Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment— more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. His so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. I believe it is time to redeem Theory’s implicit promise of a universalistic , comprehensive Kantian liberalism, a promise that went unredeemed in Rawls’s lifetime but on which this book attempts to deliver. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed. Traveling this road has, without exaggeration, taken me nearly two decades. While I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the early 1990s, I completed a senior thesis on Michael Sandel’s communitarian critique of Rawls, thus initiating a long, almost continuous engagement with contemporary analytic political philosophy. My myriad discussions there with Tom Ungs, Alex Smith, Larry Hall, and Bob Gorman—who showed nearsuperhuman patience with me as an annoyingly earnest and rigidly libertarian undergrad—further sparked my interest in liberal egalitarianism, classical liberalism , and political theory more broadly. A fateful decision to pursue a doctorate in economics at Duke University led to a profitable seven-year detour, during which I continued to examine Rawls and even taught an interdisciplinary class on contemporary analytic political philosophy. After four years of teaching economics, I decided in 1998 to return to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley to pursue my first intellectual love on a full-time basis. I recall and appreciate the warm—if slightly puzzled—support of Tom Ungs, Alex Smith, and Kip Viscusi (my former Preface and Acknowledgments dissertation advisor), who agreed to write letters of reference for what must have looked like a quixotic venture. I am also grateful to David Collier at Berkeley for his role in securing my admission to the political science program; by taking a chance on a weird applicant, he made it possible for me to shift my intellectual and professional trajectory. While at Berkeley, I had the good fortune of having several excellent teachers whose classes reintroduced me to the contemporary analytic and/or Enlightenment traditions of moral and political thought, especially Chris Kutz, Samuel Freeman, Sam Scheffler, and Shannon Stimson (my dissertation advisor). I also benefited from interaction with an unusually active and organized cohort of political theory Ph.D. students, including Robert Adcock, Yvonne Chiu, James Harney, Alison Kaufman, Jimmy Klausen, Robyn Marasco, Mike Signer, Sharon Stanley, Simon Stow, and Carla Yumatle. I am especially grateful for the close and enduring friendships I developed both with Yvonne and with Robert and Alison (now happily married ), whose support and feedback as well as companionship on hikes around the Bay Area I greatly valued. After graduation from Berkeley, short teaching stints at Duke and Stanford allowed me to meet some wonderful scholars whose encouragement during a sometimes rough transition period I appreciated: at Duke, Craig Borowiak, Charles-Philippe David, Peter Euben, Jason Frank, Ruth Grant, and Elisabeth Vallet; at Stanford, Rob Reich, Debra Satz, Tamar Schapiro, Mary Sprague, Peter Stone, Jonathan Wand, and Allen Wood. Landing my current job at UC Davis was nothing short of a godsend: the research support has been matchless, and my colleagues (especially Yuch Kono and my fellow theorist John Scott) are a delight, making my job more entertaining than I could have possibly imagined. The list of people I must thank for comments, criticisms, recommendations, and support regarding this book is long and includes most of those mentioned above: x Preface and Acknowledgments Robert Adcock Facundo Alonso Dick Arneson Nigel Ashford Chuck Beitz Corey Brettschneider Thom Brooks Barbara Buckinx Eamonn Callan Yvonne Chiu John Christman Neal D’Amato Meir Dan-Cohen Jerry Dworkin Lisa Ellis Dave Estlund Peter Euben Jim Fishkin Samuel Freeman Bill Galston Amy Gutmann Vicki Hsueh Brad Inwood Alex Kaufman [3.149...