John RawlsMike Rappaport

Steven B. Smith, a political scientist at Yale (boy are there a lot of Steve Smiths, and a pretty smart group they are) reviews Rawls’s posthumously published “Lectures on the Historyof Political Philosophy.”  Here are a couple of excerpts:

What Rawls calls “politicalliberalism” is his attempt to establish criteria of public discoursethat are internal to reason alone and therefore exclude controversialtheological or philosophical worldviews. The result of this procedureis to create an entirely secularized vision of society in which apurified doctrine of public reason is deemed the only legitimatearbiter of political debate. Rawls then reads this procedure back intothe founders of modern thought, none of whom ever believed thatpolitics could dispense with religion as a crucial component ofpolitical rule.

Rawls’s . . .  very modestyand lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranksof the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with hisanguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; noris he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces ofpersecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he aMichael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessiverationalism to the goals of a free society. Rawls is a philosopher forour time. His desire is to render both theoretically and practicallylegitimate the redistributivist policies of the prosperous NorthAtlantic welfare states. There is already more than a whiff ofnostalgia about this project. This is by no means a contemptible goal,but it is well to remember that this project of rationalization is one but only one way in which philosophy can be practiced.

The portion that I italicized is interesting.  I can’t quite make up my mind whether he is correct or not.  True, we live in a post Reagan and Thacher world, but those leaders left the welfare state in place.

Hat tip: Larry Solum