Liberal egalitarianism: what's worth salvaging?
| Author | Forrester, Katrina |
| Position | LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS |
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (FSB): The first part of your book, In the Shadow of Justice (Princeton 2019), goes back to the 1950s, when the basic parameters of Rawls's theory of justice were, you argue, set. As a historian of Britain, I was fascinated by how much the British Labour Party's revisionists shaped Rawls in the 1950s--you suggest, in fact, that his theory brought 'philosophical order to the ideas of the Labour revisionists' (p25). But because it was so fundamentally formed in this period, Rawlsianism was premised on continuing high levels of growth and public buy-in for welfare programmes, two things that Labour revisionists took for granted but which would become much less secure in the years after the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. In the following decades, as you show, a cohort of Rawlsian political philosophers, defending his work from attacks on left and right, firmed up and elaborated Rawls's already immensely ambitious theory into a kind of juggernaut: huge, with a vast, rigid structure, very slow to turn around, but immensely powerful. Rawlsianism didn't just come to dominate liberal political philosophy, it essentially defined liberal egalitarianism. Other philosophers had to work in its shadow. You want, in your book, to 'denaturalize and defamiliarize' the canons of liberal egalitarianism (p275). What's the practical payoff from doing this?
Katrina Forrester (KF): It can be hard to see the assumptions that underpin a particular way of thinking, and to see the different choices that go into making up the conceptual frameworks that we take for granted and that are coded as 'intuitive'. Among political philosophers, liberal egalitarianism has been a dominant way of thinking about politics, society and ethics, for decades. Though its origins in the political philosophy of John Rawls are constantly revisited, sometimes in a quasi-scriptural way, its political origins are less often interrogated. I wanted to ask what we see if we take liberal egalitarianism as a historical phenomenon to be explained. If it is recast as one of the twentieth century's languages of liberalism, a framework that is one among many, then we might be better placed to ask if it's a language and a framework we want to use.
FSB: One of the anxieties shaping Rawlsianism at its origins, you show, was the mid-twentieth-century anxiety about class which was very common among American liberals (and Americans generally). Do you think that liberal egalitarianism nowadays needs to incorporate a theory of class conflict--and if so, how?
KF: That's a challenging question, because if liberal egalitarian philosophy incorporated a theory of class conflict, it might cease to be recognisable as a form of liberal egalitarianism. It's possible to imagine a Rawlsianism that incorporated a sensitivity to agonism and antagonism--a theory of distributive justice that connected to a different kind of social theory than that which Rawls assumed. Mid-century US liberals were often more concerned with conflicts between values, or between associations and social groups, than with class conflict. Rawls framed social problems in terms of inequalities between individuals or between classes conceived as sociological groups (rather than classes in a Marxist sense). His anxieties about conflict led him to base a theory around the need to find agreement. Today liberal political philosophers still tend to search for agreement, but they are also more likely to attend to relations of domination and conflict (take Lea Ypi's work, for example, or much recent global justice theory).
But I take your question to also be getting at something deeper. With the recent return of theories of capitalism and socialism to mainstream discourse and to political philosophy, there's been a revival of the view that some social divisions just can't be accommodated by or diffused within existing political and economic arrangements (a view long accepted among radical and critical theorists). I would say that that idea--the idea that liberal democratic institutions cannot be set up in such a way that they can contain class conflict while delivering justice--is foreign to a Rawlsian vision. There is a tendency both among liberals and among philosophers to characterise such conflict as potentially eliminated by redistributive fixes, or as temporary and not deep enough to prevent us from living together. Liberal commentators implicitly characterise conflict in this way when they use the language of tribalism. I don't think that a dynamic Marxist theory of class conflict, which would deny the relevance of such fixes, or, for that matter, a dynamic account of capitalist development, could really be incorporated within liberal egalitarianism. That's one of the main reasons I'm critical of liberal egalitarianism, even in its left varieties.
FSB: This links to a question about the labour movement. Rawls placed unions alongside associations like churches as formative for society. You suggest that philosophers like Dworkin who, in the 1980s, wanted a social-democratic theory of equality that wouldn't rely on the labour movement, underestimated just how important...
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