I just got around to reading Bruce Ackerman’s 1994 paper “Political Liberalisms,” and I wish I’d gotten to it sooner. It contains a splendid rant against Rawls’ stupid “closed society” assumption and some congenial speculation about the direction liberal progress might take:
It is true, of course, that we are a long way away from world federalism. Over the next generation, progress toward this distant goal will come, if it comes at all, at the level of regional federation. The most important struggle will be over European union. If the Europeans conquer the nationalistic madness of the twentieth century, and create a federal union, an even more expansive federation may not look so crazy to the next generation. If the Europeans fail, political liberalism is in for another age of anxiety.
This is, if you like, an unfashionably Eurocentric diagnosis. But Americans have an important role to play as well. We have also begun a regional project by redefining the boundaries of our free-trade area to include Canada and Mexico. If this initiative is successful, North Americans may find the political will to use it as the basis of a more perfect union-in which the free movement of goods is followed by the free movement of people and then by the construction of a political federation. This project may take longer than the European experiment in federation. But we must learn to think big.
This was 1994. It’s pretty disappointing that in the intervening 15 years Europe has done so much to unleash freedom of movement and association while North America has done so little.
Anyway, Ackerman’s claim that “we must learn to think big” is part of a larger complaint that Rawls is not utopian enough. I don’t agree that this was ever Rawls’s problem. I do agree with Ackerman that Rawls’s nationalism is an indefensible capitulation to the evidently unjust global status quo, and Rawls is in this sense an almost reactionary thinker. But the complaint to level against Rawls on this score is that he simply fails to think like a liberal at all, not that he fails to rouse us with sufficiently inspiring feats of putatively liberal utopian imagination.
So when Ackerman goes on to try to skewer Rawls for failing to really vehemently insist that liberalism demands that a strongly egalitarian conception of social justice be built into the constitution, he totally loses me. On his own terms, Ackerman manages to argue that “strongly egalitarian principles for the distribution of basic resources” are not ruled out by his favored principle of liberal neutrality. When one recognizes that complacent nationalism is flatly inconsistent with the foundational liberal assumption of the equal freedom of persons, one “thinks big” simply by thinking basic liberal thoughts about borders, citizenship, and what not. When one discovers “strongly egalitarian principles” at the end of a thought experiment about a bunch of spacefaring folk colonizing an uninhabited planet, that’s a rather different flavor of big-think, I think, and utopian in the bad way.
That said, there are some great bits in this paper, which is a good deal livelier and combative than I was expecting from the august Journal of Philosophy.