What Does Being a Post-Rawlsian Mean? The Same as Being a Post-Walrasian!
Less than two weeks ago, I presented my paper “Rawlsian Public Reason and the Democratic Form of Life” at the “Grand-Est Economics & Philosophy Webinar”, a webinar jointly organized by the universities of Lorraine, Reims, and Strasbourg. I develop in this paper criticism of Rawls’s account of the democratic form of life. This account plays a key role in Rawls’s later work in his attempt to solve what he characterized as the stability problem of his theory of justice.
Like many, I obviously appreciate Rawls’s work and maybe a bit more idiosyncratically, I regard his later work, culminating in Political Liberalism, as his most interesting from the present perspective. But also like many commentators, I’m not short of criticisms about Rawls’s various claims, either about justice or the political nature of liberal democracy. During the short presentation of the paper (remember the Q&A format), I presented my approach as “post-Rawlsian”. In the discussion, my colleague Samuel Ferey asked about what remains of Rawls for contemporary political philosophers and economists in face of criticisms such as mine, and wondered about the meaning of the label “post-Rawlsian”. I replied that it should be understood in the same way as the label “post-Walrasian”. I would like to elaborate a bit on this.
I first encountered the term “post-Walrassian” in Samuel Bowles’s fantastic microeconomic textbook. To my knowledge, Bowles is one of the few to use it, at least in the relevant sense. What it is for a microeconomist to be a post-Walrasian? First, the post-Walrassian acknowledges the importance of Walrasian microeconomics (i.e., all the developments around general equilibrium theory) as a key stage in the development of microeconomic theory. Microeconomics, and economics in general, would be probably fairly different had Walras and his follower not developed and published their ideas. To paraphrase Katrina Forrester, economics has been, and in large measure still “in the shadow of Walras”. Second, the post-Walrasian not only recognizes the historical importance of the Walrasian research program but also praises its influence. Of course, many non-economists and even economists have criticized Walrassian microeconomics as being irrelevant to understand the working of market economies. I think that only teachers of economics can understand why this criticism is unfair, at least partially, as the Walrasian framework is very useful to introduce key ideas and concepts that are still relevant today. Nonetheless, and this is the third point, post-Walrassian are not shy about recognizing that Walrassian microeconomics is significantly limited and can only be a starting point for an adequate account of market economies. Ultimately, they may acknowledge that the most appropriate microeconomic theory may retain very few features of the Walrasian approach.
When I dub myself (and others) a post-Rawlsian, I mean exactly these three points. It is obviously arguably debatable that Rawls has set the tone of all discussions in political philosophy over the last five decades. Whether you agree or not with Rawls, you can hardly avoid mentioning him as soon as issues of justice and fairness are raised. From this point of view, he probably figures among the three or five most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Beyond Rawls’s strong influence, the post-Rawlsian will see it as having been of the utmost importance in orienting the debates in the right direction. Beyond Rawls’s own contribution, discussions of his work have considerably helped to advance our understanding of social justice and liberal democracy. Post-Rawlsians are particularly prone to emphasizing the importance of Rawls’s late work on the stability problem, as it has raised many important points and issues whose importance is nowadays obvious. But post-Rawlsians are also very sensitive to the limitations of the Rawlsian framework. This is partly due to the fact that some of these limitations are related to recent transformations within liberal democracies that Rawls could not have anticipated. However, most of the limitations are actually intrinsic to Rawls’s political philosophy. Rawls remained committed to a very formalist approach to justice, not sensitive enough to the diversity of forms of life within liberal democracies and too much influenced by the legalist context of the American society. His view of democracy, articulated with his account of the role of public reason, betrays an idealistic and – I would argue – not necessarily liberal approach to the regulation of disagreement in a free and dynamic society.
In a nutshell, Rawls’s contribution has been of tremendous importance to political philosophy. It has opened a vast research program that is still active. But in the same way that economists started to realize sixty years ago that the Walrasian research program was coming to an end as all the questions which were answerable within it had been answered, the time has come to go beyond Rawls I the study of social justice and the nature of liberal democracy. There are obviously many ways to do this. Libertarian, communitarian, and other “radical” alternatives are obviously not among the options. Charles Larmore’s recent suggestion, still made within the confine of political liberalism, that political philosophy should give more attention to the issue of legitimacy is one possibility. Another one is the research program inspired by the work of Gerald Gaus. There are undoubtedly even more.