Rawls on the embedded self: Liberalism as an affective regime
| Author | Kiran Banerjee,Jeffrey Bercuson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885114554466 |
| Published date | 01 April 2015 |
| Date | 01 April 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2015, Vol. 14(2) 209–228
!The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885114554466
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Article
Rawls on the embedded self:
Liberalism as an affective
regime
Kiran Banerjee and Jeffrey Bercuson
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
In recent years, political theorists have come to recognize the central role of affect in
social and political life. A host of scholars, coming from a number of distinct traditions,
have variously drawn our attention to the importance of the emotions to the tradition
of the history of political thought, as well as to normative political theory. This atten-
tiveness to affect is often cast as a break with earlier, Enlightenment-inspired liberal
approaches towards politics, approaches that marginalized the emotions, dismissing the
passions as potentially dangerous, or neglected them altogether. According to the con-
ventional liberal view, emotions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while
proceduralist institutions abstract away from citizens’ affective attachments, now cast as
private preferences of individuals qua citizens. In this paper we challenge this prevalent
view. We argue that no less a liberal theorist than John Rawls is deeply attentive to the
place of emotions in his account of liberalism. This may seem counterintuitive given that
Rawls’ work has been frequently criticized for epitomizing some of the deepest prob-
lems of contemporary liberal theory, as a result of the emphasis on rationalism and
reasonableness in his account of liberal justice. However, against this prevalent reading,
we demonstrate that Rawls is in fact highly concerned with the role of affect and
presents us with an account of the embedded liberal subject. By drawing out these
dimensions of Rawls’ thought, we hope to contribute to upending the conventional view
of liberalism as affect-blind in order to encourage a more nuanced reading of the liberal
tradition.
Keywords
John Rawls, emotions, justice as fairness, liberalism, affect
Corresponding author:
Kiran Banerjee, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada.
Email: k.banerjee@utoronto.ca
Introduction
As part of a broader turn within the discipline, political theorists have increasingly
come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life; indeed, many
scholars, coming from a number of distinct theoretical traditions, have drawn our
attention to the importance of the emotions to the tradition of the history of
political thought as well as to normative political theory.
1
This attentiveness to
affect is often cast as a break with earlier, primarily Enlightenment-inspired liberal
approaches towards politics. On such a view, liberalism and liberal theorists have a
deeply ingrained tendency to either neglect or marginalize the emotions, dismissing
affect as inconsequential or as potentially dangerous.
2
The view of liberalism as a
project committed to distancing politics from the passions is often characterized as
anchoring political life in deliberative public reason and a neutralist state.
Consequently, according to such a portrayal of contemporary liberal theory, emo-
tions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while proceduralist institutions
abstract away from the affective attachments, now cast as private preferences, of
individuals qua citizens. Emotions, so the argument goes, ought not to have any
place in the consideration of liberal principles of justice or in the design of political
institutions. Here we challenge this prevalent view. We argue that no less a liberal
theorist than John Rawls is deeply attentive to the place of emotions in his account
of liberalism. In doing so, we hope to contribute to upending the conventional view
of liberalism as affect-blind, in order to encourage a more nuanced reading of the
liberal tradition more generally.
Rawls’ unreasonable rationalism?
Casting Rawls as a theorist sensitive to affect and emotional experience may strike
many readers as counterintuitive. Indeed, Rawls’ work has been frequently criti-
cized for epitomizing some of the deepest problems of contemporary liberal theory,
as a result of the emphasis on rationalism and reasonableness in his account of
liberal justice. Whether a residual of his earlier attempt to bring rationality and
justice together, or a consequence of the explicitly neo-Kantian foundations of his
political thought, Rawls has frequently been taken to be guilty of the propensity of
contemporary theory to ignore or marginalize the emotions.
3
Far from attending to
the embedded and affective dimensions of human nature, so this argument goes,
Rawls is an exemplar of the misguided liberal propensity to articulate a politics of
illusory neutrality grounded in a deracinated and ‘unencumbered’ understanding of
the individual.
Indeed, it is precisely this perspective on Rawls that has informed a number of
prominent critiques of Rawls’ account of justice. In order to situate our own read-
ing, it is helpful to sketch this prevalent interpretation of the Rawlsian project,
from its beginnings in the initial critical response to A Theory of Justice (hereafter
TJ) to more recent challenges from communitarian, feminist, Marxist, and realist
perspectives. This important, and by no means marginal, understanding of Rawls’
project, which focused primarily on the conceptual architecture of the first two
210 European Journal of Political Theory 14(2)
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