I. Introduction
As a “peculiarly self-reflective discipline,” controversies over the nature of political philosophy run long and deep.Footnote 1 Answers—including the label one uses (philosophy or theory) and one's home department—tend to look very different in different places. Distinctive schools of thought have long been associated, however imperfectly, with different institutions—from the critical and historical “schools” of Frankfurt, Cambridge, or Berkeley, to the analytic strongholds of Oxford and Princeton, and American Straussians in their “West,” “East,” and “Midwest” varietals.Footnote 2
In this sectarian state of the discipline, the tendency to mistake one's parish for the world proceeds apace.Footnote 3 All seem to agree, however, that John Rawls's A Theory of Justice transformed the discipline in 1971 by introducing something new: a resolutely contemporary, normative and analytic approach to political philosophy, one that challenged more traditional textual and contextual approaches to the history of political thought.Footnote 4 While many of these divisions pre-dated A Theory of Justice's publication, this continued factionalism reflects, in part, a reaction against the perceived hegemony of “Rawlsianism” in the discipline, both in its principles and in its personnel.Footnote 5
The irony of reading Rawls as we might read Hobbes or Hegel—that is, as just another canonical figure in the history of political thought—has not been lost. As one eminent political philosopher at the Historical Rawls conference held in Oxford in 2017 described her excitement as a graduate student in the 1990s, “One read Rawls to avoid reading history.” Resistance to historicizing Rawls on the part of those committed to seeing things his way is therefore understandable. To treat him as simply one more figure in “the tradition,” to be contextualized and criticized accordingly, would seem to undermine the decisiveness of his break with it. It suggests that his texts and tools are not enough, that they—and our supposed emancipation from what came before—come with their own encumbrances that only historical awareness can bring to light.
Nevertheless, that Rawls himself was a remarkable traditionalist is well known.Footnote 6 A Theory of Justice appealed routinely to the “tradition” of political philosophy, invoking canonical thinkers and texts, while in lectures Rawls argued consistently that political philosophy was itself an essentially “traditional” pursuit, in the remarkable continuity of concepts, texts and “basic questions” over time.Footnote 7 While Rawls's critics might take such appeals as evidence of the continuing cultural chauvinism of analytic political philosophy,Footnote 8 his admirers might dismiss them just as easily as unreflective conformity to unstated genre conventions in the discipline, rather than expressive of any historical or methodological interest in “the tradition of political philosophy” as such.
This article suggests, however, that there is more to Rawls's constant and self-conscious fidelity to “tradition”—including what he meant by it, and how he understood himself in relation to it over the course of his career—than meets the eye. It examines how Rawls himself made use of historical authors and examples, including the “enduring” and “classic” texts of Western political philosophy, in light of the shifting appeals to tradition across his works.Footnote 9 Drawing on his archive at Harvard, I argue that Rawls's fascination with tradition arose out of his own pedagogical engagement with the debate around the “death” of political philosophy in the 1950s—a debate that not only left its mark on A Theory of Justice, but continued to shape his thinking through Political Liberalism (1993) and beyond. This engagement culminated in Rawls's extraordinary assessment of the irenic “roles” of political philosophy and its various traditions in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), completed with assistance from Erin Kelly and published the year before his death.Footnote 10
The following survey is not exhaustive. Still, it should accomplish three things. First, it should correct the persistent misimpression shared by political philosophers and historians alike as to the un- or antihistorical nature of Rawls's own political philosophy. Second, it should demonstrate how viewing Rawls himself as a historical figure can illuminate important, but hitherto neglected, aspects of his thought. Third, it attests to the significance of Rawls's teaching—beginning with his earliest lectures on social and political philosophy at Cornell in the late 1950s, and throughout his long-running Harvard survey courses on the history of moral and political philosophy—to his shifting views on the tradition of political philosophy, what it was and how to teach it, that culminated in the increasingly contextually minded and insistently irenic approach on display in his later works.Footnote 11
Rawls took his teaching seriously, and much work still remains to be done on this aspect of the historical Rawls.Footnote 12 The published versions of his lectures on the history of moral and political philosophy drew exclusively from courses taught at Harvard in the 1980s and 1990s;Footnote 13 however, among the treasures of the archive are successive versions of syllabi and lectures revised from year to year, beginning in the 1950s. Little scholarly attention has been paid to these early lectures, including those Rawls gave as an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell (1953–9) and MIT (1960–62) before his return to Harvard permanently in 1962.Footnote 14 While we must be careful not to impose a false coherence on the whole, the connection between Rawls's teaching and the development of his thought cries out for further exploration—not least in its impact on his successive reformulations of the “roles” of political philosophy.
As we shall see, looking to his teaching offers insight into how Rawls himself might have read “John Rawls” as a canonical figure in the history of political thought. He spent a lot more time contemplating that question than one might think.
II. Death of a discipline
To understand the end, one must return to the beginning. From the start, as Sophie Smith and Nikhil Krishnan highlight in their contributions to this forum, the transatlantic debates about the state of the discipline that set the stage for A Theory of Justice's reception focused on the health of the tradition of political philosophy, as a continuous thread of engagement between the “great” (always male) thinkers of the (always Western) past. In 1956, Peter Laslett proclaimed that “for three hundred years of our history there have been such men writing in English”— i.e. philosophers concerned with “political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality.”Footnote 15 But now, he lamented, “the tradition has been broken … for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.” The culprits were British philosophers: “Logical Positivists” like “Russell and Wittgenstein, Ayer and Ryle who convinced philosophers that they must withdraw” to examine “their logical and linguistic apparatus.” The resulting reexamination “threatened to reduce the traditional ethical systems”— hence political philosophy itself— “to assemblages of nonsense.”Footnote 16 “It was perhaps never intended by the analytic philosophers of the early twentieth century that a traditional area of philosophic inquiry should be permanently closed,” Laslett conceded. But closed it was, at least for the time being.Footnote 17
Not everyone took the news of political philosophy's demise lying down. In his 1959 address to the Political Studies Association, John Plamenatz insisted that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.Footnote 18 While he accepted much of the positivists’ case against the tradition, Plamenatz insisted that political philosophy or theory (at home among social scientists at Nuffield College, Oxford, he used the terms interchangeably) was very much alive and well as an essential, human pursuit—especially in the twentieth century, when “sophisticated” man could no longer rely on “primitive” prejudice to supply his values for him.Footnote 19 The “great thinkers” were thus worthy of study, he further explained in Man and Society, “not [as] a stock of ideas sufficient for [our] purposes. They are inadequate for all kinds of reasons” (including their failure to grasp the fact/value distinction).Footnote 20 Yet “we have still to come to terms with these thinkers of the past, to make up our minds about them if we are to learn to think more clearly than they did.”Footnote 21 Breaking with the tradition was impossible: “there can be no real turning of the back on these old theories, whose ideas and assumptions still permeate our thinking about society and government, whether we know it or not.”Footnote 22
Plamenatz's largely forgotten contribution to these debates should alert us to the presence of yet another “Oxford” tradition to which the young John Rawls might have been exposed in the early 1950s.Footnote 23 Still, for Plamenatz, political philosophers needed to understand their debt to these traditional political theories primarily in order to supersede them. The political philosopher's study of the tradition could therefore not be a matter of “mere history”: “Those who say that to understand a theory we must understand the [historical] conditions in which it was produced … speak as if, to understand what a man is saying, we must know why he is saying it. But this is not true. We need understand only the sense in which he is using words.”Footnote 24 Thus, even if “to understand why Machiavelli or Hobbes or Rousseau wrote as he did, we must know something of social and political conditions in their day … this does not, I hope, mean that whoever discusses their theories must also discuss these conditions and controversies. Is there to be no division of labour?”Footnote 25
Plamenatz would go on to succeed Isaiah Berlin as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford in 1967. Today, however, his naively textualist and supersessionist approach to the history of political thought is remembered mainly among Quentin Skinner's chief targets in “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.”Footnote 26 Drawing on Austin and Wittgenstein, Skinner declared that political theorists like Plamenatz were the true nonsense peddlers in suggesting that the “sense” of a historical text could be understood independently of its discursive context. Skinner's arguments have been highly influential, and today it is often assumed that “analytic” and “historical” approaches to political philosophy must be in tension, even antagonistic.Footnote 27 Yet this mistakes matters rather badly.Footnote 28 In fact, the methodological broadsides that poured out of Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s dovetailed nicely with the burgeoning self-understanding of analytic philosophers that political philosophy, as applied philosophy, had a history in the same way physics or geology did—a history mainly of error, false starts, and dead ends.Footnote 29
For both sides, then, the study of the tradition of political philosophy might therefore proceed, but as a properly historical subject that served mainly to highlight the contemporary irrelevance of the so-called “Greats.” It is no accident that Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding” began in 1968 as a conference paper, also addressed to the Political Studies Association, entitled “On the Unimportance of the Great Texts.”Footnote 30 Nearly a decade after Plamenatz's rejoinder to Laslett, Skinner effectively radicalized the former's division of labor by eliminating the middle ground. Historians should historicize, philosophers philosophize, with the “tradition” of political philosophy squarely within the remit of the former. Their problems were not our problems. The time had come to “do our thinking for ourselves.”Footnote 31
III. A Theory of Justice
Published two years later, A Theory of Justice appeared straightforwardly to accept Skinner's division of scholarly labor. The purview of political philosophy, as Rawls presented it in that work, was entirely presentist. Through the device of the original position, one could derive a conception of justice “that can serve as a standard”—an “Archimedean point”—from which to “appraise institutions and [guide] the overall direction of social change.” The only relevant authority was that of reason freely exercised, albeit suitably and sufficiently constrained.Footnote 32
As Smith notes in her essay, from the beginning readers were struck by the ambition of Rawls's theory as a break with tradition.Footnote 33 Yet Rawls—like Robert Nozick, who presented his own libertarian theory of justice as an extension of “Lockean” natural rights—was evidently eager in A Theory of Justice to insist that his work did not make any such break; rather, he depicted its arguments as emerging from within various “traditions” in the history of political philosophy. This included, most obviously, the “contractarian tradition” and “the familiar theory … found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.”Footnote 34 By pitting this against the “dominant utilitarianism of the tradition,” and the “classical doctrine” espoused by Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls conveyed to his readers a sense of his project's civilizational stakes.Footnote 35
Rawls's determination in A Theory of Justice to engage with philosophical arguments as attached to historical authors could sometimes produce strange results—most notably, in his decision to dub the preference for more complex and completely developed capacities (like chess) over simpler ones (like checkers) the “Aristotelian principle.”Footnote 36 Elsewhere, he took historical thinkers to task for empirical errors, as well as philosophical ones, as with Locke and Rousseau's unnecessarily restrictive grants of toleration: “Presumably a greater historical experience and a knowledge of the wider possibilities of political life would have convinced them that they were mistaken.”Footnote 37
More often, however, A Theory of Justice treated historical authors with deference in the course of linking their projects with Rawls's own. Neglected features of the text suggest that he was eager, even anxious, to establish his continuity with the greater tradition of political philosophy. For example, Rawls originally intended A Theory of Justice to open with an epigraph from Rousseau's Émile: “Those who expect to treat moral and political philosophy as separate things will never understand anything about either.”Footnote 38 Introduced in the first full manuscript of 1969, it was “killed” only at the pre-proof stage.Footnote 39
Still, the strangest example came in Chapter 1, where Rawls insisted that although his “approach [to justice] may not seem to tally with tradition,” this was a mistake:
The more specific sense that Aristotle gives to justice … is that of refraining from pleonexia, that is, from gaining some advantage for oneself by seizing what belongs to another, his property, his reward, his office and the like … Now such entitlements are, I believe, very often derived from social institutions and the legitimate expectations they give rise to. There is no reason to think that Aristotle would disagree with this, and certainly he has a conception of social justice to account for these claims.
Therefore, Rawls concluded, “there is no conflict with the traditional notion.”Footnote 40
The published footnote to this passage claimed to “follow the interpretation” of Gregory Vlastos. Rawls first introduced this discussion in December 1969 after reading a recent article by Vlastos in the Journal of Philosophy.Footnote 41 There, Vlastos defined Aristotle's “more specific sense” of pleonexia as “gaining some advantage for oneself by grabbing what belongs to another—his property, his wife, his office, and the like—or by denying him what is (morally or legally) due him.”Footnote 42 While the plagiarism may have been an inadvertent consequence of Rawls's note-taking process, his amendments to Vlastos's wording—changing “grabbing” to “seizing” and “wife” to “reward”—suggest a deliberate intention to render Aristotle's ancient and alien conception more familiar and palatable to modern audiences.Footnote 43
Plagiarism aside, the passage is strange. Whether or not the claim is plausible, why does it matter whether Rawls's conception of justice “tallies with tradition?” What does the agreement of Aristotle, of all people, add? Certainly, the unnecessary pains Rawls took in A Theory of Justice to claim continuity with the tradition made it easier for early critics to dismiss his engagement as glib, at best, and arrogantly clueless at worst. Allan Bloom's vicious 1975 review, “Justice: John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” accused Rawls of dressing his theory up in the authority of the Western tradition without recognizing that “the Tradition” might have something to teach him.Footnote 44
Bloom's scolding subtitles proclaimed Rawls's “misuse” of Aristotle and Kant, and he accused Rawls of offering nothing more than a post hoc rationalization of “what is wanted here and now” rather than a genuinely philosophic inquiry.Footnote 45 A Theory of Justice's success should thus be attributed solely to the fact that it was “the most ambitious political project undertaken by a member of the [analytic] school currently dominant in academic philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world”—“hence in method and substance it fits the tastes of the times.”Footnote 46 Coming from Bloom, of course, this was not a compliment. “A more appropriate title,” he concluded, would have been “A First Philosophy for the Last Man.”Footnote 47
IV. Breaking with tradition
Bloom's review demonstrates how quickly A Theory of Justice would be coopted into the academic culture wars in the United States, in which an emerging Straussian faction defined itself against its enemies as the guardians of “the Tradition.”Footnote 48 Yet A Theory of Justice's ahistorical approach to the past recalls nothing more than Skinner's Cambridge colleague John Dunn's 1968 description of the “weird tendency of much writing” in the history of political thought to serve as a chronicle “of what propositions in what great books remind the author of what propositions in what other great books.”Footnote 49 Only here, the other great book in question was Rawls's own.
But why did Rawls bother? Certainly, efforts to link his philosophical project with that of Aristotle or Locke represented a striking departure from his earlier works.Footnote 50 In his undergraduate thesis, written at Princeton in 1942, Rawls suggested that a radical “repudiation” (as he put it) of tradition must be the beginning of his philosophical inquiry. When it came to the wisdom of the ancients, “the sooner we stop kow-towing to Plato and Aristotle, the better.”Footnote 51 Of course, the young Rawls went on to clarify that their authority must be rejected for the sake of something better: “an ounce of the Bible is worth a pound (possibly a ton) of Aristotle.” Still, his openness even to the authority of Scripture would not last long.
When Rawls returned to Princeton after the war as a PhD student in philosophy,Footnote 52 his loss of faith in Christian scripture did not lead him to reevaluate the authority of the philosophical tradition. In his doctoral dissertation, “A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge,” he argued that the “stability” of moral judgments—by which he meant “a certain constancy from time to time and from person to person”—counted in their favor as material for theoretical reconstruction and testing by ethicists.Footnote 53 Still, philosophers enjoyed no advantage in discovering or accessing moral truths, and should be regarded as valuable interlocutors only insofar as their judgments agreed with those of other “reasonable men.”Footnote 54 In a footnote, he cited the Oxford jurist (and baronet) Frederick Pollock's 1880 comments on Spinoza's lack of “originality” approvingly: “The scientific discussion and explanation of morality is the task of philosophers. But morality itself is made by the community of right-minded men, whether they happen to be philosophers or not … the philosopher has little or no advantage over any of the other right-minded men beyond the habit of expressing himself in accurate language.”Footnote 55
On this view, morality was a matter of “common sense,” and common sense was “common” in that it transcended history. In the thesis, Rawls thus put the insights of his own philosophical project on a par with, and subjected them to the authority of, the abstract, transhistorical community of “reasonable men.” Accordingly, “the important theories proposed in the past should be known,” insofar as it was “highly possible that some one of them, or some combination of them, may be correct after certain adjustments and changes have been made.”Footnote 56 Yet the present cohort of reasonable men would necessarily be privileged in this process, as those in a position to judge of the “reasonableness” of their predecessors.
The same ahistorical orientation was reflected in his earliest articles. Rawls's first, “An Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics” (1951), was a consummate work of analytic philosophy in both its systematic argumentation and its lack of footnotes, or indeed any references to other authors, living or dead. In the articles that followed, however—“Two Concepts of Rules” (1955), “Justice as Fairness” (1957, expanded in 1958), and “The Sense of Justice” (1963)—Rawls's public orientation to the tradition changed markedly, with the distinctively conciliatory approach on display in A Theory of Justice coming into view.
This Rawls was an energetic footnoter, generous in his acknowledgment of the parallel thoughts, contributions, and criticisms of others.Footnote 57 Beginning with “Two Concepts of Rules,” references to canonical thinkers—above all, “the classical utilitarians,” whom he identified as Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick—were front and center, both in the notes and in the text itself.Footnote 58 Published three years later, the original “Justice as Fairness” reflected an incipient historical awareness and organization by pitting this utilitarian “tradition” against Rousseau and Kant as representatives of a rival social-contract tradition, and tracing the latter in a footnote all the way back to the Sophists and Book II of the Republic.Footnote 59
The public shift between 1951 and 1955 in the direction of emphasis—that is, of the present cohort of “reasonable men” over the past, and vice versa—is striking. Although Laslett and others presented analytic ahistoricism as a British disease, the impetus for Rawls's initial shift towards the history of political philosophy was evidently his 1952–3 Fulbright year at Oxford, during which Rawls attended seminars taught by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire. Here again, we are reminded of the importance of an alternative “Oxford” tradition to that of analytic philosophy. Archival papers from that year reveal the first traces of Rawls's direct engagement with canonical authors as a source not only of historic “common sense,” but also of philosophic insight and inspiration. In addition to a short essay on Hobbes on taxation, Rawls compiled a list of other “classical texts on taxation and justice,” including Hobbes, Smith, Bentham and Sidgwick, with additional critical notes on utilitarianism and folders on Hume and Mill's views on justice.Footnote 60 While there is no record of a direct encounter with Plamenatz, Rawls was evidently indebted to his classic study on “The English Utilitarians” for his understanding of the dramatis personae of that tradition.Footnote 61
Similarly, although Rawls's unpublished “Outline of a Constitution of Discussion”—identified as the “first form of the O[riginal] P[osition]” in a later insert—presented appeals to authority as violations of the principle of the “the equal chance of winning,”Footnote 62 Rawls now insisted that the history of philosophy had an important verificationist role to play. The principles of justice generated by a properly constituted discussion must now be assessed by comparison with “the principles which have had a long history in moral discussion and which have gone, for a long time, under the name of principles (maxims) of justice.”Footnote 63
The idea that continuity with tradition and historical antiquity might count in a theory's favor would, of course, drive A Theory of Justice's problematic discussion of pleonexia, which demonstrated the risks of shoehorning agreement with a past author at the expense of reckoning with a truly alien view. For Rawls, it remained the case that when looking to the past, a historical moral argument might be attractive or alien, but not both.Footnote 64 His apparent success in reconciling his conception of justice with Aristotle's would thus have come as a relief. His initial attempt in his 1953 “Justice as Fairness” seminar, taught in his first semester on the faculty at Cornell, had ended less happily. He confessed to students that “when we come to Aristotle we will want to compare [our] notion … with his notion” of the “grasping man … moved by pleonexia” but that “the notion [of injustice] as we have worked it out is very different from this.”Footnote 65 Rawls then attempted to explicate pleonexia as a matter of a profit-seeking will—as with a bad neighbor planting trees to take advantage of rising real-estate values. Aware that he was making a hash of the Nicomachean Ethics, Rawls insisted that “no criticism of Aristotle is intended. He knew the Greek usage better than I do, to put it somewhat mildly.”
For all of his increasing interest in the tradition, then, in the early 1950s Rawls retained the ordinary language philosopher's attention to usage. While Aristotle's Greek proved an insuperable hurdle, Rawls was less charitable toward Mill, who functioned in the seminar as the premier expositor of utilitarianism and had the even greater misfortune to speak English. As such, Rawls took him to task for extending the concept of injustice too far by including ingratitude, breaking friendships, etc. Mill “was in error” in doing so, for “we would not say of a man who did any of these things that he was being unjust … we would use such words as untrustworthy, ungrateful, etc. But these are very different.”Footnote 66
Why Mill should be accused of philosophical error on the basis of mid-twentieth-century English usage is unclear. Still, Rawls's ahistorical high-handedness in his early teaching was consistent with his published works, in which his increasing engagement with “the tradition” remained largely secondhand.Footnote 67 Only with “The Sense of Justice” (1963) did Rawls go to the text itself, Rousseau's Émile.Footnote 68 These appeals came chiefly when Rawls wanted to point out similarities with his own arguments—or, more often, historical authors’ mistakes. Mill, we are told, failed to “grasp the significance” of his stipulation that the advantages of some could not outweigh others’ disadvantage,Footnote 69 while Hobbes “would have improved his argument … had he appealed to the duty of fair play”;Footnote 70 similarly, “Kant was not far wrong when he interpreted the original contract merely as an ‘idea of Reason’; yet he still thought of it as a general criterion of right and as providing a general theory of political obligation.”Footnote 71 And so on.
V. Teaching the tradition
Rawls's early published and pedagogical efforts thus show little evidence of reflection on the uses to which he was putting historical authors and arguments in his political philosophizing. But that changed decisively around 1958, when Rawls was first called upon to teach a survey course on political philosophy to Cornell undergraduates.Footnote 72 At this point, his lecture notes begin to reflect the familiar excitement of a young teacher, who in explaining a difficult work to his students, is forced to really read it for the first time, as well as to impose upon the syllabus some sense of narrative coherence.
The course catalog stipulated that the lectures for Philosophy 326: Social and Political Philosophy would offer “a study of the philosophical and ethical doctrines involved in such political and social conceptions as the common good, natural law and natural rights, justice and equity, tolerance and liberty. Two different traditions will be studied.” As his traditions, Rawls chose “classical utilitarianism (with Locke thrown in)” and “the holistic systems of 19th century continental thought” on the grounds that “Utilitarianism is perhaps the one system of social and political thought to which Englishmen have been attracted [with] a long history from Hobbes through Locke, Hume, Bentham, the Mills, Sidgwick, Moore, and … is still influential and important at the present time.” “Of the powerful influence in the world of Hegel, Saint-Simon and especially Marx,” by contrast, “no comment is needed.”Footnote 73
These early lectures thus not only offer Rawls's first sustained treatment of Locke and contractarian thought as a “tradition” dating back to the Crito; they also contain his earliest reflections on the nature of political philosophy, as he was in the process of figuring out how to teach it.Footnote 74 From the beginning, Rawls took pains to distinguish “political and social philosophy”—as a branch of moral philosophy dealing exclusively with normative questions (e.g. “What is the grounds [sic] of political obligation?” or “What is the justification for a skewed distribution of income?”)—from “political and social theory,” dealing with empirical questions of fact.Footnote 75 Rehearsing the familiar analytic complaint against the tradition, he noted that “the so-called history of political theory,” represented by “well-known classics such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc. … certainly mix political philosophy and political theory” together. But it was incumbent upon students to maintain the distinction as they sought to answer these questions “and arrive at the truth in these matters” for themselves: “why should we be always surveying the views of others; why shouldn't we try to work out what is right”?Footnote 76
Rawls's conviction that the history of political thought was insufficient training for political philosophy is striking—but so is his insistence that one could not do without that history, either. Rather, students must begin by situating themselves within one historical tradition or another, and by “subject[ing] it to criticism and scrutiny find one's own way to truth.” Although it may come as a surprise to later readers, Rawls defended his own starting point as follows: “I myself am a utilitarian of sorts … That is [why], I begin with a view which seems to me likely to be nearly right.” Yet the social-contract tradition might work equally well. “Certainly, in a tradition as recurrent [as that] it would be surprising if there were nothing in it, even although today it should be widely regarded as out of date and a historical curiosity”; by understanding it aright “we might make some reuse of it”.Footnote 77
Thus, beginning at Cornell in 1958 and ending with his retirement from teaching at Harvard in the 1990s, Rawls would organize his survey courses teleologically, presenting historical material as following an inexorable trajectory culminating with his own works in progress. A choice made, perhaps, from efficiency or institutional culture had the effect of presenting Rawls's own thinking about justice as continuous with an unbroken tradition of political philosophizing. This approach remained consistent as Rawls went on to teach versions of the same survey course in almost every year of his teaching life—at Cornell (1958–9), then as a visitor at Harvard (1959–60), then at MIT (1960–62), before returning to Harvard permanently. After Cornell, however, Rawls would jettison the “two-traditions” model (along with his identification with utilitarianism), offering instead a thematic overview of a single tradition of Western political philosophy—beginning with Aristotle and Aquinas on natural law, and covering Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Mill and Marx—within which the “Theory of the Social Contract and Utilitarianism” were competing strands or sub-traditions offering different “accounts of justice.”Footnote 78 Thereafter, Rawls would maintain that the changing roster of authors on the Phil 171 syllabus constituted a diverse but unitary tradition—namely, “the tradition of democratic thought.”Footnote 79
The turn from “traditions” to “tradition” in Rawls's published works thus owed something to the exigencies of the course catalog. But it also reflected his direct engagement with the methodological debates inspired by Laslett's 1956 declaration of the death of political philosophy. Again, while it remains unclear whether Rawls was ever personally acquainted with Plamenatz at Oxford, he made his Plamenatzian sympathies explicit in his lectures in the early 1960s.Footnote 80 After the publication of Plamenatz's Political Studies lecture as “The Use of Political Theory” in 1960, Rawls took copious notes and had fully incorporated its arguments disputing the “death” of political philosophy in time for his opening lecture that year.Footnote 81 “If political philosophy seems quiescent today,” he told students, “it is because few … practical political problems” call for it. Communism was a matter of power; “none are intellectually attracted to it.” Similarly, according to Rawls in lectures (and in contrast with his activism behind the scenes in 1966 detailed by Brandon TerryFootnote 82), racial segregation “has no moral defenders: it is a psychological and sociological problem” of “getting people to act as they overtly think they should.” Thus the “leading political and social questions of the modern age” were “in our country,” he insisted, “in a sense resolved.”Footnote 83
Hereafter, Rawls's already teleological approach to the tradition took on an explicitly Hegelian cast. “We all believe in, or profess to believe in, religious toleration … who worries today, about the punishment of heresy?” Still:
This is no reason perhaps for not discussing them. Hegel remarked in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right that the owl of Minerva takes its flight only at dusk, by which he meant that wisdom was achieved only after a movement of thought had come to fruition … at this moment, he thought, the dry coldness of philosophical reflection brings to consciousness the logical structure of the preceding mode of thought in action. Well perhaps just because these ideas and principles are so widely accepted by us and the debate about them ostensibly turns more on matters of detail and application, we can afford for the first time to be rational in our examination of their structure and their relation to other political and social conclusions.Footnote 84
It seems that Rawls was the first to analogize himself to Hegel's owl.Footnote 85 Moreover, he justified his pedagogical focus on the social-contract and utilitarian strands within classical liberalism as the source of his own analysis of justice, “most, if not all of [which], can be … found in the contractarian tradition, from Hobbes through Rousseau to Kant, or in the utilitarian tradition from Hobbes (once again) through Hume to Sidgwick.”Footnote 86
Also evidently inspired by Plamenatz, around this time Rawls began to assemble a bibliography of methodological reflections on political philosophy, including works by Leo Strauss (“What Is Political Philosophy?” and Natural Right and History) and Sheldon Wolin (Politics and Vision).Footnote 87 Although his notes on Strauss cribbed straightforwardly from Plamenatz,Footnote 88 Rawls's copy of Wolin's book (also published in 1960) is heavily underlined, especially its assertion that political philosophy represents “a special tradition of discourse,” one “best understood by analyzing the many ways that the acknowledged masters have practiced it.”Footnote 89 Although Rawls would steadfastly refuse to adopt Plamenatz and Wolin's usage of “political theory” to include normative political philosophy, he seized upon the idea common to both that the latter addressed a permanent need of “civilized society” and hence that the study of the tradition—the clarification of its concepts and categories and the “logical structure of its basic notions”—was essential if one was to make any progress in philosophizing about politics.Footnote 90
Nevertheless, Rawls's own approach in the early lectures remained closer to Plamenatz in its quasi-social scientific supersessionism: “Personally, I have no doubt that it is possible to develop an analysis of the concept of justice which in its theoretical interest is as much an improvement on the classical doctrines of Locke and Rousseau as the economic theory of Marshall … is an improvement of Adam Smith.”Footnote 91 Accordingly, he ended his 1960 discussion of the death of political philosophy on an optimistic note: “To the contrary, I conjecture that the subject may be viewed as just beginning.”Footnote 92
VI. Progress or return?
Clearly Rawls, at least, understood the rebirth of political philosophy in his day as continuous with tradition, and not as a radical break from it. Reading his early lectures, one is struck by the remarkable continuity of concern and approach not only with A Theory of Justice, but also with Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, works composed in much the same way as A Theory of Justice had been, as successive drafts assigned to students in Phil 171.Footnote 93 Still, if A Theory of Justice treated the “tradition” of political philosophy as a history of ideas, centered on which clever propositions in which great books reminded Rawls of his own, then Political Liberalism memorably invoked the tradition as a history of political problems, as well as the social and political contexts in which certain principles or arguments had been forged.
Beginning with his 1981 Tanner lectures, Rawls would appeal consistently to the “wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the Reformation” as the context within which “the principle of toleration” (and hence the tradition of political liberalism) developed.Footnote 94 In his introduction to Political Liberalism, Rawls made his shift from concepts to problems explicit: the “emphasis on the Reformation and the long controversy about toleration … [may seem] dated in terms of contemporary political life [in which] our most basic problems are those of race, ethnicity, and gender.” Still, his “rationale” was that “a conception of justice worked up by focusing on a few long-standing classical problems should be correct, or at least provide guidelines for addressing further questions.”Footnote 95
Rawls's fascination with the historical process whereby the principle of toleration had been accepted in Western Europe coincides with what some scholars characterize as a shift from Kant to Hegel in his thought.Footnote 96 As we have seen, however, his interest in early modern religious conflict—not to mention his Hegelianism—long pre-dated the Tanner lectures. Indeed, in his posthumously published 1997 reflection, “On My Religion,” Rawls described reading Henry Lea's massive multivolume history of the Spanish Inquisition and Lord Acton's review of it shortly after the Second World War and credited these with his increasing awareness of the persecutory potential of Christianity.Footnote 97 This historical interest evidently piqued philosophic curiosity in turn. “Tolerance and Its Justifications” would be the subject of one of Rawls's earliest lectures at Cornell (c.1953–5).Footnote 98
Still, there and elsewhere, Rawls kept historical detail to a minimum, discussing it “only insofar as the analytic presentation … seems to require it.”Footnote 99 Similarly, a 1958 lecture on Locke's Second Treatise noted that “like any important book not altogether exact in its meaning, and having perhaps a good bit to be gathered from the circumstances under which it was written, it can be given different interpretations.” However, “without resurrecting Locke and asking him whether he meant this or that, it may be impossible to reach any conclusion; and it is not unlikely that, could this cross-examination be conducted, Locke would not understand the questions we wanted to put to him.”Footnote 100
That these early lectures were largely free of historical detail does not mean, however, that Rawls was uninterested in history. Behind the scenes, he continued to do an impressive amount of historical research. He had begun to read about the early modern history of toleration in the 1950s, taking extensive notes on Huguenot debates in Holland following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (including arguments made by Pierre Bayle and Isaac d'Huisseau, whose irenic “Compromise Theory of Tolerance” Rawls found particularly intriguing), and reading up on Catholic defenses of intolerance from Aquinas to Leo XIII.Footnote 101 Similarly, Rawls devoted considerable effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s to studying Robert Filmer and other “divine-right” theorists as background for his lectures on Locke.Footnote 102 In both cases, the impetus was to recover the arguments to which contract theorists like Locke or defenders of toleration like Bayle or John Milton had been responding.Footnote 103 Accordingly, Rawls's historical research found its way into lectures primarily when he wanted to highlight the weakness or inadequacy of the “winning” argument, as with Locke's response to Filmer: “F[ilmer]'s arguments contra contractarian ideas are acute and were never answered properly by Locke, who attacked the weakest parts of F[ilmer] … and not the points where [he] was strongest.”Footnote 104 (Rawls appears not to have considered the problem that cases wherein “the tradition” reproduced the weaker argument over the stronger might pose for his general approach.)
Rawls's “historical turn” in his later works, then, did not constitute a sudden, seismic change of direction.Footnote 105 Rather, it reflected a shift in focus, with historical material related to the “tradition” of political philosophy long relegated to the background finding its way into the foreground at last. As with A Theory of Justice, the impetus for Rawls's shifting approach to tradition was primarily pedagogical. Readers have often been struck by the impressive historical range and facility on display in Rawls's published Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2000), drawn mainly from Phil 171 lectures given in the 1980s.Footnote 106 His archive reveals that this work began in the late 1970s, and that between 1978 and 1984 Rawls revised and expanded his Locke lectures, in particular, by introducing a significant amount of historical detail.Footnote 107
One 1979 lecture opened with an in-depth discussion of Laslett's redating of the Second Treatise to the Exclusion Crisis, which Rawls now told students “explains much of the tone and emphasis of the book.”Footnote 108 Another from 1984 offered an extended analysis of Locke's debt to other seventeenth-century Whigs, including George Lawson.Footnote 109 Rawls chastised colleagues (including Nozick) who claimed to be “Lockeans” but neglected the importance of religion to Locke's arguments about natural rights.Footnote 110 And whereas in 1958 a younger Rawls had canvassed C. B. Macpherson's Marxian interpretation of Locke as a “possessive individualist” without any reference to context, the older Rawls now took issue with Macpherson's reading on contextual as well as philosophical grounds.Footnote 111 His tone in defending Locke from Macpherson and other leftist critics was frankly exculpatory: “Locke was a great man—one who … ran enormous risk to his life for many years to defend the cause of constitutional government.” In contrast with his own earlier treatment of Hobbes, Mill and Kant, Rawls now declared that in Locke's case it would “be indecent to take a lofty critical tone towards him because his view is not as democratic as we now would like.”Footnote 112
In Locke's case at least, Rawls's turn to history seems to have been driven by real personal sympathy, perhaps reflecting his increasing sense of identification with a fellow metonym of liberalism: “It is remarkable that anyone could write such a reasonable work, one of such imperturbably good sense, while [so] actively engaged, at great personal risk.”Footnote 113 Still, another likely source of Rawls's historicist fascination with Locke, in particular, was his friendly acquaintance with Quentin Skinner himself when they coincided at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1977–8.Footnote 114 The two corresponded about Rawls's Locke lectures for Phil 171, among other things, and this correspondence reveals that Skinner was Rawls's source for the anecdote later included in his lectures about Isaac Newton mistaking Locke for a “Hobbist.”Footnote 115 Skinner may have also been Rawls's inspiration in his methodological excursus on R. G. Collingwood's logic of question and answer with which his published Locke lectures began.Footnote 116 Gone were all references to Plamenatz. In describing his approach to the tradition, Rawls now appealed exclusively to Collingwood's idea that “the history of political theory is not the history of different answers to one and the same question, but the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it.”Footnote 117
Lest one think that Rawls became a card-carrying Cambridge school contextualist in his later years, his subsequent criticism of Collingwood indicates that his sense of political philosophy as a tradition that bound the great thinkers and texts together over time remained intact. After all, “there are certain basic questions that [political philosophers] keep asking, such as:
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What is the nature of a legitimate political regime?
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What are the grounds and limits of political obligation?
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What is the basis of rights, if any? And the like.
… These questions, when they come up in different historical contexts can,” of course, “be taken in different ways and have been seen by different writers from different points of view.” But that meant simply that “to understand their works, then, we must identify those points of view and how they shape the way the writer's questions are interpreted and discussed.”Footnote 118
Gone were the callow “x failed to see y” remarks of his youth. Rawls now emphasized historical context as a counsel to epistemic humility and interpretive charity, confessing himself “never altogether satisfied that what I say about these books is correct.”Footnote 119 His unpublished 1993 reflection, “Some Remarks about My Teaching,” likewise suggested that Rawls had long observed the maxim that “the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was.” For:
If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the student's time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they 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 wouldn't arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or hadn't read.Footnote 120
Whether this had, in fact, always been his stance towards the tradition of political philosophy, let the reader judge.
VII. Conclusion
Martha Nussbaum recounts a story about a meeting in the 1990s between Rawls and a Ph.D. student in philosophy working on utilitarianism. It became clear over the course of the conversation that the student had never read Bentham or Sidgwick, nor any other historical proponent of the view. When the student left, Rawls lamented, “What a pity that young man is so poorly educated!”Footnote 121
Pedagogically at least, Rawls would remain an unapologetic traditionalist throughout his career, insisting that adequate training in political philosophy required sustained attention to the “tradition,” too. Although he never defined what, exactly, he meant by “tradition,” the concept was central to his teaching from the start, and it captured something Rawls saw as intrinsic to political philosophy itself.Footnote 122 As he put it to a student in the 1960s: “You are a part of a tradition, place yourself within it.”Footnote 123 For Rawls, the practice of political philosophy had always to begin with where one happened to be—and, it seems, with some awareness of how one got there.
When it came to the teaching of political philosophy, then, Rawls's emphasis on the tradition remained consistent, although his understanding of where one must begin became increasingly contextual from the late 1970s onwards. Where “we” were going, however, did not change very much. Rawls continued to present the trajectory of the canon to undergraduates as constrained by the telos of secular liberal democracy on the model of the United States under the Warren Court, with “each writer”— even Marx— “contributing to the development of doctrines supporting democratic thought.”Footnote 124
Nevertheless, the connection between Rawls's pedagogical approach and philosophical project shifted subtly over time. His early comments about the verificationist role that past arguments might play in the present analysis of considered convictions was largely consistent with the method of reflective equilibrium developed in A Theory of Justice.Footnote 125 Yet decades of teaching the tradition as a history of fundamental consistency between different thinkers in vastly different places and times informed the insistently irenic approach to political philosophy that came to define his later works. As Rawls put it in retrospect in 1998: “I make a point in Political Liberalism of really not discussing anything, as far as I can help it, that will put me at odds with any theologian, or any philosopher.”Footnote 126
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement likewise presented the first “practical role” of political philosophy as “arising from divisive political conflict and the need to settle the problem of order”:
We suppose, then, that one task of political philosophy … is to focus on deeply disputed questions and to see whether, despite appearances, some underlying basis of philosophical and moral agreement can be uncovered. Or if such a basis of agreement cannot be found, perhaps the divergence of … opinion at the root of divisive political differences can at least be narrowed.Footnote 127
The apparent optimism underlying this approach was remarked upon with characteristic irony by Isaiah Berlin, who responded to Rawls's initial circulation of “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus” in 1988 by suggesting, “my only doubts arise about the degree of your optimism in the possibility of offering your views, with which I totally agree, as a permanent basis within which disagreements can be resolved.”Footnote 128
At that point, Rawls's optimism about the possibility, if not the probability, of an overlapping consensus had been informed by decades of teaching “the tradition of political philosophy” to undergraduates as a story of progressive agreement between past thinkers—both among themselves, and with the political philosophy of John Rawls. But this consensus-based and conciliatory approach to the tradition came at the expense not only of historical understanding, but also of the possibility of an encounter with past ways of thinking as a productive source of alienation, self-awareness, and critical insight.Footnote 129 As Brandon Terry reminds us, Rawls worried aloud at the end of his life that justice as fairness might itself be “ideological … and if not, why not?”Footnote 130 One wonders whether an alternative approach to the tradition—of contingency rather than continuity, of paths not taken rather than problems solved—might have helped him to answer this question.
In any case, as with his teaching more generally, Rawls's method of composition and revision, which presented his own work-in-progress to students in his survey courses, has been largely neglected by commentators. Still, it suggests that his major works, including A Theory of Justice, should be read as the product of an explicit, ongoing project of canon construction in the history of political thought, a tradition that Rawls himself would present consistently as culminating in John Rawls.
Reading Rawls as a canonical figure in the history of political thought is thus not a repudiation of his project, but rather a continuation of a process in which he was an active participant. In offering his students advice on how to approach Locke or other members of “the tradition,” Rawls was not so subtly offering guidance on how he, himself, wanted to be read.Footnote 131 “In looking at a text of this sort,” he told students, “if you are to get as much as you can out of it, you must try to interpret it in the best and most interesting way. There is no point in trying to defeat it … Otherwise, I think it's a waste of time to read … any of the important philosophers.”Footnote 132 “Unless we follow these guidelines,” he wrote elsewhere, “we fail to treat them as conscientious and intelligent writers who are in all essential respects at least our equals.”Footnote 133 As the self-styled owl of Minerva came to terms with his own setting sun, Rawls was clearly concerned that those who would come after him in the tradition be respectful, that they read him charitably and grant him the plea of necessity when need be. For “political philosophy must recognize the limits of the possible. It cannot simply condemn the world.”Footnote 134
The question facing readers today is thus not whether we should historicize Rawls, but how viewing him as a historical figure in the tradition of political philosophy might lead us to read him differently. For, as he put it in his published lectures, “Political Philosophy can only mean the tradition of political philosophy and in a democracy this tradition is always the joint work of writers and of their readers.”Footnote 135 Rawls's own reflections on, and contributions to, the work of canon construction in the discipline should remind political philosophers today that questions about the curriculum—what we teach and how we teach it—are not peripheral, but absolutely central to the activity itself. As, indeed, they have been since Socrates first proposed to banish the poets from Kallipolis as corrupters of the youth.
To follow Rawls thus far: there is no conflict with the tradition.
