Contra Rawls, toward a truer equality

In Monday's post I remarked something to the effect that anyone concerned with justice, or with political philosophy more broadly, has little choice but to reckon with Rawls, whose work in some ways functions as a sun around which present-day Western political philosophy revolves. Today I came across this anecdote in G. A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality, which we've just learned has won the Best Book in Social Philosophy Award, given by the North American Society for Social Philosophy, which underscores the point:

My friend Marshall Berman told me that the Columbia philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen would give a seminar every year on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and that Cohen’s contribution to the seminar proceedings  was to criticize Hegel mercilessly, so that the text lay in shreds by the end of the semester. Then, when a photograph of the Columbia Department was to be taken, Cohen appeared with the Phenomenology under his arm, to be displayed in the picture. A surprised colleague said, “But you’re always attacking it! Why did you bring that book?” Cohen’s answer was “What other book is there?”

I feel something like that about John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. I believe that at most two books in the history of Western political philosophy have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice: Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan. I shall not try to say what I think is great about those books. But among what contributes to the greatness of A Theory of Justice, and of the entire Rawlsian achievement, is that, to put the matter as Hegel would have done had he agreed with me, John Rawls grasped his age, or, more precisely, one large reality of his age, in thought. In his work the politics of liberal (in the American sense) democracy and social (in the European sense) democracy rises to consciousness of itself.

Cohen maintains this warm tone throughout the remainder of his outstanding book, in which he presents a serious challenge to Rawlsian liberalism, in particular the tendency of its adherents to tolerate economic inequality. Reading Cohen has the added benefit that you get to enjoy his writing, which is straightforward, friendly, and actually quite funny -- in short, a pleasure.

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