior. Further, the employees are not being used as means to concrete egoism, that is, to help amass large properties and estates; no, the end is not purely appetitional, but is spiritual. The capitalist takes great pride in his wealth; he loves to show it off. He likes to walk about his estate inwardly praising himself on his success. He likes to imagine his estate as a kingdom in which he is the most important figure. He keeps a host of servants not to serve his needs, but to swell the ranks of those who must obey him. All of his activities go to build up this petty kingdom by virtue of which his consuming vanity can congratulate itself. The entire activity of his life, all the feverish rushing in and out of town, all the unending worries of business, all these efforts which exhaust body, mind, and soul are aimed at this indeterminate end of silent, self-congratulatory self-worship. Underlying all this sinful striving is the egotist lie, namely, that he is a person distinct and superior. The purely egoistic sin of using other people, of turning personal relations into natural relations, is justified by the deepest of all sins, the egotist’s lie.
Lest the reader get the wrong idea, young Rawls immediately adds, “[W]e should remark that we have no particular dislike for capitalism. We are not spreading Marxist propaganda” (BI 195). By his own later account, Rawls in his teens was “concerned with moral questions and the religious and philosophical basis on which they might be answered,” but it was only with his military service that he came “to be also concerned with political questions” (Pyke Reference Pyke1995). Rawls never intended to publish the Brief Inquiry, and within the space of three and a half years he had lost the Christian faith that the Brief Inquiry was designed to expound. Not a single word of it can simply be assumed to reflect anything durable about Rawls’s opinions or worldview. But on the other hand, none of it should be ignored if it is useful in understanding his orientation toward society and subsequent intellectual development.
I want to draw attention to the distinction between “egoism” and “egotism,” as Rawls uses it in the Brief Inquiry, and his later emphasis on the distinction between the rational the special psychologies. There is an alignment that is hard to mistake. The “egoist” is one who is concerned to satisfy his appetites, that is, to pursue the natural objects of his appetites. The “egotist,” on the other hand (I italicize the first “t” in “egotist” to aid the reader), is one who denies an equal relationship to other persons. An egotist is normally also an egoist, but egoism does not inexorably tend to egotism. Rawls credits Paul Leon with the terminology, and it helped Rawls expound what he believed to be the nature of sin, and to correct the mistaken views of Augustine, Aquinas, and other theologians. They confuse sinfulness with egoism; but, Rawls insists to the contrary, the great sin is not egoism, but egotism.
On Rawls’s retelling, the Christian fathers were misled by the Greek notion that virtue is knowledge. This is correct, he says, if we think of man as an appetitive creature. Knowledge is a virtue if what you want is some object that you need to know how to achieve. “The rational” was not the term Rawls used, but he well might have. Later, he stipulates that parties in the original position are rational. They want to do as well as they can for those they represent, in terms of primary goods. With a slight amount of wedging, we can think of the primary good consisting in the social bases of self-respect as an appetitive, object-involving rather than personal-relationship-in-the-true-sense-involving good. The parties take no interest in the interests of others. But they are also reasonable. That is, they choose principles by which those for whom they choose will justify themselves to each other. Those whom they represent are assumed to want to live together justly, if they can, and not simply to live egoistically. Thus, it is the represented persons’ reasonableness, not their rationality, that makes it possible to propose principles to them even tentatively. But what if the citizens are not only egoists but egotists? Egotists not only want to get as much as they can, like egoists; they also care how much others get. “It is not enough to succeed,” as Oscar Wilde quipped, “others must fail.” Can the principles chosen stand the additional stress this kind of attitude brings into the mix?
The later division of the original position procedure into its two parts, Part One and Part Two, can be understood in these terms. In Part One, the parties are rational and reasonable, and those for whom they choose are conceived as being able, provisionally, to live by the principles chosen. But Part Two is necessary because the parties have to consider that those they represent will exhibit the special psychologies, which are much the same vices Rawls assigned to the egotist in his undergraduate thesis: “envy, vanity, pride … the perverse desire for height … [what] we may term, if we care to, Original Sin” (BI 191, 193). The question in Part Two is whether the reasonableness of the principles the parties chose in Part One can stand up to and stabilize a society of egotists – who are not merely, but may be also, egoists. The proof of the principles is in the institutions, and the proof is not complete until what we generally know is brought to bear on the question whether the institutions needed to realize the principles can handle the additional strains of commitment that egotists, as well as mere egoists, will be expected to bear.
This development lay far ahead. The key point is that the young Rawls saw the point of creation to be salvation, and saw salvation as consisting in union with other human persons in a community of mutual love. The great sin is egotism. The property question is nowhere mentioned, nor is production, nor is cooperation for mutual advantage in the mundane sense. Political questions will not arise for Rawls until he has seen combat and lost his faith. There is a long tradition of Christian socialism (see Gray Reference Gray1968 [1946]), which Rawls, even as an undergraduate, was unlikely not to have known to exist. But there is no evidence that Rawls was influenced by it or even interested in it.
Analytical Stage: A Theory of Justice
At this stage, an ideal society is no longer conceived in theological terms, as a community of believers striving for salvation through mutual love. Rawls has steeped himself in the economic literature of the time, much as Mill had done. Society is now conceived as a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage. The success of the scheme depends on the public availability of fair terms defining a conception of justice to which all members of society may appeal to settle conflicting claims to a share of the benefits produced by the scheme. It does not need a divine sanction, and would be no different if it had one.
The property question is now not only unavoidable; it is paramount. It is interesting to compare Mill’s way of approaching it.
In considering the institution of property as a question in social philosophy, we must leave out of consideration its actual origin …. We may suppose a community unhampered by any previous possession; a body of colonists, occupying for the first time an uninhabited country; bringing nothing with them but what belonged to them in common, and having a clear field for the adoption of institutions and polity which they judged most expedient; required, therefore, to choose whether they would conduct the work of production on the principles of individual property, or on some system of common ownership and collective agency.
For Rawls, the task is to choose rules on the basis of not mere expediency, but of fairness. To assure that, Rawls, like Mill, sets aside all thought of “previous possession,” but Rawls also introduces a veil of ignorance that would deny Mill’s colonists of all knowledge of their particular gifts and desires.
It is unnecessary to recapitulate here the position Rawls arrives at on the property question, as expounded in Theory. Unlike Mill, Rawls does not undertake any extensive exposition of the then-current state of socialist theorizing, and thus has no occasion to make criticisms that could lead the reader to assume that socialism was not realistic or desirable. Rawls does rule out one-party systems of all kinds as inconsistent with first principle liberties, and he also, by implication at least, rejects non-market varieties of socialism. As I recounted in the Introduction, Rawls left the unintended impression that he was friendly to welfare-state capitalism. Unlike Mill, the impression he is later concerned to correct is not one of hostility toward socialism, but of friendliness toward capitalism.
Corrective Stage: The Restatement
Let me first quote Mill’s own assessment of where he stood at the end of his corrective stage:
The only objection [to socialism] to which any great importance will be found to be attached … is the unprepared state of mankind in general, and of the labouring classes in particular; their extreme unfitness at present for any order of things, which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtue. It appears to me that the great end of social improvement should be to fit mankind by cultivation, for a state of society combining the greatest personal freedom with that just distribution of the fruits of labor, which the present laws of property do not profess to aim at. Whether, when this state of mental and moral cultivation shall be attained, individual property in some form (though a form very remote from the present) or community ownership in the instruments of production and a regulated division of the produce, will afford the circumstances most favorable to happiness, and best calculated to bring human nature to its greatest perfection, is a question which must be left, as it safely may, to the people of the time to decide. Those of the present are not competent to decide it.
It is impossible not to be struck by the similarity between this passage and those in Theory and the Restatement in which Rawls expresses his reluctance to say more. But Rawls’s question is quite other than Mill’s.
Rawls’s question, in the original position, conceives of persons as free equals who are fit to live by ideal principles, and are equally prepared to do so, whatever their actual abilities and cultural level happens to be. There is no question of unreadiness. There are strains of commitment, and burdens of judgment, but they affect all, and not merely a backward laboring class. For Rawls, the question is one of justice rather than happiness or perfection. He is only later to conclude that his account of stability in Theory relies on a perfectionist, at least partly comprehensive conception of justice and of the good, and in need of recasting. Finally, the principles of justice Rawls derives have to withstand the destabilizing effects of the special psychologies introduced in Part Two of the original position procedure. Rawls is aware already of the pressure the fact of domination places on the achievement of democratic stability. Mill, by contrast, seems complacent. For example, Mill proposes limits on inheritance as a means of apportioning award to virtue. For Rawls, limits on inheritance are grounded quite differently. For him, it is a matter of preserving the fair value of political liberty, and of reducing destabilizing occasions for excusable envy.
The last contrast I will draw at this stage is this. For Mill, the property question is for another day. For Rawls, the question must be adressed in light of a country’s level of development, resources, and traditions, but it is a question for today – that is, for us to ask now. The principles that determine how it is to be addressed are to be decided, once and for all, to the extent possible, by us, you and me, now. As I explained in Chapter 10, Rawls left the property question for us to decide, here and now, but to decide according to the guidance and within the framework of the original position procedure, Parts One and Two.
The Prospective Stage
Mill was optimistic that as the property notions handed down from the past progressively lost their hold, and the working class improved intellectually and morally, the day would come when socialism in a suitable form would be realized. Futurity would elect either some hitherto unexampled form of private ownership, or public ownership of the means of production, or perhaps some hybrid, as will appear likeliest to promote spontaneity, happiness, and perfection. Mill was not, as Rawls says, interested in propounding a system (LHPP 251), and so the optimism of Mill’s prospective stage was not tarnished with the obsessive theorist’s anxiety that all events unfold according to a predetermined scheme.
Rawls’s mind was always engaged in improving and reworking a theory of large proportion. He was also pessimistic about the practical influence of his work, and increasingly so as he neared the end of his life. Rawls’s development did not really include a prospective stage: his corrective essay, the Restatement, was published only a year, more or less, before his death in 2002. Unlike Mill, he did not have the opportunity to observe the decades unfolding after the publication of his corrected view, much less to observe the long arc of history bending in his direction.
Rawls’s corrective stage involved adjustments of various and seemingly unconnected kinds. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into 1990s, Rawls was working to recast the account of stability that he had given in Theory, to make it “political” rather than “metaphysical” or comprehensive. Simultaneously, and less conspicuously, he was reconfiguring the argument for the two principles. To achieve the latter, he reduced Part One’s reliance on the maximin principle and separated the argument into what he called the two fundamental comparisons: the first, justice as fairness versus average utility; and the second, justice as fairness versus restricted utility. All this was set out in earlier chapters. It was against this background that we must place his repudiation of welfare-state capitalism and his reluctance to declare that justice as fairness culminates in socialism.
Fetishizing the Means of Production
The word “socialism” is fraught with historical associations that, for many people, are unpleasant. The Cold War (1947–1991) encouraged journalistic practices in the West such that “‘socialism’ sometimes means little more than that a country is ruled despotically and that no political opposition is allowed” (Kołakowski Reference Kołakowski and Falla2005 [1978], 1181). The dissolution of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact did little to rehabilitate the word. The triumphant “shock therapy” the West imposed in the former Soviet states privatized the means of production: it was a humanitarian disaster, yet no regret or apology has been thought necessary. Rawls never shied from using the term socialism to designate a type of regime capable of justice. “[W]hile central command socialism, such as reigned in the Soviet Union, is discredited … the same is not true of liberal socialism[, t]his illuminating and worthwhile view” (LHPP 323). But it is a step further to declare that what is illuminating and worthwhile is also a demand of justice. And reflective equilibrium is harder to reach if the claim is that the public political culture of constitutional democracies contains fundamental ideas that can best be worked up into a set of principles that only socialism can realize.
Chapter 2 recounted the history of struggles within the British Labour Party over Clause Four of its original constitution. The issue was fundamentally one concerning whether or not to demand public ownership of the means of production. Revisionist politicians have not been alone in wishing that this term, and the baggage it carries, would go away. But Rawls is likelier to have been in mind of Marxian economist John Roemer’s complaint:
My view is that socialists have made a fetish of public ownership: public ownership has been viewed as the sine qua non of socialism, but this judgment is based on a false inference. What socialists want are the three equalities I enumerated [viz.] equal opportunity for
(1) self-realization and welfare,
(2) political influence, and
(3) social status[;]
[socialists] should be open-minded about what kinds of property rights in the MP [i.e., the means of production] would bring about those three equalities.
Rawls would have no reason to dissent from this and, as I have already noted, he cited Roemer’s book approvingly, though in a general way. Magnanimously, Rawls would have ignored Roemer’s warning that “self-realization … is a specifically Marxist conception of human flourishing … to be distinguished, for instance, from philosopher John Rawls’s notion of fulfillment of a plan of life” (Reference Roemer1994a, 11).Footnote 7 But Rawls does not share Roemer’s further view that it is not an urgent task for socialists to set priorities between desiderata (1), (2), and (3). In fact, justice as fairness can be read as an expression of the three, but in a definite lexical ordering, and Rawls’s political philosophy is, primarily, an argument for those principles standing in a definite order of priority.
As noted in Chapter 10, Roemer nonetheless goes on to advance a case for what is in essence a constitutional guarantee that the major means of production be publicly held. Rawls, for reasons I detail also in Chapter 10, has framed the property question in a way that requires the same conclusion. Of course, there will be reasonable disagreement about the precise dimension of this guarantee, especially if it is reduced to terms in a written constitution. As Cardinal Newman said in a different connection, even ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.
Staying True to the Political
The most discussed of the developments in Rawls’s thinking, post-1971, was his recasting justice as fairness as a political rather than a comprehensive doctrine. He struggled to re-center the argument in such a way that the primacy of the political values could be freely assented to by citizens who embrace religious doctrines that posit higher values than those of autonomous equal citizenship in the temporal world. Remarkably, Rawls suggests that some components of justice as fairness, the comprehensive doctrine set forth in A Theory of Justice, might “seem … and may actually be” religious, as well as moral and philosophical in the comprehensive sense (PL xliii). He does not specify which these are: he could be alluding to his Kantian conception of moral autonomy. In light of his posthumously published senior thesis, a likelier surmise is that Rawls came to recognize his 1971 conception of a well-ordered society to be too continuous with his youthful – and aggressively Christian – conception of a community of faith (BI passim). Rawls emphatically does not want a well-ordered society to turn out, under the microscope of analysis, to be a secularized community bonded and stabilized by a controversial religious conception of society.
What is society? The answer one gives to this question pretty much determines the outline and content of one’s political philosophy and one’s politics. One way to understand the trajectory Rawls’s thinking took is to contrast his changing conceptions of what society is. The young Rawls of the Brief Inquiry was drawn to – or, really, in the grip of – a conception of society as a stage on which certain virtues can be performed. The most pertinent of these is the virtue of humility. The mature Rawls conceived society less monolithically. It has a basic structure and it has a background culture and intermediate between these is an assortment of more-or-less voluntary associations. But the key idea is that society is a cooperative productive enterprise.
We reject the idea of allocative justice as incompatible with the fundamental idea by which justice as fairness is organized: the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation over time. Citizens are seen as cooperating to produce the social resources on which their claims are made
Once society is conceived this way, joint ownership of the means of production, at least at some level of abstraction, is almost presupposed. Compare this with what Rawls says of Marx: “His ideal: a society of freely associated producers” (LHPP 354). Marx’s ideal and the mature Rawls’s idea are essentially indistinguishable. It is not easy to explain why the youthful Rawls’s idea of community is comprehensive and the mature Rawls’s idea is not. I do not say there is no explanation that can be given. The point is that Rawls would rather emphasize that his mature conception of society is one latent in our shared, public political culture. The fact that it may also feature in a comprehensive view does not close off that possibility. In fact, the motivational efficacy of the political conception will, to some degree, depend on its resonance within different, incommensurable but equally reasonable comprehensive viewpoints.
Those who consider themselves to be socialists frequently adhere to socialism as a fully or at least partially comprehensive doctrine. Not all socialists do, and it is certainly possible to argue for socialism without appealing to any comprehensive doctrine. One has to admit that Rawls vouches for this, even if one dissents from the thesis of this book. Even so, points of analogy between socialism and religion are commonplace. If, like Rawls, one is trying to detach a political conception of justice from the comprehensive doctrines from which it historically derives – principally, those of Kant and Mill – then one might want to be quiet about putting forward a theory sporting, as it were, a sticker that reads “Socialism Inside!”
The Motivational Worry
One of the concerns that led Rawls to recast justice as fairness as a political rather than comprehensive doctrine was disclosed in a rare interview he granted in 1998, late in his life:
BP: [I]n your recent work … religion has become … a major focus …. What’s the motivation …?
JR: Well, that’s a good question. I think the basic explanation is that I’m concerned for the survival, historically, of constitutional democracy. I live in a country where 95 or 90 percent of the people profess to be religious. (CP 616)
By “survival” Rawls means, of course, stability – that is, survival for the right reasons. He is acutely conscious that a large majority of his compatriots are responsive to religious discourse. He had amended his account of public reason to make room for appeals to religious belief, subject to “the proviso” that equivalent secular reasons always be made available “in due course” (LP 144). His acknowledgment that comprehensive doctrines make for more effective rhetoric is already unmistakable, as his discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr. (PL 250 n. 39), and Abraham Lincoln (PL 254) merely amplifies.
In the United States, at least, the resonance of socialist ideals is far weaker than that of religious ones. A remark by Bernard Williams, speaking of himself, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, is pertinent here:
All three of us … accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it.
Parallel remarks apply to the role of Christianity in modern political consciousness. Rawls, obviously, recognized the significance of Christianity in both spheres. But it is less easy to state which way he was orientated with respect to it. The undergraduate Rawls looked to be ready to move backward in Christianity. The Rawls of A Theory of Justice went out of it. And the late Rawls seemed increasingly to have wondered whether he had gone out of it at all. Michael Walzer (Reference Walzer2013, 7–8) remarks:
For many years now, I have been worrying about what might be called the cultural reproduction of the left. [I]n comparison with the different religious communities, the secular left does not seem able to pass on to its next generations a rich intellectual culture or an engaging popular culture. The tradition is thin. I worried about this with regard to the American left and also, in greater anxiety, with regard to the Zionist left.
One could interject a quibble about the “red diaper babies,” who include Hilary Putnam and Rawls’s determined critic, Jerry Cohen, and Walzer himself. But these exceptions are beside the point.
Indeed, the problem is general …. [C]ompare[] three national liberation movements – in India, Israel, and Algeria. In each case, the movement was secular and leftist; in each case, it succeeded in establishing a secular state; and in each case, this secular state was challenged some 30 years later by religious zealots. Three different religions but three similar versions of zealotry: modernized, politicized, ideological. The leaders of the secular liberationists, people like Nehru, Ben-Gurion, and Ben Bella, were convinced that secularization was inevitable – the disenchantment of the social world. But they did not succeed in creating a rich cultural alternative to the old religion. They thought they didn’t have to do that; modern science was the alternative. Modern science, however, does not produce emotionally appealing life-cycle celebrations or moving accounts of the value and purpose of our lives. That’s what religion does, and secular leftism, though often described on analogy with religion, has not been similarly creative.
It is impossible to avoid being reminded of Attlee’s socialist Britain failing to reproduce itself. But, as Roemer (Reference Roemer1994a, 19) points out, of course public ownership of the means of production is “a rather weak concept” if it can be swept away at the next election. Constitutional entrenchment can achieve quite a lot even in the absence of life-cycle celebrations.Footnote 8 The citizens of Wyoming perform no uniform observances, for example; and yet their state is assured its equal representation in the U.S. Senate so long as the grass shall grow.
The trick is to achieve that entrenchment without destroying democracy. Wholly apart from the practical or procedural problems that form barriers to constitution making and amending, there is the more fundamental problem of popular will-formation. Rawls was troubled by the realization that his was a professedly religious people, and that his secular socialism might be without the mythic oomph necessary to reproduce itself. This, I conjecture, was why he was unwilling to take on the baggage of secular socialism, which had failed to take root in Britain – or, as Walzer points out, in India (set free by Attlee), or Algeria, or Israel, despite its kibbutzim raised from the nursery with a socialist ethic. Property-owning democracy has even weaker credentials in this respect, of course. But why declare at all, unnecessarily?
