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Review Essay: John Rawls's Last Word

Bart Schultz
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2009; 39; 107
DOI: 10.1177/0048393108328146
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http://pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/1/107

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Review Essay

John Rawlss Last Word

Bart Schultz
University of Chicago

Philosophy of
the Social Sciences
Volume 39 Number 1
March 2009 107-114
2009 Sage Publications
10.1177/0048393108328146
http://pos.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com

Although no one can deny the profound importance of John Rawlss 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 environmental justice figured in Rawlss 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 reconstructions 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 Rawlss masterpiece, A Theory of
Justice (1971), the conservative political philosopher Allan Bloom concluded
that Rawlss great work represented that sad lack of learning characteristic
of analytical philosophy (reprinted in Bloom 1991). Since Bloom was wrong
about so many things, it is scarcely surprising that he was wrong about
Rawls, whose erudite lectures on the history of ethical and political philosophy 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). Rawlss 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
Received 21 October 2008
107
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108 Philosophy of the Social Sciences

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 perspectives, 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 worknow 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 given
yearfor 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
Rawlss 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 surprising omission, given Rawlss 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 Rawlss works (see Rawls 1999). Apparently, for this context, Rawls just had too much to say.
Thus, if one is looking for a complete overview of Rawlss 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 Rawlss 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 Marxindeed, contra much cheap criticism, Rawls had
a better grasp of classical and neoclassical economics than most economists, and a better grasp of Marxist and neo-Marxist critique than most
critical theorists. The political liberalism of justice as fairness was not conceived in ignorance of these alternatives.
What is missing is, to my mind, somewhat more disturbing. It is generally allowed, even by such sympathetic readers as Martha Nussbaum, that
Rawls was slow to appreciate feminist critiques of liberalism. As Nussbaum

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Schultz / John Rawlss Last Word 109

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, perhaps, 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 constructivist
positions 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 acknowledgements, in footnotes, of the masculinism of Locke and Rousseau (pp. 127,
222). There are some more extensive remarks on Mills feminism:
I comment that Mills 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 Mills 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 on
these 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 Rawlss general

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110 Philosophy of the Social Sciences

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 Reviewor even Ethics.
(Nussbaum 1999, 426a review published in Ethics)

This work is a rich case in point, with much helpful introductory material 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 problems 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 writers 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 itno harm in thatI had to say so. Lecturing that way, I believed that
a writers 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 students time by studying
them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they [the philosophers] 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 wouldnt arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or
there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or hadnt read. (P. xiv)
The upshot is that we learn moral and political philosophy, and indeed any other
part of philosophy by studying the exemplarsthose noted figures who have
made cherished attemptsand 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 objections to the exemplarsthats too easy and misses what is essentialthough 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 cant progress and it would be
mysterious why later writers made the criticisms they did. (P. xiv)

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Schultz / John Rawlss Last Word 111

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 happened to be Rawls. But it is not ultimately a coherent position. In fact, it
invites 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, Rawlss claims about historical context instead of philosophical text
can be all too simplisticMill 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 feminismnotably Sidgwickthan Rawls had
with his difference principle. The fact that there was much harsh controversy
over 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 Mills 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 arguments as mistaken, and Rawls is in such lines simply owning up, not only to
how 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 Baiers (1991) reading of Hume, or Nussbaums (2005) of Mill. It
meant, all too often, a deafening textualist silencenot unlike that of the
Straussians, with their narrow textualismto forms of critique demonstrating 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 historical exonerations. Just as Peter Singer always found it stunning that Rawlss
theory was so blandly unconcerned with global justice, so too one can find
it stunning that nothing in Rawlss efforts to make the best of the exemplars
really suggests how deep and problematic the roots of racism and imperialism have been in the Western philosophical traditions. Is it not simple honesty to acknowledge that, for example, Kant, for all the fruitfulness of his
ideas, 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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112 Philosophy of the Social Sciences

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 history 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 posturing 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 Rawlss
approach that his treatment of Sidgwick has a fairly helpful outline of
Sidgwicks views on justice, but one entirely limited to the views Sidgwick
advanced 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 Politicsand this in
a set of lectures on the history of political philosophy, delivered by a philosopher 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 the
sense that a disproportionate amount of this books 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 lectures (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 Rawlss 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 Sidgwicks 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 Kiplings, 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 [Sidgwicks]
intuitionism . . . and elsewhere impugned when we discover that he relied on the
authority 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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Schultz / John Rawlss Last Word 113

philosophical viability or plausibility of Sidgwicks 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 example, 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 Sidgwicks works must be mindful about
the understandings of the terms involved, especially if being led to conclude
that 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
worlds possible downhill slide. In any event, it is enough if the type of critical 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 exemplars 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 Humes 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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114 Philosophy of the Social Sciences

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 University
Press.
. 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. Schultzs 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 Societys Jacques Barzun Prize in
Cultural History for 2004.

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