<<<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