More on Hayek/Rawls Fusionism

by Will Wilkinson on November 16, 2004

In a comment below, Julian reminds me of Hayek’s approving mention of Rawls’s method for thinking about principles of justice. This led me to look it up again. It’s in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, p. 100:

Before leaving the subject [of 'social' or distributive justice, ideas that Hayek finds muddled and misleading] I want to point out once more that the recognition that in such combinations as ’social’, ‘economic’, ‘distributive’ or ‘retributive’ justice the term ‘justice’ is wholly empty should not lead us to throw the baby out with the bath water. Not only as the basis of the legal rules of just conduct is the justice which the courts of justice administer exceedingly important; there unquestionably also exists a genuine problem of justice in connection with the deliberate design of political institutions, the problem to which Professor John Rawls has recently devoted an important book. [Vol 2 of LL&L was published in 1976.] The fact that I regret and regard as confusing is merely that in this connection he employs the term ’social justice’. But I have no basic quarrel with an author who, before he proceeds to that problem, acknowledges that the task of selecting specific systems or distributions of desired things as just must be ‘abandoned as mistaken in principle, and it is, in any case, not capable of a definite answer. Rather the principles of justice define the crucial constraints which institutions and joint activities must satisfy if persons engaging in them are to have no complaints about them. If these constraints are satisfied, the resulting distribution, whatever it is, may be accepted as just (or at least not unjust).’ This is more or less what I have been trying to argue in this chapter.

The Rawls quote is from his essay “Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice” in Nomos IV, Justice, 1963, p. 102. Hayek follows up the citation in his as always illuminating footnotes thus:

. . . where the passage quoted is preceded by the statement that ‘It is the system of institutions which has to be judged and judged from a general point of view.’ I am not aware that Professor Rawls’ later more widely read work A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) contains a comparatively clear statement of the main point, which may explain why this work seems often, but as it appears to me wrongly, top have been interpret support to socialist demands, e.g., by Daniel Bell, ‘On Meritocracy and Equality’, Public Interest, Autumn 1972, p. 72, who describes Rawls’ theory as ‘the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialistic ethic.’

Hayek is right. Rawls, at least the early Rawls, seems to me to be nowhere near a socialist or even a continental-style social democrat. He strikes me as a fairly traditional classical liberal working to reconcile the contemporary game-theoretic conception of rational choice with traditional contractarian theorizing and Kant.

Hayek somewhat earlier cites another passage from the same Rawls Nomos essay (which I really must read!) that casts Rawls in a similar classical liberal light. Here’s Rawls:

If one assumes that law and government effectively act to keep markets competitive, resources fully employed, property and wealth widely distributed over time, and maintains a reasonable social minimum, then, if there is equality of opportunity, the resulting distribution will be just or at least not unjust. It will have resulted from the workings of a just system . . . a social minimum is simply a form of rational insurance and prudence.

Here, as in other places, Rawls seems to characterize the social minimum, the safety net, as the price the wealthier must prudently pay for the stability of the order from which they benefit. At other times, Rawls makes more of the idea of fairness-as-reciprocity as a core aspect of the sense of justice, and argues that the motivation to pay into the treasury to fund the safety net is not merely prudential, but is rooted in a more distinctively moral motivation. I think this is one of many instances where Rawls’s good, clear rat choice contractarianism comes into tension with his penchant for Kantian moral psychology.

My total baseless conjecture is that Rawls’s students and some colleagues, who were far to Rawls’s left politically, slowly drew him further left toward a more euro-style social democrat point of view. I’m told that Rawls was a model of intellectual openness, not at all dogmatic, which would make him especially prone to reciprocal influence from his interlocutors. Early Rawls’s quasi-positivist naturalism and classical contractarianism was discouraged by his milieu while his Kantianism, and especially his Kantian moral psychology, was encouraged. So he abandons the idea that the theory of justice is a part of the theory of rational choice.

Rawls’s students seem to be far more vehement in their opposition to Humean moral psychology than in their interest in the contractarian conception of a social order. They seem more interested in coming up with an arguments to the effect that we’re obliged to pay taxes even if we don’t want to (the claims of justice are rationally INESCAPABLE, dammit!) than in exploring the general nature of a theory that could justify something like taxation in terms of its role in maintaining a viable social order. They seem to have co-opted a lot of Rawls’s language, and methodological apparatus, but left most of his core contractarian logic behind.

So here’s my unanswerable question–get out your possible world telescopes: What does the late Rawls look like in a world in which he had folks like Nozick, Lomasky, and Schmidtz as his prominent students, rather than folks like, say, Scanlon, Cohen, Estlund, and Korsgaard? Does he look more like the Rawls that Hayek sees and likes?

Viewing 6 Comments

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    No.

    I think you're being to generous, and disrespectful of Rawls at once. I think he was perfectly capable of coming to his bad ideas on his own, without manipulation.

    It's natural to imagine more good in someone one admires for some good qualities they have or work they've done, but I suspect that Rawls was always pretty leftist, and that his idea of what's required for a "social minimum" was very different from yours.
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    Gil, I wasn't talking about "manipulation," I was talking about influence. People are influenced by the people they talk to a lot.

    That said, Jacob Levy tells me in an email that he thinks Rawls was always pretty egalitarian, and I'm inclined to defer to Jacob on such matters. Like I said, it was a baseless conjecture.
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    I used to write for a conservative newspaper with Alec Rawls, John Rawls's son. He always insisted (as I recall) that his father was not nearly so left-wing as we all thought - that his contractarianism was a variety of classical liberalism rather than social democracy. And when I re-read the Theory of Justice, I could sort of see where he was coming from.
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    My total baseless conjecture is that Rawls's students and some colleagues, who were far to Rawls's left politically, slowly drew him further left toward a more euro-style social democrat point of view.

    Very interesting post. First, I think Rawls actually moved even further to the left than social democracy. By the time he published Justice as Fairness, Rawls say justice as fairness is a competitor to "capitalism." I don't have the book on me so I can't give you the page number, but he seriously says something as direct as that: capitalism is inconsistent with justice as fairness, including the capitalisms of social democratic countries. The only social schemes consistent with justice as fairness are market socialism and a "property-owning democracy," though I've never been able to figure out what the latter means.

    Second, I'm not convinced that Rawls was actually the model of intellectual humility. I don't doubt he was a humble and excellent man in many respects, but it seems that he found it very psychologically difficult to deal with criticism of his work (he admits as much in one of the rare interviews he gave in his life) and perhaps even discouraged such criticism among his students. At least, this is what I've heard from two of his students who I know.
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    Please bear with me as I have only today discovered Flybottle. I skim through the above and am left feeling a need to just cry out, STOP! What are you doing, here? Isn't it enough to simply acknowledge that America has, over the last 50 years, somehow moved to an economic system operating in an environment which favors and nourishes the rich, while discouraging collective investments in others? Today the amount of wealth controlled by the top 10% of the population has grown to nearly 70%. This level of disparity has historically led to revolution or anarchy. We do not need to debate the nuances of economic literature, we need to analyze the root causes of our predicament and act to correct them. If that is what you are attempting to do, great. But I fear that, as the politicians today are saying, words, just words. We need grass roots action! We must focus on key problem areas and pressure decision makers into making changes. We must do whatever is necessary to understand and reverse a culture which, each day, becomes more polarizing, pitting one group against another with little real interest in searching for and examining the truth. We must somehow reverse a close - minded culture which immediately dismisses any new idea with platitudes, fear and anger born primarily of ignorance. We must work to create understanding and common ground upon which we can stand and begin to rebuild and stabilize America's attitudes, as well as it's economy. The current state of affairs is far from productive, to say the least. If there is a flicker of hope that things will change in January, let us fan that flame.
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    "it very psychologically difficult to deal with criticism of his work (he admits as much in one of the rare interviews he gave in his life) and perhaps even discouraged such criticism among his students"

    This is wrong. Prof. Rawls's was in search of accurate criticism. A lot of the criticism misinterprets his work. In fact, the question from this blog -- what were his politics? -- is the wrong question. Prof. Rawls was a professional philosopher who wrote with rigor and understood himself to be continuing in the tradition of classical liberalism. For Rawls, the question of how TJ fits in with capitalism is an interesting as-applied question that was the subject of many papers. He was not a polemicist adopting a philosophy to reach a political result.

    As a point of philosophy and a point of fact, TJ is completely consistent with modern Western capitalism.

    As a point of politics, a lot of lesser academics tried to make a name for themselves by twisting TJ into a political tract and then debunking the supposed tract.

    I found Prof. Rawls to be open to all criticism and to be especially grateful -- if not relieved -- to receive accurate criticism. It's lonely at the top, and it is hard to find very great criticism of his very great work. A fact he handled with some grace.

    He was, in short, polite about being misunderstood and tried to take a higher, long-run view. I am sure he would think the question of what political theory he was secretely espousing in TJ is the wrong question. He was a confidant man who could have written a direct political tract if he had wanted to do that.

    The lesson for today that he followed was generally to be polite and not complain about being misunderstood and misappreciated.

    "We are all our riches, love, and fame denied.
    I take my incompleteness with the rest.
    God Bless Himself, can no one else be blessed."

    /R. Frost, "The Lesson for Today"

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