This is a... tremendously odd book review, since it's barely about Forrester's book at all, and also her book came out way back last September. Also it's funny (but very cool) to see it here on HN, since unless you're a political philosopher you've probably never even heard of Rawls.

But I have read both much of Rawls as well as Forrester's book, and hopefully I can distill what it's all about here for anyone curious.

In a nutshell, Rawls revived the long-since-discredited notion of the social contract (society is an agreement between people for the common good), and gave a deeply intellectual justification for both liberty, as well as extensive (although not unlimited) redistribution -- thus a "liberal" middle way between pure communism and pure capitalism.

He presented this in a kind of universal way, and thus gave a kind of intellectual respectability to liberal democracy that provides health care, social services, arguably a basic income, and so on, putting that on par with the equal intellectual respectability that free market liberalism had. So liberals who supported social programs weren't just wishful thinkers or muddy-headed -- they had just as much intellectual rigor as market conservatives. This was huge.

But the "universal" aspect of his philosophy always seemed rather suspect. Forrester's book is a wonderful history of how his ideas evolved as products of the time and specific national/international historic circumstances, and were often "out of date" by the time they were published, and therefore there's nothing "universal" about them, and that the veneration given to his ideas may be preventing us from developing even better ones.

But tying any of this to Trump or Dershowitz is total nonsense/clickbait.

> unless you're a political philosopher you've probably never even heard of Rawls

Rawls is one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century. Almost any Ethics 101 course (a requisite in a wide range of fields) will touch on his work.

I've always thought it sort of odd that a living condition floor isn't taken as a functional requirement for systems of self government where by definition the voting population needs enough leasure time to be informed and participating. On the other hand I've never been particularly surprised by self interested actors being more than happy to have many citizens subsisting at a level that precludes such functional participation.

Maybe it is necessary to read the book that the article is ostensibly built around. I hope so, because the article seems to do little to offer an argument for why Rawls attempt at a universal notion of "right" is somehow now seen as a mistake. It closes with this claim:

"In reminding us that even political philosophers who claim to speak outside any particular time or place are, in fact, the product of a particular time and place, Forrester undoes the pretension to timelessness that Rawls claimed, at least for a time."

At best, there's some sort of argument that "a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male analytical political philosophers" are now seen less favorably as people, or at least as "influencers". Fair enough, and almost certainly true, but what does this have to say about Rawls ideas themselves?

The closest it comes is by mentioning Haraway's "god trick" critique, which is not fleshed out nor given any real standing. Haraway's critiques and ideas are not stupid, but they stand in absolute opposition to Rawls (and others of his "kind") in asserting that there really can be no universal knowledge (because it is all situated). This isn't really a critique of Rawls, it's just a denial that the entire project of western philosophy can ever be well-conceived. That might be true, but if so it takes down much, much more than just Rawls and his contemporaries.

If I had to TLDR the article, I'd say "philosopher dude from 70s was once super popular, now faces criticisms from others who never agreed with him."

In a nutshell, Rawls assumes that a kind of "individualist" constitution-based political liberalism is the right answer. I'd say there have been three main critiques of this that have arisen in the past 30 years:

1) That people aren't atomistic individuals, but rather embedded in groups, societies and identities, and so a theory of politics needs to consider the importance of groups as well as individuals, that a group is more than the sum of its members (multiculturalism)

2) That Rawls' focus on constitutionalism basically gives way too much weight to law made by constitutional conventions and interpreted by a supreme court, with normal political processes of voting, representation, and lawmaking seen as relatively unimportant (rights talk, perilously antidemocratic/antipolitical)

3) That liberalism has been having a really hard time lately dealing with populism, immigration, making good political decisions generally, and so on, precisely because it ignores feelings about groups, and that majoritarian democracy seems to be resulting in worse and worse policies lately. So empirically, people are worried that we need some improvements (crisis of liberalism)

I agree with the broad strokes of these critiques, with one exception: Rawls treats individuals as atomistic in terms of a universal ethic (broadly in line with Kant and deriving the law for oneself), but is explicit about the role and value of intersubjectivity in the process of reflective equilibrium.

In other words: Rawls does indeed acknowledge the role of groups and societies in his political theory, and is even prescriptive about their role in moral education (per Piaget). I think it's a interpretative mistake in contemporary analyses of him to ignore that he at least attempts to address this.

Thanks for that. Vastly more informative than the original article.

After reading the article and your response, I've tried to get an overview of John Rawl, theory, and criticism.

However the scholarly criticism I can find referenced don't seem to mention any of the issues you list. They mention at least some the criticism that the linked article mentioned, but I didn't get as far as to see if I found references to all avenues of criticism the article mentioned.

Can you point me to somewhere that critique of Rawls mention the issues you listed, or are we talking about something different?

The points you list seems to more fitting as criticism of a specific kind of liberalism, than towards what can be described as a philosophy that seemingly attempts to independently derive an 'ideal' liberal system based on a small set of rules.

Can you expand on your definition of liberalism a little? It seems like you're defining liberalism by how the word is used collquially in the public context but I took the parent to mean liberalism as in the academic concept realated to philosophy, political science, and international relations theory.

This seems good enough I suppose:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism

Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

I'm speaking more so I think from the perspective of the implementation of liberalism, which is fairly closely tied to managing the affairs of human beings. So in doing so, we have conversations about the nature of society (events, rules, rights, procedures, fairness, speech, etc) and try to come up with an arrangement that maximizes outcomes for "all" people, generally speaking.

The point I was trying to make was with respect to "...liberalism has been having a really hard time lately dealing with...precisely because it ignores feelings about groups...", in that "feeling about groups" is not (precisely) the only thing it ignores. We ignore many variables, including many we consider unimportant (like feelings), and likely also some that we're not even aware of (unknown unknowns).

I think there's a trap whenever you try and pursue an unbiased, universal perspective or theory or truth (and not just in this one space): it can be really easy to lose sight of your own biases and flaws, which always exist, and always impact your perspective. None of us can claim to be fully rational and removed, so whenever we try and venture into the realm of universal truth, we must always keep our own biases front and center and account for them as best we can. That isn't to say we shouldn't pursue those truths, but I think the point being made is that Rawl's framework encouraged people to sweep their own biases under a rug, which is a dangerous thing to do.

For those unfamiliar with Rawls: Dershowitz's application of the veil of ignorance is astoundingly facile.

As the article correctly observes, the VoI is not the Golden Rule: it does not ask us how we how we would feel if the thing we advocate were done to us, but whether we would accept a course of action or policy were we to know nothing about ourselves.

Applied correctly, the VoI encourages everybody to be against political corruption, regardless of political orientation. But this runs contrary to Dershowitz's own political goals, and it's easier to co-opt your dead academic colleague's system than it is to excuse criminality from first principles.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this particular philosophy outlined in the article...

It seems like the argument here is the exact kind of thing that has burned the Democratic Party in recent years.

The Democrats should "play by the rules," treating others how they'd like to be treated, meanwhile the Republican Party continually demonstrates zero regard for norms that don't necessarily exist in law, but are/were a part of traditions in government. For example, what happened to the blue slip system? What happened with Merrick Garland? The Republican Party didn't care that Supreme Court judges were traditionally elected with at least 60% confirmation vote in the Senate, and they certainly didn't care that they were denying a Democratic President his right to appoint any judge.

In reality, the impeachment of Donald Trump happened because there was no downside for the Democrats. They knew that there was no chance of conviction, so there was no risk of the destabilization/backlash that might happen if the President was actually removed from office. The upside was not only that Congress could subpoena for information, but also that the party could enjoy the political benefits of the impeachment proceedings. Arguably, it was a time-waster for the Trump administration. It aided the perception of those who might lean Democrat or might dislike Donald Trump that the Democratic Party was working to bring about change. In reality, the effort changed precisely nothing and had no far-reaching political consequences besides a few mild upsides for the Democratic Party (at least that I can see).

The situation reminds me of instances where vote trading happens, where the political parties strategically trade votes on issues they know either will or won't pass. For example, a Democrat or Republican in a weak district might vote against the Party's own initiative to give their constituents the perception that they aren't really like the other members of their party. For a hypothetical example, you could have a Democratic congressperson in a red state vote against gun control legislation, while the hypothetical bill had no chance of failing due to other congresspeople in blue states voting for it.

The idea presented by this article works well for philosophers and intellectuals - but philosophers and intellectuals do not run our government, and politics have nothing to do with such things. It's mostly about perception, vote-gathering, and fundraising. Truth and morals don't play in at all, and the general populace isn't thinking on this kind of deep level in the first place. The Impeachment of Donald Trump now feels like a lifetime ago, and, compared to other aspects of this Presidency, weird to say it but it's a footnote.

This seems like a really slanted explanation that largely overlooks the lead up to the events you mentioned. First, the parties have always tried to out maneuver eachother. Things like judge appointment might be departures from a specific norm but they're not a departure from the broader trend of exploring the system for pressure points that can be leveraged into comprehensive strategies. The US isn't the UK or a lot of Europe, agents of the system frequently depart from established norms because those norms are just gentleman's agreements like you said and not things important to the system like the various ways the queen routinely waives chances to exercise her various reserve powers. The concern was much more simply that being viewed as ungentlemanly could backfire but that quit mattering as much after Trump ran basically all of his 2016 campaign on the image of being a rude crude anti-Bernie who'd whip DC into shape (lots of people viewed these two as the wild card candidates for some reason even though they were very different).

And the impeachment itself was fought by many influential Democrats, including Pelosi, precisely because they knew it would fail and were concerned the loss would motivate opposition voters while damaging the 2020 turnout of Democrats who might see it as a sign that the party was still largely impotent or simply disorganized. Just because Pelosi prefers to drive the car doesn't mean she likes the destination. She was criticized often beforehand for fighting the idea of an impeachment. She probably just realized that the topic wasnt going away after all, so presenting a unified front was better a better option than letting the infighting go on damaging the party's optics. But now the impeachment is largely viewed as just another in a series of fishing expeditions (to people in states that don't reliably vote for one party or the other) and on top of that the progressives in the party are currently demoralized that their candidate is an establishment figure rather than someone more extreme like they'd been hoping for.

It arguably would have been no worse if they'd just bided their time and focused on dominating the 2020 media landscape with a flurry simultaneous actions. This could have been used to eclipse media narratives like Biden compromising #MeToo's integrity or the association between the Dems and staying locked down (Americans are rapidly developing lockdown fatigue). But instead the Dems are going into an election against an incumbant President with no compelling parries left, most vocal elements of the party exhausted, and a press that (outside historically sympathetic outlets like CNN and WaPo) has lost its original interest in party mascots like AOC who could have been useful in 2020 to motivate the youth and progressive votes following the defeats of Yang and Bernie.