"Choice" & History (was Re: Rawls)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Justin:

<<<Uh, because Rawls thinks that institutions are subject to historical
choice--Yoshie makes fun of this fundamentally historical materialist
point, when it is in Rawls' mouth, by calling it a consumerist point of
view, as if Rawls thought you pick out  just institutions off the
supermarket shelf. Rawls thinks no such thing, as you may gather from his
discussion of the abolitionitists or Dr. king in Political Liberalism. But
he does think that that we don't have to accept whatever history has handed
us and say "thank you." In fact he think it would be wrong to do that.>>>

Institutions are transformed through the exercise of collective human
agency (_we_ make history, though not under the circumstances of our own
making), but the conception of history and historical change in the liberal
tradition is not the same as historical materialism (and on this point you
must agree with me, in fact).  For instance, J. S. Mill argues in
_Considerations of Representative Government_:

*****   It was not by any change in the distribution of material interests,
but by the spread of moral convictions, that negro slavery has been put an
end to in the British Empire and elsewhere.  The serfs in Russia owe their
emancipation, if not to a sentiment of duty, at least to the growth of a
more enlightened opinion respecting the true interest of the State.  It is
what men think, that determines how they act; and though the persuasions
and convictions of average men are in a much greater degree determined by
their personal position than by reason, no little power is exercised over
them by the persuasions and convictions of those whose personal position is
different, and the united authority of the instructed.  When, therefore,
the instructed in general can be brought to recognize one social
arrangement, or political or other institution, as good, and another as
bad, one as desirable, another as condemnable, very much has been done
towards giving to the one, or withdrawing from the other, that
preponderance of social force which enables it to subsist.  And the maxim,
that the government of a country is what the social forces in existence
compel it to be, is true only in the sense in which it favors, instead of
discouraging, the attempt to exercise, among all forms of government
practicable in the existing conditions of society, a rational choice.
*****

There are the following assumptions concerning historical change in the
dominant mode of thinking in liberalism:

(1)  Historical change is primarily caused by the spread of enlightened
moral convictions, and hence the history of humankind is a history of
Progress of Ideas.

(2)  Reason and "personal position" (the liberal substitute of status,
conceived as an individual attribute, for class) are opposed to each other;
reason is universal, while "personal position" is particular; government is
universal, while citizens are particular.  The dialectical twins of
particular and universal, individual and society, personal opinion and
Raison d'Etat, etc. are represented in such a fashion to occlude questions
of class relations.  Hence, there is no room for an idea that reason
consists in the working class becoming aware of what we are.

(3)  In seeking to change institutions, one must appeal to the enlightened
self-interest of the subject of "rational choice."  And the subject of
"rational choice" is a passive, consumerist individual, to whom a variety
of historically possible institutions & "social arrangements" are presented
as if they were making a choice of commodities to buy ("good" versus "bad,"
"desirable" versus "condemnable," etc.).

(3)  The enlightened opinion trickles down to "average men" who are to be
"instructed."  Individuals change their minds primarily through rational
persuasion, not through the course of political practice (in which rational
persuasion plays only a limited part).

When we think of historical change in a historical materialist fashion, we
don't hold the above assumptions.  Our conception of change and human
agency is diffeent.  Don't you agree?

BTW, Mill, in the same text, also holds that:

*****   Nothing but foreign force would induce a tribe of North American
Indians to submit to the restraints of a regular and civilized
government....Again, a people must be considered unfit for more than a
limited and qualified freedom, who will not cooperate actively with the law
and the public authorities, in the repression of evil-doers.  A people who
are more disposed to shelter a criminal than to apprehend him; who, like
the Hindoos, will perjure themselves to screen the man who has robbed them,
rather than take trouble or expose themselves to vindictiveness by giving
evidence against him;...a people who are revolted by an execution, but not
shocked at an assassination -- require that the public authorities should
be armed with much sterner powers of repression than elsewhere, since the
first indispensable requisites of civilized life have nothing else to rest
on.   *****

Evidently, for Mill, "rational choice" was not to be applied to the
subjects of the British Empire.  That is to be expected, but it is not a
little interesting to hear him speak so clearly that "a people who are
revolted by an execution, but not shocked at an assassination" are not fit
for self-government.  Crimial justice once again raises its head as one of
the fundamental instruments of the production & distribution of wealth &
power.

Yoshie