Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.

Simpson, Peter

RAWLS, John. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xix + 476 pp. Cloth, $35.00--The title of this book is misleading: the lectures are not on the history of political philosophy (nothing is said, for instance, about the ancients or medievals). Nor are they on the history of moderu political philosophy (although modern authors are the only ones discussed). The lectures are much narrower. The course for which they were given was called Modern Political Philosophy, which would be an accurate enough title if the themes of Rawls' own Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism can count as the substance of such a course. What the lectures are about is the origins of Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, as Rawls admits in several programmatic remarks (so it would have been nice if the editor had made the title do the same). Their express object is the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Sidgwick, and Butler, but they do not give a general or overall account. If readers want that, says Rawls, they should look elsewhere. What he gives here is only how these authors "treat certain topics discussed in my own writings on political philosophy" (p. xvii).

It is, of course, not new that Rawls is working out of the Social Contract tradition which had its modern beginning in Hobbes. But that Hobbes' view of the selfishness of the natural man is an anticipation of Theory of Justice's primary goods or Political Liberalism's overlapping consensus, or that Locke's rejection of Filmer and Sidgwick's rational method of ethics are an anticipation of Theory of Justice's reflective equilibrium, or that Hume's judicious spectator is an anticipation of Theory of Justice's veil of ignorance, or that Rousseau's general will and Mill's principle of liberty are an anticipation of Political Liberalism's public reason, or that Mill's higher pleasures are an anticipation of Theory of Justice's priority of the right to the good, or that Marx's public economic planning is an anticipation of Theory of Justice's difference principle, or that Butler's conscience is an anticipation of Theory of Justice's sense of justice and its pyschological satisfaction--all this came as a welcome surprise to me. It not only made Rawls' thinking and reasoning more transparent but also displayed how exceedingly fine and subtle a reader of others he could be.

I was not surprised, although I was disappointed, that in these lectures, as indeed throughout his work, Rawls has no serious discussion of, nor makes a serious attempt to grapple with, the great thinkers of the ancient and medieval worlds. The Hobbesian problematic, which is absolutely definitive for all modern political thinking, including that of Rawls (for although those who came after Hobbes often rejected his answers, they seldom rejected his way of posing the problem), was, if not decisively refuted, then decisively put into question by Plato's Republic (to say nothing of Augustine's City of God). Should not Rawls have somewhere raised the question of whether doing political philosophy according to this Hobbesian problematic was the right way to proceed? True, he does in these lectures raise criticisms against the authors he discusses, but the purpose, he says, is to examine the respects in which "we, from our point of view and concerned with our own questions or problems, do not find their answers or solutions altogether acceptable" (p.104). A not unworthy aim, but a limited one--so limited, in fact, that one may wonder if Rawls has not thereby abandoned political philosophy for political apologetics. The charge, indeed, that Rawls did thus abandon philosophy has often been leveled against him since he openly professed his aim to be 'political and not metaphysical'.

Actually I wonder whether he even got as far as being political. For while he here justifies the study of political philosophy because it is part of the "general background culture of a democratic society" and because certain "classic texts" are part of "public lore and a fund of society's basic political ideas" (p.3), and while he refers in this context to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, he never discusses, indeed he barely mentions, that text which really forms the "background culture", the "public lore", and the "basic ideas", whether political or otherwise, of our society. I mean, of course, the Bible, which is at least the subtext of both the Declaration and the Address and is the express text of a host of major political documents from the Founding Fathers on. No one who, like Rawls, professes to be concerned with the "background culture" or with "our questions and problems" can afford to ignore the Bible. That Rawls does so throughout his writings is a puzzling omission--an omission that these lectures do nothing to rectify.--Peter Simpson, City University of New York.