We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2016
For nearly half a century democratic citizens have been preoccupied with the search for self-respect. Though classical liberalism places this question outside its purview and many commentators see in such a concern evidence of a “thin-skinned” political culture, John Rawls has recently provided serious arguments for the political relevance of self-respect. These arguments, we claim, are deeply indebted to the social and political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deep albeit underexamined influence on Rawls shows itself both in Rawls's conception of the social problem as well as in his solution to it. Rawls's belief that the provision of self-respect can solve the social problem is uniquely Rousseauan not only because of its emphasis on equality but also because it suggests political life can and must reconcile the conflicts between self and society at a fundamental level.
1 James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 118–19.
2 Immanuel Kant, “Toward a Perpetual Peace,” in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8:366.
3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 401.
4 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 399, 456.
5 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 348. On the relationship of self-respect and political stability, see Zink, James R., “Reconsidering the Role of Self-Respect in Rawls's A Theory of Justice,” Journal of Politics 73 (2011): 331–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See, e.g., Darwall, Stephen, “A Defense of the Kantian Interpretation,” Ethics 86, no. 2 (1976): 164–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuel Freeman, “Congruence and the Good of Justice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 277–315, esp. 290–96; Thomas Hill Jr., Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7 Robert S. Taylor, Reconstructing Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 51; Freeman, “Congruence,” 277–78.
8 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 462.
9 Two recent exceptions include Jeffrey Bercuson, Rawls and the History of Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2014), and Neuhouser, Frederick, “Rousseau's Critique of Economic Inequality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41 (2013): 193–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 215–21.
10 E.g., Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998); Taylor, Reconstructing Rawls, esp. 41–48.
11 E.g., Freeman, Samuel, “Capitalism in the Classical and High Liberal Traditions,” Social Philosophy and Policy 28 (2011): 19–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a very different rendering of “liberalism,” see Bell, Duncan, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42 (2014): 682–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 E.g., Lester Crocker, “Rousseau's Soi-disant Liberty,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Beyond Rawls, recent liberalizers of Rousseau include Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social, and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
13 John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), xvii, emphasis added. On Rawls's methodology, see Rawls, Lectures, xiii.
14 Rawls, Theory, 62–64, 456–57; see also John Tomasi and Jason Brennan, “Classical Liberalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, ed. David Estlund (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 115–32.
15 See Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,’” in Practical Philosophy, 8:291–92. Whether Kant could allow such a policy for the sake of stability is a somewhat different matter (“Theory and Practice,” 8: 298). We shall deal with this in Section III.
16 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 398. Note that throughout Theory Rawls identifies self-respect—not the social bases of self-respect—as a primary good (e.g., 91, 386, 477), and thus seems to suggest that self-respect can be distributed directly by the basic structure in the same way that rights, liberties, opportunities, income, and wealth are. Rawls later clarified the point, noting that “it is not self-respect as an attitude toward oneself but the social bases of self-respect that count as a primary good” (John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001], 60). We think a careful reading of Theory makes this point abundantly clear, but it continues to be a source of confusion. See, e.g., Gerald Doppelt, “The Place of Self-Respect in a Theory of Justice,” Inquiry 52, no. 2 (2009): 131–33.
17 E.g., Rawls, Theory of Justice, 402–3, 471; John Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 96; Rawls, Lectures, 247–48.
18 Neal, Patrick, “In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant, and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right,” Review of Politics 49, no. 3 (1987): 389CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bercuson, John Rawls, 62.
19 Rawls, Theory, 466, 469.
20 Ibid., 466.
21 Ibid., §§63, 65.
22 Ibid., 469, 386.
23 Celine Spector, “John Rawls' Rousseau: From Realism to Utopia,” http://www.celinespector.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Rawls-Rousseau1.pdf, accessed September 9, 2014.
24 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 402–3, 473.
25 Rawls, Lectures, 247–48.
26 See, e.g., Bercuson, John Rawls, 65–66; and Cohen, Free Community, 1–3. On the importance of recognition specifically, see Neuhouser, Theodicy, 57–70.
27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Roger and Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), 195.
28 See Neuhouser, Theodicy, 57–70.
29 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 473.
30 On bourgeois dividedness, see Werner Dannhauser, “The Problem of the Bourgeois,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Clifford Orwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3–19.
31 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 40.
32 Rousseau, Emile, 312n; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract: With Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed and trans. Roger and Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1978), 55.
33 Rawls, Lectures, 248.
34 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 478.
35 Ibid., 477.
36 Ibid., 374, 376–77.
37 Ibid., 475–76; see also Zink, “Reconsidering,” 335–36.
38 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 387.
39 Spector, “John Rawls' Rousseau,” 8.
40 Rawls, Lectures, 223–24.
41 Rawls believes what he calls “public reason” begins with Rousseau: “it is clear from this that Rousseau's view contains an idea of what I have called public reason. So far as I know, the idea originates with him” (ibid., 231).
42 Ibid., 230–31.
43 Ibid., 241.
44 Rawls states plainly that “Kant is the best interpreter of Rousseau,” and claims a debt to Dent and Neuhouser as well (see Rawls, Lectures, 200, 198n).
45 Cohen, Rousseau, 11; Neuhouser, Theodicy, 22.
46 Quoted in Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6.
47 Freeman, “Congruence,” in Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 278.
48 Ibid., 277. See also Freeman, Rawls, 272–78.
49 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 456–80.
50 Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” 96.
51 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 456–58.
52 Kant, “Toward a Perpetual Peace,” 8:366, italics in original.
53 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 435.
54 Ibid., 459, 463.
55 Ibid., 387.
56 Ibid., 462–63.
57 Ibid., 459n4.
58 Ibid., 464.
59 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 503.
60 Ibid., 501.
61 Rawls, Lectures, 240.
62 Ibid., 369–70.
63 Rousseau, Social Contract, 56.
64 Rawls, Lectures, 235.
65 Ibid., 219–20.
66 Spector, “John Rawls' Rousseau,” 17.
67 Rousseau, Social Contract, 56.
68 Ibid.
69 It may be urged that Rawls's inattention to the illiberal dimensions of Rousseau's thinking is deliberate, and that, far from being influenced by Rousseau in some deep way, Rawls is instead using Rousseau's texts as raw materials that help him articulate his own independently formulated concerns. Without denying that Rawls's interpretation of Rousseau is influenced by his own philosophical perspective, we wish to stress that his hermeneutic principles do not allow him to play fast and loose with the text. In “Some Remarks about My Teaching,” Rawls claimed that the first goal of textual interpretation was to “pose their philosophical problems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and political philosophy then was.” He goes on: “Yet I didn't say, not intentionally anyway, what to my mind they should have said, but what they did say, supported by what I viewed as the most reasonable interpretation of their text. The text had to be known and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form. Leaving aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending” (Lectures, xiii–xiv, emphasis added). Since it was important to Rawls to never reconstruct any philosopher's thought in a way that he believed to be inconsistent with the author's own understanding of the work, we think the connections Rawls notes between his work and Rousseau support our claims about direct influence.
70 Rousseau, Social Contract, 96–104.
71 Ibid., 96.
72 Ibid., 100.
73 Ibid., 101.
74 Ibid., 101–2, emphasis added.
75 Ibid., 61.
76 Ibid., 101.
77 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, in Politics and the Arts, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 100.
78 Ibid., 99.
79 Ibid., 105.
80 E.g., Doppelt, “Place of Self-Respect,” 127–54; and Zaino, Jeanne S., “Self-Respect and Rawlsian Justice,” Journal of Politics 60, no. 3 (1998): 737–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 111.
82 See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 4–6.
83 See Freeman, “Capitalism,” and Tomasi and Brennan, “Classical Liberalism.”
84 On Rawls's interpretive method, see Frazer, Michael, “The Modest Professor: Interpretive Charity and Interpretive Humility in John Rawls' Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy,” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (2010): 218–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 Rawls, Lectures, 193.
86 See Rousseau, Emile, 40. See also Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
