There is a wonderful remark in Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, which runs as follows:

Wittgenstein thought that it was a kind of ghastly and mythologically-grand error to think of philosophy as a subject that progresses; at any rate, if ‘progress’ is to mean anything resembling its meaning in the case which tends to be our paradigm-case for the meaning of progress, namely (normal) science.

The above remark of his parallels another – earlier – remark, this time from the Tractatus:

These (in my view) very deep sentences from Wittgenstein's early masterpiece deeply provoke readers: they seem to suggest that there has actually been the very opposite of progress, in (roughly) the philosophy of science and the metaphysical ‘foundations’ of ‘the modern system’. That, far from moving on from the days of Plato et al, we have in an important respect moved backward, precisely because we have combined a lack of moving on with an illusion of having moved on. We are thus less clear than we used to be that (as Wittgenstein puts it at the very opening of (in section 1 of) Philosophical Investigations), “Explanations come to an end somewhere”.Footnote ³

Plato's dialogues themselves are somewhat equivocal, when assessed according to these ‘Wittgensteinian’ criteria: the ‘later’, less ‘Socratic’ and more didactic dialogues in some cases certainly seem to want to explain ‘everything’ in their field of view; the ‘early’ dialogues tend to be more content to leave their field in a state of aporia, reflecting Socrates's celebrated claim to know only that he did not know, and his unmasking of others' pompous claims to know.Footnote ⁴ Even these (early) dialogues might not be wholly to Wittgenstein's liking, though: did Socrates sometimes make his co-conversationalists feel a need for or the lack of a foundation for their beliefs or practice that was in fact not genuinely missing (because it had never really been needed) in the first place?

This, in my view, is indeed a pertinent question. By my lights, there has certainly then been progress of a kind in the move from Plato's Socrates at his best to Wittgenstein, in philosophy. But what about since then? If we look at the most significant figures to have succeeded Wittgenstein, in philosophy, do they hold true to his insights about the character of philosophy, and about how not to fall into the illusions of scientism? That is the question of this paper: Has philosophy after Wittgenstein succeeded in manifesting a ‘metaphilosophy’ which successfully follows Wittgenstein in not overstating or mischaracterising the actual extent or nature of progress in philosophy?

But this is a very large question; I shall restrict myself, in the compass of the present paper, to considering just one particularly significant aspect of the philosophy of one such philosopher, a philosopher sometimes alleged indeed to be an inheritor of a Wittgensteinian mantle: John Rawls.Footnote ⁵

Why Rawls in particular? Primarily because he is the widely-acknowledged father of contemporary liberal political philosophy, the dominant political philosophy of our times (dominant in the academy and, as discussed below, fairly dominant in actually-existing world-politics, too). He can therefore justly be taken as an exemplar of liberal political theory in general. What I argue here through engaging with the texts of John Rawls is, I submit, true in large measure of broadly social-contractarian-influenced liberalism. For instance, of Dworkin, Scanlon and even of Locke. (Or at least: to the extent, whatever that extent is, that what I argue here is true of the likes of them, too, then this paper is of indefinitely wide interest.)

Furthermore, I believe that Rawls's highly-influential philosophy at what should be its heart is in fact deformed by scientistic ambition, an ambition that dangerously (and, some might even suggest, more or less deliberately?) masks its real intention; namely, the rhetorical promulgation of and an obscuring apologia for a specific vision of society (or, in a sense, of its absence), and, concomitantly, of the self. I address this vision towards the close of the present paper. Thus there is particular interest in putting Rawls' bold theoretical liberal vision beside the import of the remarks above of Wittgenstein's.

Mine is then a challenge, by way of a ‘metaphilosophical’ reflection informed by historical, philosophical and political considerations, to Moral (Philosophical) Theory, and to the ‘dominant [liberal] paradigm’ in political philosophy. To Rawlsian philosophy as theory – as an extravagant version, indeed, of the project of theory: ‘grand’ theory in political philosophy. (Rawls is particularly important of course because his theory is taken to be the basis for (or apologia for) how roughly the basic institutions of ‘liberal democratic’ societies such as ours are or are to be justified. This matter therefore has an importance that cuts some considerable way beyond merely intellectual or scholarly dispute. It is often said that our very political leaders today (at least, the ‘liberals’ among them) are Rawlsians.Footnote ⁶)

One might contrast here most of the comparatively unambitious (though in my view still over-ambitious) field of ‘Cognitive Science’; most Cognitive Scientists spend much of their time in effect running around after real scientists (brain scientists, physicists, etc.).Footnote ⁷ Whereas the scale of Rawls' ambition is evident from the very first sentences of the first section of A Theory of Justice: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.” This supposedly direct and precise analogy makes clear that Rawls' modelling of his project on science – what might be taken in fact to be scientism on his part – is indeed ‘grand’ and bold. Indeed, I would characterize it as at least as dangerous as it is fertile. The placing of justice above all other virtues, for society, turns out to be an enterprise that may result in the fragmentation of society itself.

Of course, I cannot hope to justify that last claim here.Footnote ⁸ What I aim to do in the present paper is to focus principally on just one – crucial – issue in Rawlsian liberalism: a difficulty in understanding what the force of the famous neo-contractarianism – the ‘original position’ – in Rawls is supposed to be. I shall, in the course of my discussion, consider an analogy to Plato's ‘early, Socratic’ Euthyphro dialogue, an analogy perhaps suggested already by my quote from the Tractatus, above. This analogy will explicate more fully the sense in which we can justly find Rawls to be possessed of (or by) a grand (implicitly scientistic) vision.

John Rawls, in his early work, in A Theory of Justice, looks to ‘the original position’ as something like an ‘Archimedean point’; a point from which, ideally, everything in the target area can or could be explained. He seeks to find a point or ‘place’ from which principles of justice can be determined, and justified. This ‘place’ should be neither merely some place in the world – which would fail to provide the independence sought for in an Archimedean point – nor somewhere wholly removed from it – as it had been, to the point of metaphysical dubiety, in Kant (and Plato).

It is worth quoting at length from a key statement of this aspiration – beginning with a telling analogy of Rawls's own – from page 47 of Rawls's text:

Thus, if such a ‘point’ or ‘place’ can be found as Rawls seeks, an ‘original position’ (even if just in our minds or in a representational/symbolic system), if there's a there ‘there’, then it will enable us to determine rationally what is just.Footnote ¹⁰

Here is how Michael Sandel sketches the aspiration – and a central difficulty that arises with it:

This seems to me an excellent question. I shall suggest below that closely-reading Rawls' Theory of Justice (and closely-reading his subsequent corpus) takes one if anything further from an answer to it than one already probably is.

However, we should address first the worry that Sandel has perhaps read Rawls uncharitably, before we seek to draw morals from or gain inspiration from his question(s). For it might be submitted that Sandel reads Rawls too literalistically, here (as if he, Rawls, were someone like David Gauthier on one interpretation of his (Gauthier's) work, someone who does take there to be something awfully like a real contract, real bargaining, in his account of ‘justice’Footnote ¹²). For isn't the contract idea really only an attempt to model our sense of justice, as part of a project of (following Chomsky) modelling the universal human ‘moral capacity’?

Well, but if the quotation from Rawls that I gave above is to be believed, his is not merely a model in the sense of a (Wittgensteinian) ‘object of comparison’ (see PI section 131). If Rawls is indeed (as he says) following Chomsky,Footnote ¹³ then the legitimate question(s) that Sandel is aiming to raise can at least be reformulated roughly thus: Isn't there a sense in which we should indeed (if we are to follow Rawls) think of this ‘contract’ as (aiming to be) determinative and justificatory; but then, what is the status of Rawls's contract idea, and what justificatory authority does it (and what goes on ‘in’ it) have? If it were something very like a real contract that occurs in Rawls' ‘place’, as perhaps it is in Gauthier's, then we would understand how to assess it. Given that it isn't (i.e. that it isn't anything like a real contract that Rawls has in mind), then what is it?

It might be objected against me that I am wilfully ignoring the way that Rawls's ‘modelling’ is understood as being validated, by him, the way in which what goes on in Rawls' ‘place’ attains real, human meaning. The way in question is thought to be the method of reflective equilibrium. But once more this simply raises Sandel's question: Where/how does this yield (any) justification? Where in what Sandel calls the “elusive dance of procedure and principle”Footnote ¹⁴ do we find anything in the slightest Archimedean? Is Rawls' anything other than a cleverly-disguised (but ultimately merely circular) bootstrapping operation?

So, I think we are justified in starting to follow through on Sandel's dilemma:

I want to remark now an extremely striking parallel between these fundamental questions Sandel raises for Rawls, and the questions Socrates raised, near the very beginning of Western philosophy, for Euthyphro. The latter questions may be put thus:

The dilemma for Rawls is the very same one that faced Euthyphro. I suspect that we have on balance seen here the very opposite of progress in philosophy since Socrates'/Euthyphro's time; because at least Euthyphro did not in the end claim to be able to solve the paradox (and still less did Socrates). Pretending to have solved a paradox when one has not done so is worse than doing nothing at all.

Now, thinking back to our quotation from the Tractatus, above: Wittgenstein, presumably, would remark that the best option to take might be simply to say that what the Gods chose was as a result right: for this would at least make the terminus clear. While Rawls (who is it seems in the position designated by Wittgenstein in TLP 6.372 as that of the scientistic thinker – and, as we saw above the opening of and certain key moments in his Theory of Justice making clear, more or less willingly so) somehow gives the impression that, in the field of political philosophy, everything fundamental has been explained by his intervention.

But let us explore the options a little more, before settling on that judgement on Rawls. Could Rawls not follow Wittgenstein; couldn't he say that what his ‘gods’ (people) choose/chose is/was as a result right?

As we discussed above, choosing in the original position is meant to be a ‘model’ of moral judgement; but this surely would make the model too strong. Rawls wants something to be discovered, un-covered – not just ‘invented’.

Could Rawls say that there isn't really any choice in the original position; that ‘rational choice’ or whatever happens when we correctly go about ‘modelling’ our moral and political thinking is really just the un-covering of the dictates of reason?Footnote ¹⁵

This would fit with the science-analogy that I have suggested implicitly structures so much of Rawls' thought. Rational choice theory, as science, yields discovered truths, and so, presumably (to use the terminology that Rawls comes to prefer to that of ‘rational choice’) does right reasoning about the Reasonable. The original position would then, I suppose, be a mere device which enabled the exercise – more, the discovery – of true reason. But this very much seems to remove the sense, repeatedly emphasised by Rawls, that individuals actually engage in an active process of figuring out, deciding, even agreeing the principles of justice. Rawls doesn't want his ‘g/Gods’ to be mere computation-devices, devoid of any powers of choice or deliberation. (This would, among other things, make them too remote from us; and us is who ‘they’ – the would-be entrants to the ‘original position’ – are supposed to be.)

(Early) Rawls believes that there has been progress in philosophy since Locke's and Rousseau's and Kant's time (and presumably still more so since Plato's) in significant part because he, along with others, has successfully found a role for the theory of rational choice in moral and political philosophy. He remarks on page 16 of A theory of justice that “The merit of the contract terminology is that it conveys that principles of justice may be conceived as principles that would be chosen by rational persons, and that in this way conceptions of justice may be explained and justified.” If we were to ‘translate’ this into the language of the Euthyphro dialogue, it would read roughly as follows: ‘The merit of speaking of ‘the Gods’ and what they would choose is that it conveys that principles of morality (piety, etc.) may be conceived as principles that would be chosen by Gods, and that in this way conceptions of morality (piety) may be explained and justified.’ But put in that way, this sounds distinctly underwhelming. The lack of clarity Rawls is bringing to the situation is now, I think, clarified. That is: we are clearer about that (clear) lack of clarity.

The denizens of the original position surely are as good as (being) g/Gods. They are utterly abstracted from circumstance;Footnote ¹⁶ while they are omniscient concerning the range of circumstances they might eventually find themselves in; they make no errors of reasoning; and so forth.Footnote ¹⁷ But what my ‘translation’ of Rawls' explication of the original position contract terminology back into ‘Socratic’ terms makes clear that this helps Rawls not one jot.

Socrates, in his discussion with Euthyphro, allowed that what the Gods agreed on would be right. But he raised a worry about whether it would be right because they agreed on it, or agreed on because it was right. Has Rawls advanced our understanding at all about which of these, if either, we should say? Rawls wishes, through ‘the original position’, to express “the idea that moral principles are the object of rational choice.” (Theory, 251) Very well; but does that take us any further, either? Couldn't Euthyphro happily have said as much, on the Gods' behalf?

It might of course be replied once more that Rawls' concept of ‘reflective equilibrium’Footnote ¹⁸ finesses this problem. Could Rawls say that it is neither exactly that his gods choose what is just, nor exactly that what is just is prior to their discovery of it, but some subtle composite or superposition of the two, worked out over time, by each and every one of us? But I would counter that all that ‘reflective equilibrium’ does is find a way of marrying what ‘the original position’ comes up with with our “considered judgements”Footnote ¹⁹ about justice etc., or (alternatively put) of compromising between the two. It does not itself give any weight to the original position itself. (If I don't really understand ‘the original position’, if it isn't in the end coherent or possessed of a coherent aspiration or place in one's thinking, then ‘reflective equilibrium’ can't help me!) And so our problem remains: Does the original position (when suitably reflected on and in) have any justifying force? When we reflect as fully as possible, and imaginatively enter this ‘place’, what helps us to make any real progress with our moral/political-philosophical thinking, there? Are Rawls' principles of justice right because the denizens of the original position would choose them; or would they choose those principles simply because the principles are right? What is the status of Rawlsian ‘contract theory’?

It seems to me that when Wittgenstein's ‘Ancients’, such as Euthyphro at a certain point in his discussion with Socrates, say that it is what God chooses that is as a result right, this at least has the virtue of clarity. (Incidentally, it makes no difference here whether one says ‘God’ or ‘the g/Gods’ – just as in the original position, where Rawls eventually makes clear that there wouldn't really be any discussion,Footnote ²⁰ as all the ‘beings’ there are identical, and so one could just take any one of them, and the rational choice made would be the same as if one took a thousand of ‘them’) It is clear that there is no real justification or explanation in Euthyphro; and that's a good thing, inasmuch as it is at least honest. In Rawls, by contrast, the situation is more or less endlessly obscured. Rawls precisely claims to give us a justification – only what is in fact at best a systematically obscure one.

At times, in his celebrated Theory of Justice, it very much appears as though Rawls, like Kant, has the self be prior to the ends it affirms, or chooses (for discussion, see e.g. Sandel, 120), and that the original position is a way of laying bare the constructive and voluntaristic powers of the true – liberal – individual. At other times, it appears as though Rawls and his individual in fact discover antecedently true principles, and that ‘the original position’ is nothing more than a convenient device for making this discovery perspicuous (see e.g. Sandel, 128f., and 177–8). My suggestion is that Rawls' ‘great’ text is simply unclear, and so it does not enable philosophic progress, and certainly it does not constitute it. It merely hovers and obscures.

We cannot delay any longer considering in the body of this paper what many readers will undoubtedly be impatiently rehearsing in their minds by now: Rawls' gradual move in the years after ‘Theory’ away from ‘metaphysics’ and from a deep reliance on rational choice theory and toward a more historically-relative ‘political’ schema. Can this move help us resolve Rawls's quandary? My argument will be that these changes have not unmuddied the waters, and, moreover, that they have once more exhibited far from progress. For they have simply, I shall contend, made it (even!) less clear whether Rawls is attempting to offer a justification of a set of moral and political principles, in any sense worthy of the name, at all. He has not, as he was in effect urged to do by Richard Rorty,Footnote ²¹ simply admitted a terminus to explanation/justification, in the spirit of Wittgenstein's Tractatus remark on the Gods given above, or in the spirit of section 1 of Philosophical Investigations (“Explanations come to an end somewhere”). He has not, that is, come right out and said that these his ‘principles of justice’ are simply free-standing suggestions for liberal individuals qua political animals to help them interpret themselves at this point in history and geography. He has continued to maintain that his ‘theory of justice’ is to some degree justified, and that ‘the original position’ has some justifying force. He has insisted, that is, that ‘political liberalism’ and ‘justice as fairness’ are no mere modus vivendi, but are more reasonable than their alternatives. But in what sense ‘more reasonable’, or ‘justified’ – and with what justifying force, – it is entirely unclear. Even more unclear, I will submit, than it was in his earlier work.

It will no doubt be countered that this verdict is too harsh: It will be claimed on behalf of the later Rawls that political liberalism, as opposed to the metaphysical liberalism that some saw the early Rawls as putting forward, precisely gives up the claim to any Archimedeanism, of the kind that has been a central aspect of what I have questioned, above, and that Rawls now concedes openly that a certain set of conceptions of the good – and far more besides (e.g. certain economic and environmental facts) – are/is already assumed, by and in his proposed polity. It will be suggested on behalf of ‘political liberalism’ that it is based on a framework that is not itself argued for. Dreben calls it a “conceptual analysis”, but one that takes as given a certain background: e.g. the U.S. Constitution, or something much like it.Footnote ²²

This may be roughly right, although Rawls continues to claim quite explicitly that his framework can be ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ between conceptions of the good; we shall worry about this shortly. If this account is (roughly) right, then later Rawls has certainly made some progress: something has been clarified. An impossible task is no longer being attempted. Rorty's rendering of later Rawls is to some degree right, after all.Footnote ²³ This might perhaps be heard in effect as plumping for one horn of the Euthyphro paradox: it might perhaps amount to saying that the ‘Gods’ just choose, and that what they choose is (therefore) the rational (the reasonable), that that must be tolerated. It could then be said that they/we, the denizens of a modern liberal polity, then choose our individual conceptions of the good etc., and that what we so choose, in all its (reasonable) pluralism, is what is rational (reasonable). It could be added that one is mistakenly holding onto an old-fashioned conception of rationality if one supposes that “the normal result of a culture of free institutions” would be a monistic comprehensive doctrine.Footnote ²⁴ And finally it could be urged that “a continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power”,Footnote ²⁵ and that the flowering of human reason therefore will not yield such a continuing shared understanding.Footnote ²⁶

But three (inter-related) questions naturally arise:

1. 1. What about the unspoken framework for such ‘flowering’? Why should the choice of later Rawls' replacement for Euthyphro's Gods be structured and constrained by the particular frame that ‘political liberalism’ provides?

2. 2. What about (allegedly) ‘unreasonable’ pluralism? Is it clear that what falls outside the constraints of ‘political liberalism’ is really intolerable, unreasonable, not-to-be-welcomed? As Sandel puts it, at page 1776 of his Book Review of Political Liberalism:Footnote ²⁷ “[Is it always] reasonabl[e] to bracket, or set aside for political purposes, claims arising from within comprehensive moral and religious doctrines”? (He argues, drawing on the words of Lincoln no less, and of Abolitionist voices, that it is not.)

3. 3. What is so great about choice, anyway? Isn't being good or high-quality, good enough? Choosing is a paradigm of the good for liberals, but not for most creeds or belief-systems. Might it not be that later Rawls' quasi-solution to the Euthyphro dilemma, plumping for the choices of persons as defining what is rational, is only likely to be attractive to one who is already convinced of the merits of a liberal solution to the problems of political philosophy? In which case, is Rawls doing nothing more than preaching to the choir?

I shall focus in what follows primarily on the 1st and 2nd questions, largely leaving the 3rd, intriguing and important though it is, for some briefer thoughts that emerge from the discussion of the first two. My strong suspicion, though I cannot argue this in full here,Footnote ²⁸ is that the perhaps-sympathetic reading of later Rawls that I sketched above, a reading of him as genuinely moving forward from a conceptual impasse in a way that early Rawls could not do, is not right. The reason is this: that it is not clear that the problem that Rawls above all sets out to solve in his later work, the problem of political legitimacy,Footnote ²⁹ is actually progressed at all, in that work, at least if that work is interpreted as we have so far interpreted it, striving to make sense of it. (This is, in effect, the burden of question (1), above). For sure, if we (all) simply accept the framework of political liberalism, then we can all get along, and have a society which is ‘congruent’, but that is little more than begging the question. (Again: Rawls claims to provide more than merely a modus vivendi (see Political Liberalism, 147), more than merely a reflection back to us of what we currently do and how we currently just about muddle along – he evidently does not accept Rorty's strong misreading of him as a nothing more than pragmatist ethnocentrist about justice (See page 1775 of Sandel's review). But what is the ‘more’ than this that later Rawls can intelligibly be offering? Is there any there there that can be sustained?)

The real issue – of whether the later Rawlsian framework invites such a shared sense of stable congruence, of legitimacy, of self-transparency, as Rawls suggests we need - depends upon whether or not we find it to actually and genuinely find, accommodate, foster and (in any way) legitimate an ‘overlapping consensus’, or whether in reality it fails (or would fail) to facilitate genuine toleration of ‘minorities’ (e.g. of religious believers who are not willing to have their religion privatised), genuine toleration of different conceptions of the good (See question (2), above). I would claim, as I argue in detail elsewhere,Footnote ³⁰ that it so fails (as intimated in both (1) & (2), above). My suggestion is that all the important questions (that will impact heavily and negatively on many conceptions of the good) about the organisation of society have already been ‘begged’, or pre-judged, by the ‘political liberalism’ framework. I would therefore suggest that those of us who dissent from the framework that Rawls presumes and proposes can hardly be morally nor even politically bound by it. Those of us who believe, for instance, that our human- and animal- and living- oneness with one another, with future generations, and with the planetary ecosystem itself, is such as to demand systematic and impactful conscientious objection to war and to ecologically-deleterious activities (such as much of industrial-growth society) will not be satisfied to privatise our spirituality and our conscientious objection, our conscientious civil disobedience, in the manner required by early Rawls and reinforced at length in the deliberations of later Rawls.Footnote ³¹ And (we) are not convinced that there is anything in the slightest unreasonable, at the end of the day, in our refusal to accept ‘political liberalism’. On the contrary, many of us perhaps suspect strongly that the ‘public reason’ beloved of Rawls will in fact hasten societal and ecological fragmentation – and so deserves in reality to be judged as itself unreasonable as a mode of life for human beings.Footnote ³²

But liberal-inclined readers will probably not yet grant that. To have a chance of meeting them, of convincing them, I need to be sure that I am doing all I can to present Rawls' side of the story fairly. Let me have one more go, then, at the most charitable rendering it is I think possible to give of the later Rawls in this connection, in relation to his chosen central problem, of political legitimacy in a time of pluralism, and then see where we have reached in relation to it:

Say all of that is right. (Leave aside even the fact that Rawls' historical story ‘explaining’ the centrality of liberalism to its heirs and denizens is desperately thin and vague, hobbled by his abstract framework and method. And leave til later the worry that the values that Rawls intends the original position to model are part of a controversial comprehensive vision of society.) My deepest worries about this, the most generous version of later Rawls that I think it possible to give, others having failed, are still live. They are the following two: (i) Is the privatization/individualization of reflection (of conscience?) envisioned here tenable, something that makes sense?Footnote ³³ The denizens of this ‘society’ seem not to be able to have a real and rational conversation Footnote ³⁴ about justice, let alone about any deeper values: Is this really a picture of a society at all? (ii) Even if, contrary to the suggestions I have made in this paper, and that I draw conclusions from below, question (i) can somehow be answered in the affirmative, then the key question, the central question of my entire paper, is really just repeated in the penultimate line of the previous paragraph. What does it mean, to say that what that paragraph sets out amounts to anything worth calling a justification (or legitimation) of certain political institutions? The meaning of this claim seems now entirely to have evaporated.

Let us explore further why and how this is so. The later Rawls' central worry can be usefully put in this way: “[A] version of liberalism that insisted that it was the one true comprehensive doctrine would not be able to provide the kind of social stability that is part of Rawls's conception of a truly just, well-ordered society.”Footnote ³⁵ Thus Rawls thinks that we have to resort to a purely political liberalism. The problem of the legitimacy (cf. Political Liberalism, 217) or justifiability of the state cannot be solved, at least not any longer, he thinks, through a comprehensive doctrine (such as even that laid out in A Theory of Justice); ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’ sees to that. The justification must be public, via ‘public reason’; the state must be publicly justifiable. But: why even worry about stability, to this extent and in this way? The worry goes, as we have seen, beyond even that necessary to attain a mere modus vivendi. Rawls in his later work seeks stability achieved in the right way and for the right reasons – the public good of justice as fairness publicly and reciprocally endorsed by reasonable individuals. The only answer to the question just asked, then, can be that Rawls worries like this about stability because of a tacit, comprehensive commitment.Footnote ³⁶ Given the unavoidability of comprehensive commitments, the only questions really are questions such as whether the comprehensive commitment(s) tacitly or explicitly underlying a given conception of society or proposal for governance actually does effectively promote stability. There are reasons for suspecting that Rawlsian political liberalism will not: for instance, because it is likely to increase societal atomization (as people feel increasingly indifferent to one another's comprehensive commitments, if the liberal scheme with its rigorous division between public and private works out as it is supposed to). The alternative to seeking an ‘overlapping consensus’ would be to find an explicit comprehensive doctrine that as many of us as possible can sign upto, as un-partial a comprehensive doctrine as possible – but Rawls points us in the opposite direction to this.

Meanwhile, and decisively, Rawls' claim that only unreasonable views are excluded from the overlapping consensus allegedly underlying liberal society (see qu. (2), above) completely begs the question. Rawls has tacitly defined any conceptions that do not accept political liberalism as unreasonable.Footnote ³⁷ Thus political liberalism has no justificatory or legitimatory force at all. It only appeals to those who already agree with it. It therefore cannot help settle the question of social stability, cannot help to justify publicly anything not already felt to be justified.

In short, I submit that ‘political liberalism’ no more answers the question which it was designed to answer, the question of stable political legitimacy, than Rawls' (early) theory of justice answers the question which it was designed to answer, the question of (the nature and grounds of) justice. The later Rawls repeats the ruse of the early Rawls. While the early Rawls tried to make it seem as if rational choice ‘in ‘the original position’’ settled the problem of justice, so the later Rawls tries to make it seem as if the alleged existence of an overlapping consensus with which every ‘reasonable’ person should be satisfied settles the problem of legitimacy. If one then asks the question as to why the original position models values already present in our society, the answer is obvious: because that society is indeed to some extent created around liberal individualist ideas. But this provides no legitimacy to it at all. It simply means that Rawls's device reflects back at us an implicit hegemonic ideology – and refusal to accept that hegemony is simply defined by Rawls as being unreasonable.

The kindest thing to say is, then, that at the end of the day the appearance of progress hereabouts (this time, in Rawls' thought) has once again proved very much greater than the reality. I say “the kindest thing to say”, because my actual view is that Rawls' later philosophy is more confused in this regard than his early philosophy. For even the (very limited) amount of clarity entailed in the justificatory force of rational principles or rational choice vanishes, in the later work.

My own view is that what the ruses of early and later Rawls alike partly conceal is what Sandel aims to establish and perhaps makes manifest by the end of his impressive book,Footnote ³⁸ with its remorseless, more-or-less Socratic line of questioning of Rawls: that Rawls is necessarily implicitly putting forward in his work a theory of the (liberal) individual, or rather of the self as paradigmatically a consuming (consumerist, choosing) liberal individualFootnote ³⁹ whose interest if any in community is only a preference, and never anything constitutive of their self-identity.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is, contrary to general belief, so at least as much in the polity of later Rawls as in the society of early Rawls. Later Rawls does not really involve the kind of concession to so-called ‘communitarianism’ that it is so often thought to, but rather expresses an effort to cope with and to live with and regularise a still greater degree of societal fracturing!Footnote ⁴¹ Later Rawls moves in this sense in precisely the opposite direction to communitarianism. The self in later Rawls is split between a political self, which regards as unreasonable everything that falls outside a very narrow range of political-space and communications-methods, and a wider self that is privatized and forbidden to interfere with that essential but narrow range. Early Rawls at least expressed (even if not at all clearly) a comprehensive moral and political conception, the kind of thing that communitarians think at least could be the basis of a society of some kind. Later Rawls tries to abstract even from this (and mostly fails). Later Rawls, in other words, is about how to think political philosophy in a setting that cannot be baldly predicated, as Rawls came to recognise the Theory of Justice covertly was, on an explicit shared liberal political philosophy. ‘Political Liberalism’ is a political philosophy for a world which lacks even the (thin) mutual ties of the denizens of A theory of justice. It is a political philosophy (if that is the right word) for a world of individualized consumerism gone wild, a world where one thinks even of the choice between philosophies as a quasi-consumer-choice (this is the real meaning of Rawls' famous later idea of applying “the principle of tolerance to philosophy itself”).Footnote ⁴²

To re-focus our minds in closing on the dilemmas of how to take ‘the original position’ that have been my main concern in this paper: what Sandel never really fully considers is the possibility that the way in which the ‘concealment’ of which he speaks – by Rawls, of his ‘ruse’ – happens is that ‘the original position’ is neither really a contract, an agreement between parties, nor even a voluntaristic or deterministic agreement by the thin god-like agent in the original position to a set of propositionsFootnote ⁴³ (i.e. to the two principles of justice that Rawls puts forward), but rather something more basic: such as the kind of ‘agreement’ that Wittgenstein sets out in Philosophical Investigations sections 240–2. What Wittgenstein speaks of there is agreement in ‘form of life’. This is ‘agreement’ neither in the sense of an actual agreement (treaty, contract), nor an unstable ‘hypothetical’ version thereof, nor again agreement in the sense of agreement with a certain opinion, but agreement in form of community life. This could be usefully rephrased here as ‘agreement’ in conception of the good at a level so fundamental that it escapes any easy conceptualisation or expression. Such ‘agreement’ comes before actual explicit agreements or agreements in opinions. That is what makes it peculiarly invulnerable to challenge – or understanding. It is really, an ‘agreement’ of that kind, I would submit, in a final effort to be ‘charitable’ to Rawls, and as much as possible to save him from the problem I have laid out in this paper, that is present in the original position: ‘agreement’ in the ‘form of life’ that is liberal individualism. That is, agreement in that form of life in politics, but also by extension across the realm of the good, because what is agreed upon is the privatization of that realm. This implies directly a very particular form or traditionFootnote ⁴⁴ of social reason, a ‘community’ – albeit at another level of description a pseudo-community, I would say, were I asked to judge it – of rigidly autonomous selves, opaque to one another, but having interests and preferences that make them above all desiring-machines, whether what they desire is more fine food or fast cars or charity for their fellow men or what-have-you.Footnote ⁴⁵ This image of humankind is beyond argument (and is, I suggest, tacitly but precisely behind the later Rawls' thought that we may all be able to agree on something to found our political community that he thinks need not be able to be agreed in the form of an explicit philosophy) – but this image is also, it should now be clear, decidedly uncompulsory. Alternative possible forms of community life are imaginable, in which for instance the denizens have values and commitments involving each other which are constitutive of their identities; or in which in their taken-for-granted mutual dependence they lack strict boundaries and ‘individual identities’ altogether. In such alternative forms of life as these, the ‘contractarian’ premise of the voluntariness of societyFootnote ⁴⁶ that Rawls wants to embrace would appear not so much unattractive or false as absurd (as, in literal or historical terms, it is.). My suspicion, then, is that all that Rawls' long, involved and inconclusive arguments concerning the nature of his ‘contractarianism’ establish is a vision of the self and its society (or ‘society’) – a vision, reflective of its time, that may tempt others, but is, to the present writer, at least as unattractive, when seen clearly, as it is uncompulsory. (Rawls' official vision of a ‘well-ordered society’ in the end boils down, I would claim, to what I have just indicated.)Footnote ⁴⁷

And now I can only say this: What an unperspicuous way of attempting to achieve the goal of promulgating such a vision Rawls' writing is.

In sum; philosophy does indeed tend to exhibit a lack of progress, as Wittgenstein (following Nestroy – see my epigraph, above) suggests. The very effort to achieve progress in philosophy roughly after the fashion of science, in fact, is what very frequently causes philosophy to move in a retrograde direction.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is this effort in Rawls – most glaringly, his wish to come up with a ‘theory’, by means of introducing ‘rational choice theory’ into moral and political philosophy, without his having addressed the fundamental, ‘timeless’ philosophical problems which were actually at the root of the ethical issue he was concerned with; but then equally, his effort to continue the same unclear process of producing an (at least political) conception that will satisfy and cover us all, even once the quasi-scientific way in which this was earlier promised has been abandoned – which ensures that, on the most fundamental issue of his entire work, he shows less wisdom and produces less clarity than was already present in Plato's Euthyphro. He succeeds only in pushing moral (and political) philosophy back to a stage inferior to that which it reached with Socrates. In neither his earlier nor his later work does he make any progress at all; on the contrary.

The moral of the story so far as real politics goes, then, is surely this: So much the worse for any actual liberal politics that depends on Rawlsian liberalism or which draws upon him for inspiration. For Rawlsian liberalism is both ill-founded and inferior to other available philosophical inspirations. Moreover, this is of course not just a problem for Rawlsians. If Rawls' philosophy gets into trouble in as I have argued above, then other liberal philosophers committed to social-contractarianism and/or to ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good are doomed to find similar trouble. Most liberal philosophers and philosophiesFootnote ⁴⁹ will thus suffer the same fate as Rawls. In this sense, Rawls has been in this paper merely an example, and the ramifications of the paper stretch far, across most of liberalism. To put my point in more general terms, then: Any liberal politics that would draw its programme from some general (and as it turns out question-begging) assumptions about reason (whether that be cashed out as ‘rational choice theory’ or ‘public reason’ or what-have-you) is here put severely into doubt.

Rawls functions here as a central example of a more general story, whose ‘metaphilosophical’ moral, then, is this: That if there is progress in philosophy, it consists chiefly in realizing how it is in the nature of such progress that it almost constantly seems greater than it is. To return one last time to the case with which we opened this essay: We could certainly call the coming of Wittgenstein a kind of progress. But then we ought to recognise still how little Wittgenstein advanced on what was already present, when seen aright, in the great works of Kant and Frege; how little the Investigations advances upon the Tractatus; and how little in fact the latter advances on Plato, or indeed on the best common sense. But at least there was some progress, in these cases.

If philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato (in the case under discussion in the present paper: to his enduring Euthyphro dialogue), nevertheless it would be better if some of these footnotes had never been written. Some such footnotes do not advance matters at all, but rather make things worse. In that category, albeit with some regret, one must place the central elements of the works both early and late of the dominant figure in political philosophy in our time, John Rawls, that I have here put into question.Footnote ⁵⁰