Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

IN 1971 John Rawls published a book called A Theory of Justice, which established his reputation as a philosopher as well as a pre-eminent spokesman for an advanced and sophisticated sort of philosophical liberalism. In this book Rawls sought to rescue Kant’s theory of justice as the primary value deriving from a concept of right, prior to and utterly independent of every notion of the good. Rawls agreed with Kant that uncompromised justice must be the first consideration of human society, but he understood that in order to be “relevant,” as they say, to the empirical twentieth century mind, Kantianism had to be divested of its metaphysical and transcendental matrix. Hence, his own theory of justice “tries to present a natural procedural rendering of Kant’s conception of the kingdom of ends, and of the notion of autonomy and the categorical imperative. In this way the underlying structure of Kant’s doctrine is detached from its metaphysical surroundings so that it can be seen more clearly and presented relatively free from objection.”

Kant and, through his updating of him, Rawls were important to theories of liberal politics because they provided a justification for a radical individualism in which the untrammeled independence of the citizen was paramount. Kant had argued that only “the subject of all possible ends himself” can give rise to the right, that subject being also the subject of an autonomous will; Rawls agreed, denying only that such a subject must be a transcendental, or noumenal, entity. Now comes Michael J. Sandel, like Rawls a professor of philosophy at Harvard, to deny that Rawls can have “liberal politics without metaphysical embarrassment” and to attack the foundations of what he with gentle mockery calls “deontological liberalism.”

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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IN 1971 John Rawls published a book called A Theory of Justice, which established his reputation as a philosopher as well as a pre-eminent spokesman for an advanced and sophisticated sort of philosophical liberalism. In this book Rawls sought to rescue Kant’s theory of justice as the primary value deriving from a concept of right, prior to and utterly independent of every notion of the good. Rawls agreed with Kant that uncompromised justice must be the first consideration of human society, but he understood that in order to be “relevant,” as they say, to the empirical twentieth century mind, Kantianism had to be divested of its metaphysical and transcendental matrix. Hence, his own theory of justice “tries to present a natural procedural rendering of Kant’s conception of the kingdom of ends, and of the notion of autonomy and the categorical imperative. In this way the underlying structure of Kant’s doctrine is detached from its metaphysical surroundings so that it can be seen more clearly and presented relatively free from objection.”

Kant and, through his updating of him, Rawls were important to theories of liberal politics because they provided a justification for a radical individualism in which the untrammeled independence of the citizen was paramount. Kant had argued that only “the subject of all possible ends himself” can give rise to the right, that subject being also the subject of an autonomous will; Rawls agreed, denying only that such a subject must be a transcendental, or noumenal, entity. Now comes Michael J. Sandel, like Rawls a professor of philosophy at Harvard, to deny that Rawls can have “liberal politics without metaphysical embarrassment” and to attack the foundations of what he with gentle mockery calls “deontological liberalism.”