mouffe - rawls - political philosophy without politics

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DOI: 10.1177/019145378701300201 1987; 13; 105 Philosophy Social Criticism

chantal mouffe rawls: political philosophy without politics

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chantal moufferawls: political philosophy

without politics

Is it possible to disentangle political liberalism from the

vocabulary that it has inherited from the rationalism of the

Enlightenment on one side and from the connotations it has

acquired by its long association with economic liberalism on theother? This is, I believe, a crucial question for the elaboration ofa modern democratic political philosophy. Several recent

debates attest the need for such an elucidation by forcing us intounacceptable dichotomies. It is particularly evident in the currentcontroversy about modernity and postmodernity and theconfrontation between the defenders of the Enlightenment and itsdetractors. As Richard Rorty pointed out in &dquo;Habermas and

Lyotard on Postmodernity&dquo;: &dquo;we find French critics of Habermas

ready to abandon liberal politics in order to avoid universalisticphilosophy, and Habermas trying to hang on to universalisticphilosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberalpolitics.&dquo;’ A very similar confusion is happening among thecommunitarian critics of liberalism, with several of them failing todistinguish between liberal individualism as a specific doctrineconcerning the nature of the human subject, and politicalliberalism as a set of institutions characteristic of the &dquo;law state&dquo;:defense of rights, recognition of pluralism, limitation of the role ofthe state, separation of powers, etc. So communitarians likeSandel and Maclntyre who refuse the atomist conception of manof liberal individualism, think it necessary to denounce the



106

&dquo;rhetoric of rights and pluralism&dquo; and end up by rejecting politicalliberalism. Even Rorty is guilty of illegitimate amalgamatiorl whenhe makes bourgeois economic relations an intrinsic componentof liberalism. Indeed, his concept of &dquo;liberalism&dquo; is extremelyambiguous; if he rightly separates-following Blumenberg-thetwo aspects of the Enlightenment, that of &dquo;self-assertion&dquo; (whichcan be identified with the political project),2 and that of &dquo;self-foundation&dquo; (the epistemological project), he later identifies thepolitical project of modernity with a vague concept of &dquo;liberalism&dquo;which includes both capitalism and democracy. His

&dquo;postmodernist bourgeois liberalism&dquo; is therefore a pure andsimple apology for the &dquo;institutions and practices of the rich NorthAtlantic democracies’? that leaves no room for democraticcritique.

All those false dilemmas are the result of the conflation under theterm of &dquo;liberalism&dquo; of a series of different discourses which havebeen articulated together in certain circumstances but that haveno necessary relation. First it is important in order to understandpolitical modernity to distinguish two traditions, liberal and

democratic, which were only articulated in the nineteenth century.Then one must not confuse this &dquo;political modernity&dquo; with theprocess of modernization carried out under the domination of

capitalist relations of production. Some liberals of course arguethat there cannot be political liberalism without economicliberalism and a free market economy, but that is only theexpression of one trend within liberalism. Finally, there are aseries of philosophical discourses concerning the idea of man,the criteria of rationality, the nature of morality, etc.; they aresometimes referred to as &dquo;the philosophy of liberalism&dquo; but theyare extremely heterogeneous and include positions as differentas Kantianism and utilitarianism. It is therefore a mistake to seethem as constituting a single doctrine. Many possible articulationscan take place between those different &dquo;forms&dquo; of liberalism andI want to argue that the acceptance of political liberalism does notrequire us to endorse either individualism or economic liberalismnor does it commit us to a defense of universalism andrationalism. I will take the case of Rawls’s deontological liberalismas an example of those multiple articulations and use it as a

starting point to discuss the nature and the role of politicalphilosophy in a democratic society.

Rawls’s Theory of Justice

Rawls’s work is a good illustration of the point I am making. First,we have here a defense of political liberalism which establishesits autonomy from economic liberalism. As Brian Barry indicated,the significance of A Theory of Justice is that it is &dquo;a statementof liberalism which isolates its crucial features by making private



107

property, in the means of production, distribution and exchange,a contingent matter rather than an essential part of the doctrineand introduces a principle of distribution which could, suitablyinterpreted and with certain factual assumptions, have egalitarianimplications.&dquo;4 Moreover, it is an attempt to provide an alternativeto utilitarian thought whose hegemony among liberal moral

philosophy had been solidly established. Finally, and this is theaspect I want to examine, Rawls has been moving away from auniversalistic framework and is now stressing the &dquo;situated&dquo;character of his theory of justice.

Indeed Rawls pretends that he was misunderstood and that evenin his book he did not intend to pose the question of justice in anahistorical manner. But by stating that the principles of justice asfairness &dquo;are the principles that free and rational personsconcerned to further their own interests would accept in an initialposition of equality as defining the fundamental terms of theirassociation&dquo;5 without further historical specifications, he wasleaving the door wide open for those universalistic types ofinterpretations. It is only later that he has specified that his aimwas not to elaborate a conception of justice suitable for all typesof societies regardless of their particular social or historicalcircumstances but only &dquo;to settle a fundamental disagreementoverthe just form of social institutions within a democratic societyunder modern conditions.’&dquo; He was therefore trying to find asolution to the disputed question of how basic social institutionsshould be arranged in order to embody the principles of equalityand liberty and how those two ideals should be understood andbalanced. Now, he also emphasizes that the task of articulatinga public conception of justice is primarily a practical social task,not an epistemological one, and that &dquo;what justifies a conceptionof justice is not its being true to an order antecedent and given tous, but its congruence with a deeper understanding of ourselvesand our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history andthe tradition embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonabledoctrine for us.&dquo;’ After having been one of the main targets of theadvocates of contextualism, has Rawls become one of theirchampions? Has he abandoned Dworkin for Rorty? What aretoday the points of contention with his communitarian critics?More generally, how successful is Rawls’s &dquo;historicized&dquo; versionof justice as fairness?

In order to elucidate some of these problems it is necessary to

recapitulate briefly the main ideas of Rawls’s theory as they arepresented in a series of articles posterior to A Theory of Justice.There he declares that the aim of political philosophy in aconstitutional democracy is to propose &dquo;a political conception ofjustice that can not only provide a fair public basis for thejustification of political social and economic institutions but also



108

help ensure stability from one generation to the next.&dquo;8 What is atstake is the creation of social unity. In a democratic society itcannot rest on a shared conception of the meaning, value andpurpose of life; nor can it rest exclusively on convergence of selfor group interest because such a basis of justification would notbe stable enough. Social unity should therefore be secured by anoverlapping consensus on a reasonable political conception ofjustice.

Concerning the nature of such a political conception of justice,Rawls indicates that it is a moral conception worked out forpolitical, social and economic institutions and should not beunderstood as an applicationto the political order of a general andcomprehensive moral conception. This is to respect the existenceof pluralism that must allow for a plurality of conflicting andincommensurable conceptions of the good. Therefore a politicalconception of justice must be independent of controversial

philosophical and religious doctrines and no general moralconception can provide a publicly recognized basis for a

conception of justice in a modern democratic society. It can onlybe formulated in terms of certain fundamental intuitive ideaslatent in its common sense and embedded in its institutions.9

For that reason, justice as fairness starts with what Rawlsconsiders to be the central intuitive idea implicit in the publicculture of a democracy: a view of society as a fair system ofcooperation between free and equal persons. The fundamentalquestion of political justice is then to find &dquo;the most appropriateprinciples for realizing liberty and equality once society is viewedas a system of cooperation between free and equal personsRawls’s proposal is to see those principles as the result of anagreement among the people concerned in the light of theirmutual advantage. He believes that the idea of a rational self-interested choice can provide a shared idea of citizens’ goodappropriate for political purposes and independent of anyparticular doctrine. But such a choice is nevertheless subject toa series of constraints and the original position is introduced inorderto specify the conditions of liberty and equality necessary forthe agreement to be reached in a fair way. Its &dquo;veil of ignorance&dquo;serves to eliminate the bargaining advantages that could affectthe process of decision and distort the result. Rawls affirms thatonce the citizens see themselves as free and equal persons theyshould recognize that to pursue their own different conceptions ofthe good they need the same primary goods, that is, the samebasic rights, liberties and opportunities as well as the same all-purpose means such as income and wealth and the same socialbases of self respect. They would in consequence agree on apolitical conception of justice that will state that &dquo;all social primarygoods-liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the



109

bases of self respect-are to be distributed equally unless anunequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the

advantage of the least favored.&dquo;&dquo; Such is precisely the generalconception behind the two principles of justice specified byJustice as Fairness, the first one requiring that each person is tohave an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty, compatiblewith a similar liberty for others; and the second that goods shouldonly be distributed unequally when that unequal distribution is (a)to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attachedto offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair

opportunity. 12

The main difference with A Theory of Justice is the new

emphasis put on the fact that the basic ideas of justice as fairnessare regarded as implicit or latent in the public culture of ademocratic society and the abandonment of the description of thetheory of justice is part of the theory of rational choice. Rawlsrecognizes that it was a mistake and declares &dquo;What I should havesaid is that the conception of justice as fairness uses an accountof rational choice subject to reasonable conditions to characterizethe deliberations of the parties as representatives of free andequal persons ... There is no thought of trying to derive thecontent of justice within a framework that uses an idea of therational as the sole normative idea.&dquo;’3 Rawls also stresses thatthe conception of the person found in the original position is apolitical conception, a conception of citizens concerned with ourpublic identity, and that it does not presuppose any specificcomprehensive view of the nature of the self.

Priority of the Right Over the Good

One of the characteristic features of Justice as Fairness is that itaffirms the priority of the right over the good. Such a priorityindicates that individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake ofthe general welfare, as is the case with utilitarianism, and that theprinciples of justice impose restrictions on what are the

permissible conceptions of their good that individuals are allowedto pursue. This is of course why the principles of justice must bederived independently of any particular conception of the goodsince they need to respect the existence of a plurality of

competing conceptions of the good in order to be accepted by allcitizens. Rawls believes that the superiority of the deontologicalapproach over the teleological one (which asserts the priority ofthe good and defines the right as what maximizes the good) is thatit is the only one providing an adequate representation of thedistinctness of individuals and a defense of their inalienable

rights. Hence his claim that Justice as Fairness is the theory ofjustice best suited for a modern democracy.



110

I think that Rawls is right in arguing that in a modem democracythe principles of justice must be derived independently of anymoral, religious or philosophical conception and serve as aframework to determine which particular conceptions of the goodare acceptable. But he is defending this thesis in a way that isinadequate and has left him vulnerable to the communitariancritique. The communitarians object that such a priority of the rightcannot exist, because it is only in a specific type of society, withcertain institutions, that an individual with rights can exist and thatit is only through our participation in a community which definesthe good in a certain way that we can acquire a sense of the rightand a conception of justice. As CharIesTaylorcorrectly points out,&dquo;the basic error of atomism in all its forms is that it fails to takeaccount of the degree to which the free individual with his owngoals and aspirations, whose just rewards it is trying to protect, ishimself only possible within a certain kind of civilization; that it tooka long development of certain institutions and practices, of therule of law, of rules of equal respect, of habits of commondeliberation, of common association, of cultural development,and so on, to produce the modern individual.&dquo;’4 Once it is

recognized that the existence of rights and a conception of justicecannot exist previously and independently of specific forms ofpolitical association-which by definition imply a conception ofthe good-it becomes obvious that there can never be anabsolute priority of the right over the good.

Does that mean that we should therefore reject Rawls’s concernswith the priority of justice and the defense of individual rights andcome back to a politics of the common good based on sharedmoral values as Michael Sandel argues?’5 We find here adangerous confusion which accounts for the ambiguity of thecommunitarian critique and which leads, in authors like Sandel,to the rejection of political liberalism and a denial of pluralism. Itsorigin resides in the problematic notion of the &dquo;common good&dquo; andits implications for the relationship between ethics and politics.Before the advent of modernity, the community was organizedaround a single idea of a substantive common good and no realdistinction existed between ethics and politics, with politics beingsubordinated to the common good. With the emergence of theindividual, the separation between Church and State, the

principle of religious toleration and the development of civil

society, a separation took place between politics and whatbecame the sphere of morality. Moral and religious beliefs arenow a private matter on which the state cannot legislate andpluralism is a crucial feature of modern democracy, the kind ofdemocracy that is characterized by the absence of a substantivecommon good.

But if Rawls as a consequent liberal is right in wanting to defend



111

pluralism and individual rights, he is wrong in believing that sucha project requires the rejection of any possible idea of a commongood. Because that priority of right he advocates can only existwithin the context of a specific political association defined by anidea of the common good; except that in this case it must beunderstood in strictly political terms, as the political common goodof a liberal-democratic regime, i.e., the principles of the liberal

’

democratic regime qua political association: equality and liberty.There is no need on the other side to reject pluralism and thepriority of justice in order to adopt a communitarian approachstressing the character of man as a political and social beingwhose identity is created within a community of language,meanings and practices. Sandel is therefore drawing illegitimateconclusions in using the inadequacy in Rawls’s formulation tocriticize a politics of rights, and a communitarian defense ofpolitical liberalism is perfectly possible. Indeed Rawls has beenmoving into that direction since he acknowledged that his

conception of justice is a political one that concerns us quacitizens of a constitutional democracy whose latent ideals it triesto reflect and develop.

Nevertheless his current position is not very consistent and hestands in an awkward position between Kant and Hegel, asGlaston has correctly pointed out. He still maintains the priority ofthe right but his new emphasis on the conception of the moralperson undermines such a priority since &dquo;if justice is desirablebecause it aims at our good as moral persons, then justice asfairness rests on a specific conception of the good, from which the‘constraints’ of right and justice are ultimately derived.&dquo;16 Glastonargues that Rawls’s revised theory is difficult to distinguish fromthe perfectionism that he continues to reject. &dquo;Clearly the ideal ofthe person functions as a moral goal, in two respects. Individualschoosing principles of justice will seek, first and foremost, tocreate circumstances in which they can realize and express theirmoral powers. Second, we as observers will appraise socialinstitutions in light of their propensity to promote the realizationand facilitate the expression of these powers, and this standardwill take priority over our other concerns. 1117

I agree with Glaston that Rawls’s position today is untenable butI do not think that the solution would consist in assuming openlya perfectionist view but, as I shall try to show later, in establishingthe conditions that would enable him to base his politicalconception of justice on strictly political grounds. That will requireus to recognize that a liberal-democratic regime, if it must be

agnostic in terms of morality and religion, cannot be agnosticconcerning political values since by definition it asserts the

principles that constitute its specificity qua political association,i.e., the political principles of equality and liberty.



112

Unfortunately too many liberals want to identify political liberalismwith the neutral state and do not understand that it is a mistakenand self-defeating strategy. Some like Charles Larmore evenargue that the task of liberal theory is to provide a neutraljustification of the neutrality of the state.18 This can only reinforcea tendency already too much present in liberalism to transformpolitical problems into administrative and technical ones and itchimes with theories of neo-conservatives like Niklas Luhmannwho want to restrict the field of democratic decisions by turningmore and more areas over to the control of supposedly neutralexperts.

To be sure Rawls does not endorse those claims to neutrality and,as we have seen, his theory of justice is getting increasinglyloaded with values. By subordinating the rational to thereasonable’9 he has drastically limited the field of exercise of therational choice approach. The original position no longerexpresses a point of view of neutrality but reflects the idealsimplicit in the public culture of a democratic society and the partiesin their deliberation are now guided by the exercise and

development of their two moral powers. Moreover-againstLarmore-Rawls insists that the aim of a theory of justice is not tocreate merely a modus-vivendibut an overlapping consensus onshared principles of justice that imply the realization of politicalvalues. He wants to steer a course &dquo;between the Hobbesianstrand in liberalism-liberalism as a modus vivendi secured by aconvergence of self- and group-interests as coordinated andbalanced by well-designed constitutional arrangements-and aliberalism founded on a comprehensive moral doctrine such asthat of Kant or Mill.&dquo;2°

Justice and the Political

Despite the fact that I sympathize with Rawls’s assertion that weshould start from our democratic tradition to elaborate aconception of justice instead of trying to look for a point of viewexterior to our historical insertion in order to reach supposedly&dquo;true&dquo; ahistorical principles, I consider his approach inadequate.The reason lies, I believe, in the unsatisfactory notion of thepolitical that we find in his work. As far as politics is present at allin Rawls, it is reduced to the &dquo;politics of interest,&dquo; i.e., the pursuitof differing interests defined previously and independently of theirpossible articulation by competing alternative discourses. Theaim of his theory of justice is to regulate that pursuit byestablishing agreed-upon, neutral rules. Of course those ruleshave for Rawls a moral character, so his conception is not a purelyinstrumentalist one; there should be moral limits imposed to thesearch for self-interest. But between the &dquo;reasonable&dquo; and the&dquo;rational&dquo; there is no space left for something properly political,



113

whose nature we could establish independently of morality oreconomics. The term might be present-and increasingly so-inhis writings but only in some kind of negative way to specify a formof morality which is not based on a comprehensive doctrine andthat applies only to certain areas.

We are told that &dquo;the first feature of a political conception of justiceis that, while such a conception is, of course, a moral conception,it is a moral conception worked out for a specific kind of subject,namely, for political, social and economic institutions&dquo; and that&dquo;the second feature complements the first: a political conceptionis not to be understood as a general and comprehensive moralconception that applies to the political order.’’21 Until now nothinghas been said in a positive way about the specific nature of thepolitical. Finally Rawls introduces the third feature of a politicalconception of justice : &dquo;it is not formulated interms of a general andcomprehensive religious, philosophical or moral doctrine butrather in terms of certain fundamental intuitive ideas viewed aslatent in the public political culture of a democratic society.’*2 Sowe are left with the intuitive ideas to understand in what sense a

conception of justice is political. On the other side, as we haveseen before, the two main intuitive ideas from which he starts arethat society is a fair system of social cooperation and that citizensare free and equal moral persons. Since for Rawls citizens arefree and equal in virtue of their possession of two moral powers:(1 ) capacity for a sense of justice and (2) capacity for a conceptionof the good,23 we are still within the discourse of morality and hisconception of citizenship is hardly a political one.

After presenting his theory of justice as a contribution to moralphilosophy, Rawls later declared that it should better be seen asa part of political philosophy.24 The problem is that since thebeginning Rawls has been using a mode of reasoning which isspecific to moral discourse and whose effects when applied to thefield of politics is to reduce it to a rational process of negotiationamong private interests under the constraints of morality. Soconflicts, antagonisms, relations of power, forms of subordinationand repression simply disappear and we are faced with a typicallyliberal vision of a plurality of interests that can be regulatedwithout need for a level superior to political decision and wherethe question of sovereignty is evacuated. As Carl Schmitt pointedout &dquo;liberal concepts typically move between ethics andeconomics. From that polarity they attempt to annihilate thepolitical as a domain of conquering power and repression. 1125 Tothink politics in terms of moral language, as Rawls does,necessarily leads to neglect of the role played by conflict, powerand interest.

Analyzing the differences between moral discourse and political



114

discourse from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Hanna Pitkinindicates that-while both concern human action-politicaldiscourse alone concerns public action. One of the crucialquestions at stake is the creation of a collective identity, a &dquo;we.&dquo;In the question &dquo;what shall we do?&dquo; the &dquo;we&dquo; is not given butconstitutes a problem. Since in political discourse there is alwaysdisagreement about the possible courses of action, the identity ofthe ‘~ve&dquo; that is going to be created through a specific form ofcollective action might indeed be seen as the central question. ForPitkin, &dquo;Moral discourse is personal dialogue; political discourseconcerns a public, a community, and takes place among themembers generally. Thus it requires a plurality of viewpoints fromwhich to begin; and the interaction of these varied perspectives,their reconciliation into a single public policy, though thatreconciliation will always be temporary, partial and provisional.&dquo;26

Political discourse attempts to create specific forms of unityamong different interests by relating them to a common projectand by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed,the &dquo;enemy.&dquo; Schmitt is right to affirm &dquo;the phenomenon of thepolitical can be understood only in the context of the ever presentpossibility of the friend-and-enemy groupings, regardless of theaspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics andeconomics.&dquo;27 In politics the public interest is always a matter ofdebate and a final agreement can never be reached; to imaginesuch a situation is to dream of a society without politics. Oneshould not hope for the elimination of disagreement but for itscontainment within forms that respect the existence of liberal-democratic institutions. As Pitkin argues, &dquo;what characterizes

political life is precisely the problem of continually creating unity,a public, in a context of diversity, rival claims and conflictinginterests. In the absence of rival claims and conflicting interests,a topic never enters the political realm; no political decision needsto be made. But for the political collectivity, the ‘we’ to act, thosecontinuing claims and interests must be resolved in a way thatcontinues to preserve the collectivity.&dquo;~

Such a view of the political is completely lacking in Rawls whotakes for granted the existence of a common rational self-intereston which the citizens acting as free and equal moral persons canagree and ground principles of justice. He seems to believe thatdisagreements only concern religious and philosophicalquestions and that by avoiding those controversial issues itshould be possible to reach a consensus on the way the basicinstitutions of society should be organized. He is so confident thatthere is only one solution to this problem and that rational personsdeliberating within the constraints of the reasonable and movedonly by their rational advantage will choose his principles ofjustice that he considers it would be enough for one man to



115

calculate the rational self-interest of all. In that case the processof deliberation is supererogatory.29 Politics is not affected by theexistence of pluralism which Rawls understands only as themultiplicity of the conceptions of the good that people exercise inthe private sphere, perfectly separated from the public spherewhere consensus based on self-interest reigns. This is the perfectliberal utopia. As current controversies about abortion clearlyshow, pluralism does not mean that all those conflictingconceptions of the good will coexist peacefully without trying tointervene in the public sphere and the frontier between public andprivate is not given once and for all but constructed and constantlyshifting. Moreover at any moment &dquo;private&dquo; affairs can witness theemergence of antagonisms and thereby become politicized.Therefore Rawls’s &dquo;well-ordered society&dquo; rests on the eliminationof the very idea of the political.

There is another way in which the political is absent in Rawls: it isthe political understood as symbolic ordering of social relations,the aspect of &dquo;politics in the profound sense, as the ensemble ofhuman relations in their real, social structure, in their ability toconstruct the world.&dquo;3° It is within such an approach which renewswith the classical type of political philosophy and enquires aboutthe different forms of society, the &dquo;regimes&dquo; (in the Greek senseof politeia), that we can throw light on some problems leftunresolved by Rawls. First what he calls the &dquo;fact of pluralism&dquo; ismuch more than the mere consequence of the acceptance of theprinciple of toleration; it is the expression of a symbolic mutation:the democratic revolution understood as the end of a hierarchical

type of society organized around a single substantive conceptionof the common good, grounded either in Nature or in God. AsClaude Lefort has shown, modern democratic society isconstituted &dquo;as a society in which Power, Law and Knowledge areexposed to a radical indeterminacy, a society that has become thetheatre of an uncontrollable adventure.&dquo;31 The absence of powerembodied in the person of the prince and tied to a transcendentalinstance preempts the existence of a final guarantee or source oflegitimation; society can no longer be defined as a substancehaving an organic identity and democracy is characterized by the&dquo;dissolution of the landmarks of certainty.&dquo; In a moderndemocratic society there can no longer be a substantial unity, anddivision must be recognized as constitutive. Rawls is indeed rightin arguing that &dquo;we must abandon the hope of a politicalcommunity if by such a community we mean a political societyunited in affirming a general and comprehensive doctrine.’<3 Butthis is a characteristic feature of the new ordering of socialrelations and not a consequence to be drawn from the &dquo;fact&dquo; of

pluralism. If Rawls had possessed such an understanding of thepolitical and been able to see the democratic tradition not as asimple collection of shared meanings, institutions and intuitive



116

ideas but as a specific mode of institution of the social, he wouldhave realized that there could never be, in a modern democracy,a final agreement on a single set of principles of justice.

Secondly the vague notion of &dquo;intuitive ideas&dquo; can be reformulatedso as to give equality and freedom a very different status. I agreewith Rawls that a theory of justice in a modern democracy shouldbe focused on howto realize liberty and equality in our institutions.But it is because those are the political principles of the liberal-democratic regime. Those principles command a certain type ofordering of the relations that men establish between themselvesand their world, they give a specific form to democratic society,shape its institutions, its practices, its political culture; they makepossible the constitution of a certain type of individual, createspecific forms of political subjectivity and construe particularmodes of identities. If equality and liberty are central signifiers forus it is due to the fact that we have been constructed as subjectsin a democratic society whose regime and tradition has put thosevalues at the center of social life. Without such an understandingof the political as &dquo;disciplinary matrix&dquo; of the social (to borrow aterm from Thomas Khun) it is impossible to go further than thevery vague notions of &dquo;shared meanings&dquo; and &dquo;intuitive ideas&dquo; andthe empirical generalizations that they imply.

Justice and Hegemony

Liberty and equality constitute the political principles of a liberaldemocratic regime and should be at the core of a theory of justicein a modern democracy. But there are many possibleinterpretations of those principles, the type of social relationswhere they should apply and their mode of institutionalization.Rawls’s claim that he has found the rational solution to this

question has to be rejected outright. For there cannot be such asolution, providing an undisputed and &dquo;publicly recognized pointof view from which all citizens can examine before one anotherwhether or not their political and social institutions are just.&dquo; It isthe very characteristic of modern democracy to impede such afinal fixation of the social order and to preclude the possibility fora discourse to establish a definite suture. Different discourseswill, indeed, attempt to dominate the field of discursivity andcreate nodal points through the practice of articulation but theycan only succeed in temporarily fixing meaning.

Part of the struggle characteristic of modern politics is to

constitute a certain order, to fix social relations around nodalpoints, but successes are necessarily partial and precariousbecause of the permanence of antagonistic forces. Discoursesabout justice are part of that struggle because, by proposingcompeting interpretations of the principles of liberty and equality,



117

they provide grounds of legitimation for different types ofdemands, create particular forms of identification and shapepolitical forces. In other words they play an important role in theestablishment of a specific hegemony and in construing themeaning of &dquo;citizenship&dquo; at a given moment. A successfulhegemony signifies a period of relative stabilization and thecreation of a widely shared &dquo;common sense&dquo; but such an

overlapping consensus is to be distinguished from theArchimedian point of rational agreement that Rawls is searching.Far from providing the final, rational solution to the problem ofjustice-which in a modern democracy is bound to remain a

permanent, unresolved question-Justice as Fairness is onlyone among the possible interpretations of the political principlesof equality and liberty. To be sure, it is a progressive interpretationand in the context of the aggressive reassertion of neo-liberalismand its attacks against welfare rights and the widening of the fieldof equality, Rawls’s intentions are commendable. But it must beseen as an intervention in an ongoing debate and cannot pretendto a privileged status with respect to other more or less radicalinterpretations. The emphasis put on the rational choice

procedure might be of rhetorical value-given the current

intellectual context-and it might even produce political effects,but it is no guarantee of objectivity.

Rawls has been accused of collapsing justice into equality and ofpresenting an equalitarian vision far from faithful to the sharedmeanings dominant in the United States. But that is not the pointand the problem is not how well he reflects the actual values of theAmericans since what is really at stake is their transformation. AsJohn Schaar has argued, Rawls proposes &dquo;a basic shift in our

operative definition of equality and he wants to move away fromour present understanding of equality of opportunity.’+ Heproposes a new articulation that could-if successful-redefinethe &dquo;common sense&dquo; of liberal democracies and give a newmeaning to citizenship. I believe it is an important task and that weneed today a political conception of justice that could provide apole of identification for democratic forces as well as a newlanguage of citizenship to confront the individualistic conceptionsbased on efficiency or individual liberty of the Hayek or Nozicktype.

But if we agree to approach Rawls’s theory from that angle the realquestion that we should ask is how effective would it be in fulfillingsuch a role. The test for a discourse aiming at the establishmentof new forms of articulation is its adequacy in creating a linkbetween recognized principles and hitherto unformulateddemands. Only if it manages to construct new subject positionscan it have a real purchase on people’s political identities. Myimpression is that, from that point of view, the chances of Justice



118

as Fairness are not very good. It is a theory elaborated in the eraof the &dquo;great society&dquo; and addressing a type of democratic politicswhich has been displaced in the following decades. New politicalsubjects have emerged, new forms of identities and communitieshave been created and a traditional type of social-democraticconception of justice exclusively centered around economicinequalities is unlikely to capture the imagination of the new socialmovements. A political conception of justice with little space forthe new demands manifest in the women’s movement, the gaymovement, the ecological and anti-nuclear movement and thevarious anti-institutional movements, while aiming at defendingand deepening ideals of liberty and equality present in ourdemocratic culture will not be in a position to create the

overlapping consensus needed for the establishment of a newhegemony. One should also take account of the fact that a newideological terrain has been defined by the attacks of the rightagainst state intervention and bureaucratization and that it

requires for its deconstruction a discursive strategy that canprovide new forms of articulation for anti-state resistances. Theshortcomings of Rawls on that count are all too evident since histheory of justice implies a great amount of state intervention.

In &dquo;Spheres of Justice,&dquo; Michael Walzer proposes a pluralistconception of justice that I consider to be better suited to thedefense of an egalitarian ideal today and more sensitive to thepresent political struggles. Walzer criticizes the ideal of &dquo;simpleequality&dquo; because it would need continual state intervention andargues that &dquo;equality cannot be the goal of our politics unless wecan describe it in a way that protects us against the moderntyranny of politics, against the domination of the party/state.&dquo;36The solution of complex equality that he puts forward intends toavoid those problems by distinguishing different spheres ofjustice with their respective distributive principles. He states thatthe principles of justice should be pluralistic in form and thatdifferent goods should be distributed in accordance with differentprocedures and by different agents. Even if Walzer does notaddress directly the question posed by the demands of the newmovements, his general approach could be useful to deal withthose problems because, contrary to Rawls, he provides us witha pluralistic framework which is crucial for the formulation of anadequate theory of justice and conception of citizenship in thepresent stage of democratic politics.

Political Philosophy Without Foundations

Despite its shortcomings Rawls’s theory of justice poses a seriesof very important questions for political philosophy. His veryincapacity in providing a satisfactory answer to those questionsis instructive of the limitations of the liberal approach and



119

indicates the way towards a solution. The great merit of Rawlsconsists in stressing that in modern democratic societies wherethere is no longer a single substantive common good and wherepluralism is central, a political conception of justice cannot bederived from one particular religious, moral or philosophicalconception of the good life. We should reject today the idea of apolitical community unified by an objective moral order for whichsome communitarians like Sandel are longing.

If the &dquo;priority of the right over the good&dquo; meant only that, it wouldbe unobjectionable. The problem is that Rawls cannot accept thatsuch a priority of the right is the consequence of the symbolicordering of social relations characteristic of the liberal-democraticregime and is therefore derivative of an idea of the good, thepolitical principles that define it as a political association. I thinkthat the reasons are twofold. As I have argued the politicalproperly speaking is absent in Rawls and the very notion ofregime as politeia is precluded; secondly his reliance on a liberalindividualistic conception of the subject impedes him fromthinking of the subject as discursively constructed through themultiplicity of language games in which a social agentparticipates. The subject in Rawls remains an origin, it exists

independently of the social relations in which it is inscribed.

To be sure, he now insists that what he says about the originalposition only concerns us qua citizens and that it does not implya fully-fledged theory of the self. But the problem is that even theway he addresses our nature qua citizens is inadequate and doesnot recognize that a certain type of citizenship is the resu It of givenpractices, discourses and institutions. For Rawls equality andliberty are properties of human beings qua moral persons.Against Dworkin’s interpretation in terms of natural right, 37 heaffirms that justice as fairness is not a &dquo;right-based&dquo; but a&dquo;conception-based&dquo; or &dquo;ideal-based&dquo; theory since it is based onintuitive ideas that reflect ideals implicit or latent in a public cultureof a democratic society.38 But as we have seen those intuitiveideas are never attributed any concrete status, nor are they put inrelation with the principles of the regime. No explanation is evergiven why we happen to have those ideas. Rawls seems to rejectthe idea of &dquo;natural rights&dquo; while being unable to accept that it isonly qua citizens of a certain type of political community that wehave rights; so his whole conception stands in a vacuum.

My guess is that he has been trying to move away from auniversalistic, individualistic and natural right type of liberaldiscourse but has not yet succeeded in replacing it with a

satisfactory alternative because of his incapacity to think of thecollective aspect of human existence as constitutive. Theindividual remains the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem



120

and that prevents him from conceptualizing the political. I thinkthat it is in that context that one should understand his conflationof political discourse with moral discourse and his evasion of thecentral political notions of power, conflict, division, antagonismand sovereignty, as well as the values that can be realized incollective action.

As a result what Rawls presents as political philosophy is simplya specific type of moral philosophy, a public morality to regulatethe basic structure of society. Indeed he asserts that &dquo;thedistinction between political conceptions of justice and othermoral conceptions is a matter of scope; that is the range of subjectto which a conception applies, and the wider content a widerrange requires.&dquo;39 That is exactly where the problem lies becauseI believe that the distinction should be one of nature, not merelyof scope. A modern political philosophy should articulate politicalvalues, the values that can be realized through collective actionand through common belonging to a political association. Its

subject matter is the ethics of the political which should bedistinguished from morality.

But Rawls’s conception precisely precludes such an

understanding of political philosophy: there is no room for a notionof the political common good, no place for a really politicaldefinition of citizenship and he can only conceive of citizens asfree and equal moral persons engaged in fair terms of socialcooperation. Here his communitarian critics who want to revivethe ideals of civic republicanism do have a point. Such a traditioncould help us to restore some dignity to political participation andgo beyond the liberal conception that can only identify citizenshipwith the possession of rights or moral powers.

There is nevertheless a danger that needs to be avoided; wecannot go back to a premodern conception and sacrifice theindividual to the citizen. A modern conception of citizenshipshould respect pluralism and individual liberty; every attempt toreintroduce a moral community, to go back to a &dquo;universitas&dquo; is tobe resisted. One task of a modern democratic politicalphilosophy, as I see it, is to provide us with a language to articulateindividual liberty with political liberty so as to construe new subjectpositions and create different citizens’ identities. I consider that atheory of justice has an important role to play in such an endeavorbecause as Aristotle already noted &dquo;participation in a commonunderstanding of justice makes a polis.&dquo;40 Nevertheless it shouldnot be forgotten that under modern conditions the most that atheory of justice can aspire to is to cement an hegemony, toestablish a frontier, to provide a pole of identification around acertain conception of citizenship but in a field necessarily criss-crossed by antagonisms where it will be confronted by opposingforces and competing definitions.



121

Politicat philosophy in a modern democratic society should not bea search for foundations but the elaboration of a languageproviding us with metaphoric redescriptions of our socialrelations. By presenting us with different interpretations of thedemocratic ideal of liberty and equality it will not supplymetaphysical foundations for the liberal-democratic regime (theycannot exist and it does not need any) but it could help us todefend democracy by deepening and extending the range ofdemocratic practices through the creation of new subjectpositions within a democratic matrix.

Rawls’s theory of justice-even if he is not fully aware of it-

belongs to such a struggle and despite all its limitations there isa lot in it which is of value for the advance of democracy. Hisdefense of political liberalism should be reformulated within adiscourse that would articulate it with some themes of classical

political philosophy and with the valorization of politics of the civicrepublican tradition. To recognize the Aristotelian insight that manis a zoon politikondoes not commit us necessarily to a teleologicaland essentialist conception. Several contemporary theoreticalcurrents converge in stressing how participation in a communityof language is the sine qua non of the construction of humanidentity and allow us to formulate the social and political nature ofman in a non-essentialist way. It should therefore be possible tocombine the defense of pluralism and the priority of rightcharacteristic of modern democracy with a revalorization of thepolitical understood as collective participation in a public spherewhere interests are confronted, conflicts sorted out, divisionsexposed, confrontations staged and in that way-as Machiavelliwas the first to recognize-liberty secured.

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," inHabermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Oxford 1985), p.162.

2. For this distinction see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of theModern Age (MIT Press 1983).

3. Richard Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," The Journalof Philosophy, Vol. LXXX, No. 10 (October 1983), p. 585.

4. Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, (Oxford 1973), p. 166.

5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Oxford 1971), p. 11.

6. John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of



122

Philosophy 77, 9 (September 1980), p. 518).

7. Ibid., p. 519.

8. John Rawls, "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," OxfordJournal of Legal Studies, Volume 7 No. 1, Spring 1987, p. 12.

9. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,"Philosophy and Social Affairs, Summer 1985, Volume 14 No. 3, p.225.

10. Ibid., p. 235.

11. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 303.

12. Ibid., p. 302.

13. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," p. 237, note20.

14. Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences,Philosophical Papers 2, (Cambridge 1985), p. 309.

15. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,(Cambridge 1982) and "Morality and the Liberal Ideal," New Republic,May 7, 1984. For a more detailed critique of Sandel see my article "Lelibéralisme américain et ses critiques," Esprit, March 1987, Paris.

16. William A. Glaston, "Moral Personality and Liberal Theory," PoliticalTheory, Vol. 10, No. 4, November 1982, p. 506.

17. Ibid., p. 498.

18. Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, (Cambridge1987).

19. This distinction is introduced by Rawls in "Kantian Constructivism inMoral Theory" to specify the two elements of any notion of socialcooperation: the Reasonable refers to a conception of the fair terms ofsocial cooperation and articulates an idea of reciprocity and mutuality;the Rational corresponds to the other element and expresses aconception of each participant’s rational advantage.

20. Rawls, "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," p. 23.

21. Ibid., p. 3.

22. Ibid., p. 6.

23. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," p. 226 ff.

24. Ibid., p. 224, note 2.

25. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, (Rutgers 1976), p. 71.



123

26. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, (Berkeley 1972),p. 216.

27. Schmitt, p. 35.

28. Pitkin, p. 215.

29. Rawls declares: "To begin with, it is clear that since the differences

among the parties are unknown to them, and everyone is equally rationaland similarly situated, each is convinced by the same arguments.Therefore, we can view the choice in the original position from thestandpoint of one person selected at random" (A Theory of Justice, p.139). As Bernard Manin has pointed out, what Rawls calls deliberationis a simple process of calculation. See B. Manin "Volonté générale oudélibération?", Le Débat, No. 33, January 1985, Paris.

30. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, (Paris 1957), p. 230.

31. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford1986), p. 305.

32. Claude Lefort, Essais sur le Politique (Paris 1986), p. 29.

33. John Rawls, "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," p. 10.

34. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," p.229.

35. John Schaar, Legitimacy in the Modern State (Transaction Books,1981), p. 214.

36. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, (New York 1983), p. 316.

37. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, (Harvard 1977),chapter 6.

38. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," p.236.

39. John Rawls, "The priority of Right and Idea of the Good in Justice asFairness" mimeographed paper given to the conference in Paris on ATheory of Justice on March 21, 1987, p. 2.

40. Aristotle, Politics, book I, chapter II, 1253a15.



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