It is difficult to transport oneself back to the situation where Rawls found moral and political philosophy in America in the early 50s. Moral philosophy was concerned pretty much exclusively with the study of the meaning of ethical language. To the extent that anyone discussed right and wrong, all there was was utilitarianism. There was no political philosophy, zip, zero, nothing. There was Isaiah Berlin, but he felt he had to leave philosophy to do political philosophy. Rawls' work, first in papers like Two Concepts of Rules and (later) Justice as Fairness, put moral philosophy that people could care about back on the map, created a space where real issues could be discussed (laying the groundwork for "applied ethics" and journals like Philosophy and Public Affairs), and eorked on an alternative to utilitarianism.
Then came The Book: A Theory of Justice (1971). All of us who do moral and political philosophy live in its shadow (or maybe its light). Political philosophy since has been (a) lively, and (b) a series of responses to, comments on, and criticisms of ToJ. These points are connected. It's generally agreed that Rawls' detailed argument in ToJ doesn't work, but his method is very important--I don't mean the Original Position, etc., that's the stuff that doesn't work. Rawls showed how to develop and apply the neopragmatist "epistemology" implicit in the philosophy of science of his colleagues Quine and Goodman to ethics in the method of reflective equilibrium, thsu sttating the correct theory of knowledge and justification for the first time in human history. It's also widely thought that even if Rawls' derivation doesn't work, his "two principles of justice" (mysteriously so called, because there are three of them), are pretty much right, or at least a pretty good approximation to the truth.
Rawls' later work, including Political Liberalism, developed the insights of the ToJ in important ways, articulating (aming other things) political justification is different from, and prior to, philosophical justification.
Rawls was never an activist, but while 70s radicals attacked him as being a defender of welfare state capitalism, this was not correct. He was politically progressive. He considered the only choices of economic order that comported with justice to be either (1) market socialism, or (2) what he called property owning democracy (in Marxist lingo, petty commodity production). Rodney Peffer wrote a fine book arguing in one long section that (1) was the Rawlsian way to go. Robert Brenner once told me that Rawls, whom he knew well, was personally quite radical, but tempentally incapable of waving banners or (say) joining PL, as his colleague Hilary Putnam did for a while.
Rawls is not a non-philosopher's philosopher. Of course someone like Doug who likes Judith Butler can hardly complain about technical writing and turgid prose, but Rawls' work _is_ technical and his prose _is_ turgid. The non-Ps and continental Ps among us will get their Rawls through interpreters and translators (like Richard Rorty whose is accessible and literate and bilingual--speaks analytical and contintental). And through the influence of anyone who studied with the man, or who, like me, studied with people who studied with him. In my case, I was trained by Allan Gibbard, Peter Railton, Elizabeth Anderson, and many other students of Rawls.
Without exactly intended to, I have devoted a big chunk of one paper I wrote and practically all of another to his work; it's just the natural starting place in talking about liberalism, justice, democracy, a host of topics.
Anyway, let me sum up my saying that he was far and away the most important Anglo-American, indeed, Euro-American, political philosopher of the last century; only Habermas (with whom he has a number of important similarities, bad writing not least among them), could rival him. (I do not denigrate Lukacs and Gramsci, but because of the failure of the Bolshevik and Eurocommunist projects, their importance is lesser.) I think Putnam is not wrong to suggest that his work will be read for centuries. Everone who knew hima lso says he was a really wonderful human being. I never met him myself.
jks
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >A great one gone. He left the world a better place
> than when he
> >found it. We are all in his debt.
>
> We are? I never felt the debt. From what I've read,
> it seems like an
> industrial strength supply of tedium, and what I've
> heard from fans
> doesn't sound any more impressive. Could you explain
> why he's so
> important that you'd string together three obituary
> cliches in his
> honor?
>
> Doug
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