Against Rawls

John Gray begins his Enlightenment’s Wake with a breathtaking dismissal of neo-liberal political philosophy (the chapter is “Against the new liberalism”). I found it thrilling, and not just because I have a weakness for titles that begin with “Against.”

A few highlights: “It is arguable that the traditional of liberal theorizing [Rawls’s work] inagurated has done little more than articulate the prejudices of an Anglo-American academic class that lacks any understanding of political life in our age – an age distinguished by the collapse of the Enlightenment project on a world-historical scale. Because political philosophy in the Anglo-American [i.e., Rawlsian] mode remains for the most part animated by the hopes of the Enlightenment, above all by the hope that human beings will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a uiversal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality, it cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities.”

Earlier political philosophers from Aristotle to Mill saw their works as “an inquire into the human good that has as its precondition a theory of human nature.” The new liberalism is “an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance.” The new liberalism lacks “anything like a philosophical anthropology, or any other sort of metaphysical commitment.”

Not that it makes much practical difference: “The theorists of the new Kantian liberalism speak for no political interest or constituency, even in the liberal democracies to which their reflections are directed; few members of the political classes in their respective countries know what these theorists are thinking, and none care.”

Not that conservatism is any better off. Later in the book, Gray summarizes traditional conservatism with three beliefs: “human beings as we find them are not individual specimens of generic humanity but practitioners of particular cultures”; the theme of “non-progress,” that is, “the conservative rejection of the idea of indefinite world-improvement as either a realistic or a desirable end of political life”; and finally, the primacy of culture, which means that “neither market institutions nor political institutions can or should be autonomous in regard to the cultures they serve” but “have to be assessed, and controlled, by reference to the ends and norms of the cultures in which they are embedded.”

In place of this traditional conservatism, Gray argues, contemporary conservatism offers only market fundamentalism, which is a variation on the Enlightenment project.