[PEN-L:32565] RE: Re: Re: John Rawls

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32564] Re: Re: John Rawls

Eric N. wrote:
> > He was not claiming that we should look at actually existing societies as
> > if they were the product of a social contract. Rather, Rawls asked "what
> > would society look like IF it was designed from scratch by people who did
> > not know what position they would have in this newly designed society
> > when it came into being." The resulting "social contract," Rawls
> > suggests, should be the blueprint of the society we should construct.
> > This society would, arguably, have no classes. This blueprint has NOT
> > guided the construction of the actual societies we see in front of us
> > (with classes, injustice, etc).

Louis P writes:
> I don't understand how you can be proposing the abolition of class
> society while still being a proponent of liberalism. Rawls's whole
> notion of redistributive justice reminds me of nothing less than
> Victorian era middle-class pieties, Charles Dickens's
> "Christmas Carol" in particular.

One point is that if liberals ever want their values (liberty, democracy, equality, etc.) to be applied in practice (rather than being mere slogans), there will have to be an abolition of classes. Put another way, the standard liberal image of society as involving an eternal conflict between "the common good" and the "special interests" cannot apply under capitalism and other class societies -- and thus can only apply with classless society. (There is some truth to the liberal/pluralist view of society in that there are a bunch of competing interest groups, but the whole game is fixed in favor of the ruling class.) What this says is that maybe Rawlsian ideas don't work under capitalism, but maybe they might with socialism.

(With Eric, I can't claim to be an expert on Rawls. His theory of justice does seem very individualistic, which goes against notions of the societal construction of our personal characters, etc.)

Jim