8

The Limits of Philosophy

BY THE 1980S, the new philosophy was under attack. While liberal egalitarians grappled with the ideas of the New Right, a number of critics rejected both Rawls and the approach to political philosophy he was taken to represent. Political philosophers had elevated constitutional law and constructed a “distributive paradigm.”¹ They had made morality fundamental at the level of justification, interpersonal relationships, and institutions, and had applied ethical principles across an increasing number of spheres of social and political life. All this was now challenged. A number of philosophers and political theorists, including Michael Walzer, Judith Shklar, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Stanley Cavell, and Michael Sandel, published critiques of philosophy, liberalism, or both. Liberal philosophy, according to these critics, misunderstood psychic and ethical life. It misconstrued the nature of the self and human agency. And it neglected the realities of morality, community, and politics. Over the course of the decade, these critiques came to be understood as the standard alternatives to liberal egalitarianism. The irony was that they ultimately aided the remaking of political philosophy in Rawls’s shadow.

To many in the 1980s, the postwar liberal order seemed to be coming undone. Liberal universalisms were contested across the human sciences. New approaches and interpretive strategies were taken up within the Anglophone academy. Anthropologists, historians, and postcolonial, literary, and cultural theorists wrestled with the implications of feminism, deconstruction, post-Marxism, and poststructuralism, as well as new critical theories that challenged, destabilized, and redescribed identity and agency.² This forced a reckoning with the universalisms of midcentury socialism and anticolonialism as much as those of liberalism.³ New market and business ideologies made others worry about the fragmentation of civil society, the dissolution of the pluralist “civic culture,” the decline of character, and the hollowing out of institutions. Political scientists argued that social life had fragmented and atomized and traditional communities had been destroyed.⁴ There was disagreement about the source of that destruction: some saw the problem as the age of affluence and consumerism; others worried about its passing. But the idea that the current social order left people “bowling alone” was widespread.⁵ Faced with the right’s efforts to curtail the welfare state, many started to invoke the value of community. With the Cold War freeze, and with neoliberal policies and international humanitarian politics gaining ground, the welfarist and internationalist schemes of the previous decade receded.⁶

The challenge to universalism and the worry about community took a particular form within liberal political theory, as these ideas were deployed in debates at both the center and the margins of the intellectual world that philosophers had built. A number of political theorists and philosophers borrowed from these discourses to challenge the dominant assumptions and claims of liberal political philosophy. The postwar search for objective ethics, out of which Rawls’s theory was born, had long inspired opposition. Since the 1960s, many had criticized the attempt to carve up morality and politics into purportedly universal and objective principles. While analytical philosophers had looked for universal grounds for judgment, others had explored alternative ways of understanding the nature of the self and the tasks of philosophy. By the 1980s, the critics of liberal philosophy also challenged the philosophical search for systematicity by appealing to literature, history, and interpretation. Liberal egalitarianism, and analytical political philosophy in general, was criticized for its commitment to neutral rules and universal principles. Its critics came to be identified with ideas of interpretation, experience, the local, and the particular. Some aimed to replace the unrealities of “Kantian abstractions” with thicker visions of self and community, opposing both liberal proceduralism and the encroachment of the market into social life. Others appealed to humanity instead of equality and stressed the fragilities of ethical life and the need to protect individuals from cruelty. They focused on the threat of group and state power to bodily security and the physical and psychological risks that politics could pose to individuals if power were left unchecked.

For these critics, Rawls and his followers were key targets. Liberal political philosophy came to be seen as a technocratic and bureaucratic form of thought that prioritized consensus and distributional decisions over legitimacy or democracy, and interpersonal and procedural justification and “public reason” over collective reasons and control. Many political theorists came to associate the commitment of liberal philosophers to neutrality in markets and institutions of governance with a legalistic, antidemocratic expertise that put philosophy above democracy or community. Divisions between liberal egalitarians and their critics thus hardened, with consequences for how political philosophy and, in turn, political theory were understood. The field of normative political theory had developed its postwar disciplinary identity in opposition to behavioralist political science’s claims to value-neutrality.⁷ But it had also defined itself increasingly against Rawlsian political philosophy, in meetings of professional associations like the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (founded in 1967) and journals like Political Theory (founded in 1973). Divisions among political philosophers and political theorists in part followed the already established divide between “continental” and “analytic” theory, which itself tracked the demographics of elite philosophy departments where continental theory was marginalized and labeled heterodox.⁸ While European post-Marxist and critical theories were largely ignored by the analytical philosophers of public affairs, the political theorists who were heirs to the New Left’s democratic critiques of liberalism embraced them and now canonized alternative theorists, like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Sheldon Wolin.⁹ Though some of these traditions of political theory prided themselves on having nothing to say to Rawls or his followers, others challenged him directly. For the still mainstream liberal strand of normative political theory that now turned to ideas of democracy and community and a liberal skepticism of state power, Rawls came to stand in as definitional of the liberal philosophy under critique.¹⁰

Rawls’s theory was thus associated with many characteristics that he himself had opposed. His critics revisited arguments that he had explored as he formulated his own opposition to midcentury administrative politics. They assessed the abstractions that were fundamental to his early work, such as his ideas of the self and community. Some retraced his steps by exploring problems of objectivity in ethics and by reimagining the possibilities for American society. As they did so, they sometimes entered territory that liberal egalitarians neglected, like the claims of disadvantaged groups or problems of culture. Others returned to the analysis of totalitarianism and the individual that had first structured Rawls’s social philosophy. By the end of the 1980s, a communitarianism and an anti-totalitarian liberalism became liberal egalitarian’s most influential alternatives among political liberals. With liberal egalitarians turning inward, by debating equality in technical terms, their critics looked backward, to postwar concerns. They remained within the philosophical world built from postwar liberalism, even as that world changed as they wrote. Those political theorists who challenged fundamental liberal premises by appealing to distinctive intellectual traditions rarely achieved a similar prominence in elite institutions. The mainstream alternatives to liberal egalitarianism were those that could be accommodated within the postwar liberal paradigm and that continued to take Rawls and Rawlsian liberalism as target or referent. They were authored often by close colleagues who worked at the same universities. Many of these theories therefore provided mirror images of liberal political philosophy, not the political alternative they promised. Political theory remained in the shadow of the theory of justice.

Already in the 1970s, a number of philosophers and political theorists had objected to certain characteristics of the new liberal philosophy. Critics challenged its commitment to rationality, rules, neutrality, and objectivity, and invoked anxieties about Cold War “algorithmic rationality,” as well as charges of “rationalism,” “formalism,” and behaviorism to do so. In his criticism of social science for its role in the Vietnam War, Stuart Hampshire, for instance, had claimed that modern moral philosophy faced the same problems as behavioralism. “Computational” moralities dismissed the nonpropositional and unprogrammed elements in morality altogether, “falsely confident that these elements can all be ticketed and brought into the computations.”Rationalist “ethicists”—with their focus on agents able to give reasons for their actions—neglected that which could not be consciously articulated and ignored the philosophical premise Hampshire called “the inexhaustibility of description.” Practical dilemmas could not be solved through the rational application of principles. Nor were the processes of reasoning that preceded moral and political decisions easily “reconstructible,” like legal decisions. Knowledge of moral laws was no substitute for practical reason gained through “experience.”¹¹ The vision of the relationship of theory and practice at the heart of liberal philosophy failed to capture what ethical, social, and political life was like.¹²

The critique of rule-bound moralities would be a key part of the critique of Rawlsian philosophy in the 1980s. It began in response to social science and utilitarian moral philosophy. In 1972, Bernard Williams had argued that utilitarianism forced individuals to live an incoherent life.¹³ By inviting agents to see their lives from a utilitarian point of view, it required that they view their moral feelings as “merely objects of utilitarian value.” But “because our moral relation to the world is partly given by such feelings, and by a sense of what we can or cannot ‘live with,’ to come to regard those feelings from a purely utilitarian point of view . . . as happenings outside one’s moral self, is to lose a sense of one’s moral identity; to lose, in the most literal way, one’s integrity.” Utilitarianism, for Williams, alienated a person from their “moral feelings” and actions.¹⁴ It was “too much and too unknowingly caught up” in “the modern world,” “unreflectively appealing to administrative ideas of rationality.”¹⁵ It missed what the agent’s life was about. Over time, these arguments were extended beyond utilitarianism. It was not the only ethical theory that neglected the desires, beliefs, and projects of particular persons. Faced with the rise of deontological ethics after Rawls, Williams reoriented his critique to encompass Kantian moral philosophies of contract and obligation. Kantian ethics was likewise insufficiently involved in concrete ethical realities. Conceptions of rational agency that depended on a “particular conception of the business of making rules” were at the “heart of the Kantian enterprise.”¹⁶ But real people did not think in terms of moral rules or utility. Neo-Kantian Rawlsians had not moved as far away from utilitarianism as they believed.

In the 1980s, the Oxford-trained, social democratic Williams became one of the foremost critics of the philosophy of public affairs. His critique was somewhat internal. But despite, or perhaps because of, his shared concerns, he objected deeply to its trajectory. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Williams delivered a bruising challenge to the “morality system” that encompassed utilitarianism, applied ethics, and the impartial morality he saw as underpinning justice theory. That system was self-deceiving. It stood in the way of proper ethical understanding and people’s capacity to live an ethical life. Where utilitarians eclipsed agency by weighing states of affairs, deontologists overmoralized agency by allowing the notion of obligation to structure ethical thought. It was a mistake to think only an obligation could “beat” an obligation.¹⁷ Moreover, Williams argued, the modern institution of blame rested on an untenable conception of voluntariness that purported to “cut through character and psychological or social determination, and allocate blame and responsibility on the ultimately fair basis of the agent’s own contribution, no more and no less.” This was an illusion. The “purity” of moral philosophy, its “insistence on abstracting the moral consciousness from other kinds of emotional reaction or social influence,” worked to create a series of extreme contrasts—between “force and reason, persuasion and rational conviction, shame and guilt.” But it was not the case that “without voluntariness, there is only force,” that without morality’s “very special obligation, there is only inclination.”¹⁸ In real life, moral obligations were escapable, and that was often a good thing. “Almost all worthwhile human life lies between the extremes that morality puts before us.”¹⁹

By adhering to binaries between the moral and the nonmoral, philosophy ignored the range of human feelings, ethical behaviors, and relationships that might not be covered by the label of morality.²⁰ Williams was as biting about new developments as he had been about postwar analytical philosophy, which he deemed “original” in having not discussed “moral issues at all.”²¹ He thought that liberal philosophy was plagued by a tyranny of logic that resulted in bad and “casuistical” arguments in which principles were taken to their logical conclusions, resulting in answers that were antithetical to people’s expectations and beliefs about their own lives. From the doctrine of double effect to the claim that abortion was morally equivalent to infanticide, the philosophical tendency to invite rationalist extremes was widespread.²² All this provided a false picture of morality as able to provide “a shelter against luck.”²³ Williams shared the liberal egalitarians’ preoccupation with luck and fortune, but he questioned their approach and conclusions. He had influentially claimed that neither practices of blame nor ethically important feelings like guilt and regret were tied only to voluntary control. We blame people not only for what they have voluntarily done but for what they have done as a matter of luck. We often justify actions by how a situation turns out, and sometimes we blame people not for what they do but for who they are. Ascribing moral responsibility for outcomes to individuals was thus more complex than the morality system suggested with its claim about the impossibility of moral luck.²⁴ Williams thought morality’s realm had been overextended. It did not know its limits in the realm of value, where it had become hegemonic, dominating realms best left to other kinds of valuation. Nor did it in the realm of fortune, where it failed to understand the accidents of character and history.

At the turn of the 1980s, Williams was not the only prominent philosopher to argue for the abandonment of the belief that impersonal, systematizing, and rule-based theories could make sense of the particularities of the world. But his attacks were particularly explicit. “Ready-made philosophical theory” could not be applied to historically, psychologically, and politically specific circumstances.²⁵ When it came to “applying ethics,” every part of life and each professional morality had different virtues and psychologies. Philosophers went wrong when they took models of ethically “special” relationships—the lawyer and client, the doctor and patient—to be general and widely applicable. What was needed was to ask political questions about politics, which had its own ethical practices, not impose preformed questions from other parts of philosophy. Alasdair MacIntyre also saw the attempt to formulate rules and principles in abstraction from particular applications as confused: rules did not exist apart from some range of applications.²⁶ Rawls was himself sympathetic to aspects of such critiques. In 1985, he privately denounced the reinvention of philosophy in his image. “I am at the moment persuaded,” Rawls wrote to H.L.A. Hart, “that the aims and methods of much current political philosophy are misconceived.” “I find myself sympathetic to what Bernard Williams has been saying,” he continued, “but for somewhat different reasons and from another point of view.”²⁷

Rawls’s Harvard colleague Stanley Cavell also contested dominant visions of morality in his The Claim of Reason (1979), which combined ordinary language philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis (and like Rawls’s theory took over two decades to complete). “Morality must leave itself open to repudiation,” Cavell argued. “It provides one possibility of settling” or “encompassing conflict,” but there were others: “politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion, and withdrawal.” “Morality is a valuable way because the others are so often inaccessible or brutal; but it is not everything.”²⁸ Most philosophy failed to capture this. Too often, it conceived of morality as a game. Cavell contested the young Rawls’s analogy of morality and games, as well as Rawls’s fixation, shared with postwar utilitarians, on promise-keeping as paradigmatic for morality. He also challenged the suggestion that practices and forms of life were like settled institutions. For Cavell, morality was precisely not like a game. The “form of life called morality” was not the same as a moral “code.” No rules “could in principle function in the moral life the way ‘practice’ rules function in Rawls’s account of them.” When people decided what course of action they “must” or “ought” to take, the alternatives open to them were not, “unlike the case of games,” “fixed.”²⁹ Cavell’s conventionalist reading of Wittgenstein provided an influential way to challenge the institutionalist focus of Rawlsian philosophy. The irony was that the origins of many of the component parts of that philosophy were also found in a proceduralist interpretation of Wittgenstein’s late ideas that had since been abandoned.

One of liberal philosophy’s challenges, according to Judith Shklar, was to avoid legalistic conceptions of morality. In the 1980s, Shklar, a close colleague of Rawls and Cavell, joined the ranks of critics. To Shklar, liberal philosophy elevated general principles and regarded agents as abstract moral persons outside of time, a move that entailed a “legalistic distortion of experience.”³⁰ It portrayed agents as existing in a dramatic moment of “stark choice and great decisions”—of “dirty hands” situations of “shaking, personal and spectacular crisis,” which Shklar described as fantasies only “appropriate to the imaginary world, in which these people see themselves in full technicolor.”³¹ Theories modeled on law fell into the trap of assuming consensus. In her critique of the ideology of legalism, she had suggested that legal systems exaggerated the extent of social cohesion and consensus.³² Legalistic philosophy made a similar mistake. It relied either on shaky assumptions about the potential for hypothetical agreement or on assumed moral consensus, and it treated morality like an uncontested body of common law, necessary to make the judgment of hard cases possible.³³

Shklar also objected to the primacy given to obligation, autonomy, and the voluntariness of choice. This primacy was a product of the ascent of contract theory, made possible when the “welfare state became the warfare state.” It was when “social justice made moral rather than historical claims that obligations to society became a respectable topic of philosophical discussion again.”³⁴ After the Vietnam War, philosophers “got bogged down in the issues of conscientious objection and just war theory,” which had left “a rather tepid debate about whether one has or has not a prima facie duty to obey the law of a relatively just state.” “Little follows from this,” she wrote, “since no one argues for unconditional obedience in response,” yet philosophy ever since had operated “within a narrow contractualist paradigm.”³⁵ Philosophers offered a false choice between overly moral and narrowly political treatments of obligation. They viewed relationships through the lens of rules, principles, contract, and consent, and redescribed them in terms that elided experience. Theorists of war, for instance, in distinguishing between soldiers and civilians on the basis of the degree to which they had consented to war, failed to see that it was “the helplessness of the civilians that exempts them from attack, not the absence of such consent that might be imputed to a conscript who is shooting at another draftee.” The reasons why certain acts were morally egregious often had little to do with prior relationships and agreements (hypothetical or otherwise). Institutions and relations of power were misunderstood if viewed through contracts rather than as interpersonal relations. Shklar put this another way when she described what was wrong with cruelty: it was “a vice that disfigures human character, not a transgression of a divine or human rule.”³⁶ Cavell made similar claims.³⁷ The problem with beginning from the need to justify “promise-keeping” was that promises resembled “legal contracts,” unlike most human commitments. This “involves a whole way of looking at society, one in which all human relationships are pictured as contractual rather than personal.”³⁸ But most of ethical life was not like law.

How, then, was ethical life to be understood? When these critics came to provide alternatives, their ideas intersected with a broader set of intellectual developments. They each argued in different ways that, to grasp the realities of “lived experience,” a different approach was needed. For Walzer, who increasingly challenged his former co-members in the SELF group, that involved looking to historical and sociological cases and examples of political action or distribution.³⁹ Hampshire also argued that abstract forms of reasoning neglected psychological experience, ethical complexity, and the importance of practical knowledge to making sense of human action.⁴⁰ He advocated an appeal not to principles but to “actual examples” and to “true stories, drawn from direct experience, of events which have actually involved difficult decisions.”⁴¹ This narrative and literary emphasis became prominent among those who objected to the new liberal philosophy for its neglect of ethical conflict and ambivalence. As Shklar wrote in Ordinary Vices (1984), though “literature” and “historical narratives” were never quite “like personal experience,” they managed to capture it better than philosophical principles. The advantage of “telling stories” was that they did not “rationalize the irrationality of actual experience and of history. Indecision, incoherence, and inconsistency are not ironed out or put between brackets. All our conflicts are preserved in all their inconclusiveness.” “Story telling” was crucial to understanding the “ritual, display, social exchanging, and acting out” of politics on the public stage.⁴²

Experience was conceived of as a distinctive realm that theory must try to capture. When political theorists aligned their critiques of rules and law with such accounts, they joined a turn to the study of experience across the humanities. In the late 1960s, as the feminist theorists of the women’s liberation movement argued that the personal was political, some had proposed a politics of experience, which a range of psychoanalytic and Marxian theorists had tried to integrate into their theories.⁴³ In subsequent decades, when historians, anthropologists, and social theorists challenged empiricist frameworks and elevated the importance of everyday life, some made experience into a quasi-normative standard or foundation.⁴⁴ This raised a set of conceptual questions about meaning, explanation, and interpretation that many dealt with through deconstruction and poststructuralist frameworks. But such questions also preoccupied Anglophone philosophers of social science, especially those influenced by Wittgenstein, whose ideas provided ways of thinking about cross-cultural or interpersonal understanding. In the 1950s and 1960s, debates about the problem of other minds and how to understand another person’s pain had given way to debates about how to understand another culture.⁴⁵ Were only participants in a given practice able to understand it? If what mattered was “the deed,” the “bedrock” of the practice, the point where philosophical principles “grasped intellectually” ran out and what remained were forms of “carrying on,” was it possible to understand a form of life by observation, sympathetic reconstruction, or imagination?⁴⁶

First philosophers of social science and action, then anthropologists, sociologists, and historians—including Peter Winch, Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and Quentin Skinner—argued that it was impossible to understand actions without understanding the rules that governed them.⁴⁷ While debates about the ontological status and explanations of actions continued among philosophers, the clash between theorists of meaning and exponents of causation birthed an “interpretivist” social science that rejected “positivism,” challenged objective and universal standpoints of comparison, and attacked the idea that the natural sciences were a model for the human ones. Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1958), which framed meaning as bounded by forms of life and cultural categories as not translatable, shaped debates about the possibility of evaluating divergent societies and about whether cultures could be understood from the outside. These had implications for the philosophical status of sociological knowledge and the very possibility of social science.⁴⁸ For moral philosophers, such claims suggested the impossibility of universal forms of reasoning or the evaluative comparability of different worldviews and raised the threat of relativism.⁴⁹ They also pointed to alternative forms of reasoning, for instance, in cases rather than through the application of principles.⁵⁰ In the 1960s, these insights had shaped the choices facing philosophers of social science: Was methodological individualism or social holism the appropriate frame? Was social science part of natural or “unified” science? And could behaviorism give a convincing account of human action, or could action be understood only by sociological observation and historical reconstruction—via Verstehen, “imaginative re-enactment,” or its anthropological analogue, “thick description”?⁵¹

By the late 1970s and 1980s, these ideas were adapted in critiques of liberal philosophy’s claims to objectivity, neutrality and universalism. A number of different attacks were launched against the naturalizing theories and legitimating narratives of Enlightenment liberalism by feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critics who stressed the contingency and limitations of contemporary conceptual frameworks, the implausibility of liberal assumptions about agency and the subject, and the extent to which all these assumptions were bound up with power and produced by the structures and norms of colonial modernity.⁵² Liberal philosophers and theorists rejected the more radical aspects of these theories, which destabilized the position of the theorist and her categories.⁵³ Instead, they borrowed ideas of difference, identity, partial standpoints, and local cultures from literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists, prompting charges of relativism and historicism from their opponents in the culture wars.⁵⁴ It was in this context that a number of lawyers and philosophers argued that morality and meaning had to be accessed through interpretation, which involved attention to local and particular cultures.⁵⁵ The foremost philosophical exponent of interpretation was Charles Taylor, whose work on Hegel had done much to introduce the phenomenological tradition to analytical philosophy, and whose attack on claims to neutrality in behavioral political science had been met with sympathy by many theorists, Rawls included.⁵⁶ But as Rawlsians debated the neutrality of liberal institutions, it was his critics who picked up where Taylor left off and leveled the claims of interpretation against the claims of objectivity to contest the “thereness” of meanings—whether they were to be interpreted, invented, or discovered.

One influential proponent of these arguments was Richard Rorty. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) challenged the correspondence theory of truth and the attempt to construct rational justifications for truths that transcended nature and culture. His neopragmatist view that prioritized intersubjective agreement and saw truth as what is “good for us to believe” formed the basis of his attack on objectivity and the norms of liberal philosophy.⁵⁷ The search for truth, Rorty argued, was a way of distancing a person from their community. Instead of relating to “actual persons” and thinking of themselves as a “member of some other real or imaginary group,” philosophers mistakenly believed that the “idea of Truth” existed as something to be attached to, “that can be described without reference to any particular human beings.”⁵⁸ For Rorty, the philosophical attachment to objectivity was antithetical to community and democracy.⁵⁹

In this way, appeals to interpretation were given political force. For Walzer, who became an influential advocate of the anti-objectivity position, invoking interpretation was part of his critique of liberal egalitarianism in the name of democracy. He argued that political theory—as distinct from the political philosophy he now associated with Rawls and his followers—had to begin with the concrete realities of community. It could not discover or invent a new morality, but had to “interpret” that which was already there. “Justice and equality,” he wrote, “can conceivably be worked out as philosophical artifacts, but a just or an egalitarian society cannot be. If such a society isn’t already here—hidden, as it were, in our concepts and categories—we will never know it concretely or realize it in fact.”⁶⁰ Walzer described the new “school” of Rawlsian liberalism as portraying a false and pernicious model of politics, based on philosopher kings rather than democratic citizenship and the interpretation of communal categories. He quoted Wittgenstein against Rawls: “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas.” That Rawls’s ideas were more popular among lawyers and economists than citizens spoke to their undemocratic core. Ideal theory, with its framing as a “founding” philosophy, was an intrinsically “authoritarian business.”⁶¹ It did not look to a real “social process” or to “real men and women” but was a philosophy of “procedural design” that enabled the “aggrandizement of judges”—a search, in Bruce Ackerman’s terms, for the “philosophers’ stone.” For Walzer there was “no such thing.” “The stronger the claims made for philosophy, the harder it is to make the case for democracy.” Rawlsian philosophy’s rejection of experience was testament to its antidemocratic underpinnings.⁶²

This invocation of experience tracked the anti-empiricist move of historians and anthropologists who appealed to the interpretation of language, meaning, and culture.⁶³ Yet Walzer, who was at this time very close to Geertz, did not look to critiques that took all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent.⁶⁴ Instead, he naturalized and elevated experience and its interpretation against the objectivist claims and legalization of liberal philosophy. He extended his early commitment to the study of the “real experience” of “actual people” into an ethical standard.⁶⁵ Others also now used antibureaucratic arguments, which had focused in the postwar and Vietnam years on utilitarianism or attacked cost-benefit analysis for neglecting the particularities of experience, against justice theory.⁶⁶ Wolin and those associated with his short-lived journal democracy argued that the legal proceduralism of American liberalism and the ideology of economic productivity had squeezed out democracy.⁶⁷ Liberal egalitarianism was deemed a theory of the “procedural republic.”⁶⁸ Thanks in part to its overreach, “the political” was disappearing. In response, some promoted local cultures and practices, while others defended political education as a counterpoint to expertise and an experiential vision of participatory democracy.⁶⁹ A robust civil society was defended against bureaucratic power.⁷⁰ Soon, a distinctive agonistic democratic theory would develop out of post-Marxist thought, which rejected the consensus vision at the heart of liberal philosophy.⁷¹

Not all who advocated interpretation rejected liberal egalitarianism. Far from being alien to Rawls’s theory, the claim that political philosophy rested on the “discovery” of existing morality had been fundamental to his vision of its task. After all, he had viewed philosophy as aiming to locate principles by exploring a morality that was already there, within a given practice (the reach of which could not stretch to the world). His constructivism also appealed to many historicists.⁷² In the 1980s, a number of liberal philosophers incorporated the idea of interpretation into their theories, most notably Dworkin.⁷³ Dworkin had earlier argued that the role of courts was to “discover” and enforce preexisting law and had, like Rawls, foregrounded the importance of existing moral communities.⁷⁴ Now he accommodated interpretation within liberal “rationalism,” arguing for the law-creating functions of courts, positing a view of judicial activity as the interpretation of “a country’s legal history,” and downgrading the importance of “asserting or denying an ‘objective’ truth for legal claims.”⁷⁵

Nonetheless, critics of liberal egalitarians often restated the dichotomy between rationalist philosophy and democratic experience and placed Rawlsians on the side of the former. Even those who accepted the substantive commitments of Rawls’s liberalism challenged its prioritization of what Rorty called “objectivity” over “solidarity.”⁷⁶ These debates returned to older questions about the possibility of an objective ethics and about ethical decision procedures that had preoccupied the young Rawls.⁷⁷ Both liberal philosophers and their critics were primarily concerned with the sources of social and moral agreement. Was it enough to appeal to forms of life and ways of carrying on, or were principles necessary to provide standards of judgment? Walzer suggested that correct moral principles could be found, but only in “our shared meanings.”⁷⁸ For Rorty, the idea that social disagreement was resolvable through appeal to general principles was a misunderstanding of democratic life, where tensions were resolved by appeal to what Dworkin called “convention and anecdote.” Democratic discourse was, Rorty wrote, “the exchange of what Wittgenstein called ‘reminders for a political purpose’—anecdotes about the past effects of various practices and predictions of what will happen if, or unless, some of these are altered.”⁷⁹ Political problems should be solved by looking to custom, agreement, or ways of carrying on. Rationality must be conceived as “criterionless muddling through.” Rorty was happy to say that “we,” “the liberal Rawlsian searchers for consensus,” must be ethnocentric, and that “our” views were justified merely as “the way we live now.”⁸⁰

The split between those who put general principles first and those who challenged them was thus reframed by the latter as a battle over the imposition of ethical norms from above and the generation of them from below. By the mid-1980s, these divisions over justification and critique had hardened. Accusations of relativism, misinterpretation, and disingenuousness flew between Dworkin, Walzer, Nagel, Rorty, and others. The critics suggested that liberal philosophers’ commitment to consensus, and their focus on distributional decisions and procedure rather than democratic control, implied a tacit acceptance of technocracy and inequality.⁸¹ Objectivity and impersonal modes of knowledge came to be associated with antidemocratic expertise. The language of interpretation and experience was joined to the critique of the liberal procedural state.⁸²

Out of these debates came a distinctive set of ideas about the self and identity that were embedded in a larger defense of community. In these years, conservatives harnessed appeals to community to the antigovernment resentments of groups that saw themselves as “left behind” by the social projects and civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s.⁸³ With whiteness no longer the explicit basis of claims against the state, “race” was replaced rhetorically by community, culture, and ethnicity as the basis for group identity claims.⁸⁴ But the turn to community also had analogues among liberals and on the left. Many had long argued that both bureaucratic liberalism and bureaucratic socialism denied the possibility of community, producing experiences of moral desolation and alienation (as well as material deprivation).⁸⁵ The task for New Left intellectuals had been to recover the power and agency of communities whose experiences had been buried beneath the impersonal structures of welfare and monopoly capitalism (a task that resulted in historical explorations of “moral economies,” tradition, custom, and participation).⁸⁶ With the neoliberal entrenchment of market forms of decision-making, theorists concerned with the flux and uncertainty of a market order appealed again to community, now deploying not Marx but R. H. Tawney or Karl Polanyi to argue for its protection against liberal capitalist atomism and commodification.⁸⁷ When Walzer published his Spheres of Justice (1983), he argued that market-based inequalities must not be allowed to cross the boundary of the market sphere into other “spheres” of citizenship—whether education, health care, or public honor.⁸⁸ Self-styled communitarians began to claim that liberalism misunderstood the social nature of the self and that the liberal subject created a hostile and alienating social order.⁸⁹ That liberal philosophical anthropology had difficulty accommodating communal relations was not a new claim, but it was now joined with the interpretive turn against naturalism and liberal neutrality, and a localist, democratic critique of Rawls.⁹⁰ A Hegelian counterpoint to Kantian universalism took shape, heralding the overthrow of an “abstract,” “individualist,” rights-based politics and a return to “patriotism,” the “primary bond of community,” and “the family.”⁹¹

Among the communitarian critics of liberal philosophy, the first concern was with the self. This was in part a response to trends within liberal egalitarianism, particularly the growing centrality to liberalism of the Kantian ideal of the autonomous moral person and the egalitarian foregrounding of choice, responsibility, and behavior. The entrenchment of ideas of autonomous personhood signaled the Anglophone hostility to the contemporaneous dismantling of traditional conceptions of identity and the reconstitution of the subject of modernity by social theorists. Even the enthusiastic readers of Derek Parfit’s theory, which dissolved the self into sequences of contingently associated states and potentially threatened the liberal subject in much the same way as those ideas, downplayed its radical implications.⁹² Most Rawlsian liberals retained a commitment to individual persons and their rational life plans conceived over time. It was this commitment that became a primary target for communitarians.

Charles Taylor offered the most influential interpretive account of the self and the constitutive features of human agency. In the late 1970s, as he developed his hermeneutic framework, he distinguished different notions of “a responsible human agent.”⁹³ There was the “radical chooser” of liberal individualism (and existentialism), the “simple weigher” of economic and utilitarian theory whose authentic evaluations were “non-qualitative,” and the “strong evaluator.” The strong evaluator did not make decisions by choosing between simple alternatives and evaluating courses of action, but through appeals to a deeper ethical “vocabulary of worth” and “identity” concerned with “what kind of life, what quality of agent they are to be.”⁹⁴ This identity set the “horizons of evaluation.” Those who repudiated their identity would be “cripple[d],” and left without the essential part of themselves that allowed them to make “authentic” evaluations. Moral agents did not make decisions either by principle or by open, radical choice, but looked to their “most fundamental formulations, and at what they were meant to articulate.” These articulations were not descriptions, but acts of self-interpretation, constitutive of experience. Deciphering them engaged the “whole self” in a way that judgment by reference to a fixed “yardstick” (of utilitarian or other principles) did not. This form of evaluation was an essential feature of a person. It was neglected, Taylor claimed, by liberal theory, with its emphasis on freedom as choice-making and its strong sense of moral responsibility. Taylor was keen to differentiate his constitutive self from a determined one, common to various kinds of determinism and materialism. Unlike the latter, the former did not eliminate moral responsibility, but grounded it. In reflection on our selves, he wrote, we find responsibility for ourselves.⁹⁵

Taylor contrasted this authentic self with the liberal “bearer of rights.”⁹⁶ Defined by the capacity to plan—the strategic powers to lay out possibilities and calculate value in terms of goals (and of the probabilities and costs of their attainment)—that “modern subject” was a person to whom respect was owed by virtue of these powers to evaluate, choose, and act on life plans.⁹⁷ The subject autonomously discovered their ends, which were set by nature and objective scrutiny. It was free, choosing, and self-defining, and was “capable of objectifying the world, reasoning about it in a detached, instrumental way.” Utilitarianism was a product of this conception, with its stress on calculation, its naturalistically identified ends, and its neutral, “interpretation-free account of human choice in terms of preferences.”⁹⁸ The authentic self, by contrast, was not a calculating machine. It was endowed with and constituted by meaning. Real agents were defined not by their strategic power to make choices, but as beings for whom things matter—subjects of significance, able to recognize and constitute goals and ends. “The essence of evaluation” did not consist only in “assessment in the light of fixed goals,” Taylor wrote, “but also and even more in the sensitivity to certain standards, those involved in the peculiarly human goals. The sense of self is the sense of where one stands in relation to these standards, and properly personal choice is one informed by these standards.”⁹⁹

Did the moral person of liberal egalitarianism fit this picture of the liberal chooser, the modern capitalist subject? Some presumed so, but Rawls’s portrayal of individuals had also long been recognized, even by his staunchest critics, as ambiguous.¹⁰⁰ Rawls’s rational man was a maximizer, wrote C. B. Macpherson, but his ends were “far from bourgeois.” Yet Macpherson saw that man’s duality—at once maintaining a class society and aiming at non-bourgeois ends—as typical of liberal capitalism: “ambiguity” was “the hallmark of bourgeois man.”¹⁰¹ Other critiques of Rawlsian rationality had focused on the parties in the original position, not on Rawls’s account of persons. Taylor appreciated the difference and did not apply his critique to Rawls. He knew they shared an understanding of agents acting within constitutive practices, for whom their plans were only ambiguously of their own making. Nor were pre-institutional rights a foundational element of the Rawlsian apparatus: Rawls’s individuals, like Taylor’s, were always institutional and situated within forms of life.

When Taylor redirected his critique of social science and utilitarianism against liberal philosophy and objected to a rights-based, “atomistic” vision, his focus was therefore not Rawls’s account of moral persons embedded in practices, but Nozick’s rights and entitlements theory.¹⁰² Indeed, this critique came when Rawls’s trajectory was diverging from later luck-egalitarians, who focused on individuated ownership and choice in ways that made Taylor’s claims more powerful. Barry had identified this tendency toward choice as a “complacent kind of liberal conservatism” that defined freedom in terms of choice-making and implied that the capacity to choose life plans was something liberal persons were metaphysically endowed with (rather than something to be secured through collective political action or produced by power).¹⁰³ Among those who agreed, Taylor’s account of the self gained traction.

A number of communitarians tried to connect Taylor’s vision of agency and interpretation to long-standing critiques of liberal views of choice, market, and civil society. The most provocative was Michael Sandel’s. Sandel, a former student of Taylor’s and Dworkin’s, was teaching at Harvard in its peak Rawlsian years. His target was Rawls’s vision of the subject, which he described as a “subject of possession, individuated in advance,” prior “to the ends it chooses,” for whom the capacity to choose was what mattered most.¹⁰⁴ This “unencumbered self,” Sandel argued, was at the core of Rawls’s theory. It was evidenced in the rational, disembodied choosers of the original position but also in Rawls’s rejection of desert and merit as bases for distributive justice. Sandel attributed to Rawls the atomistic self that Taylor had seen in Nozick. He also fastened on the concerns that egalitarians were trying to address: the discrepancy that many perceived in Rawls’s downgrading of desert, responsibility, and agency in his account of distributive justice (in which “character” was morally arbitrary and irrelevant to the distribution of goods), but not in his account of retributive justice (in which responsible agents could deserve punishment as a result of “bad character”).

Rawls’s theory had prompted a debate about the relevance of desert in market societies compared to its appropriateness in more tight-knit communitarian and solidaristic societies, with some objecting to his downgrading of desert as part of their more general rejection of liberal atomism.¹⁰⁵ Taylor had criticized theories that eliminated desert and contributory principles for their accompanying displacement of ideas of moral worth and recognition, but did not object to Rawls’s account of the divergent relevance of judgments about responsibility and character to retributive and distributive justice (perhaps because Taylor attributed it to a strong interpretation of the noncomparability of practices). For Sandel, however, Rawls’s devaluation of claims of desert and merit, based on his claim that natural and social assets were morally arbitrary, showed that he drew too strong a distinction between the “attributes and constituents” of a person. Because of the arbitrariness of fortune, Sandel read Rawls as arguing, “‘my’ assets do not belong to me in the strong constitutive sense,” so I cannot be properly said to deserve them.¹⁰⁶ Like Nozick, who had seen Rawls’s distinction between “the self and its various possessions” as violating personhood and the right to holdings, Sandel argued that the distinction of the self and its possessions was untenable. Rawls misunderstood the socially situated nature of the self and the importance of natural and social assets to its historically and culturally constituted identity.¹⁰⁷

Sandel’s critique extended an argument of Daniel Bell’s, suggesting that liberal attacks on meritocracy and discrimination went so far in their effort to get rid of notions of character and moral worth that the “person himself has disappeared. Only attributes remain.”¹⁰⁸ To save Rawls’s theory from itself—the difference principle in particular—Sandel argued that an “intersubjective conception” had to replace the unencumbered self. He posited a constitutive conception of community in which individual identities were shaped by relations between citizens and associations that were discovered, not chosen. In certain circumstances, he wrote, the relevant description of the self would “embrace more than a single empirically individuated human being.”¹⁰⁹ Instead of divorcing the self from its possessions, he socialized the self that bore the assets in the first place. This did not mark a return to problems of corporate agency or collective action, but a refocusing of political theory so the relevant units were the encumbered self and its community. The defense of the “social self” was the key building block of the communitarian critique of liberalism.¹¹⁰

Politically, however, this critique pulled in a number of different directions.¹¹¹ Some communitarians built a defense of family, culture, and nation.¹¹² MacIntyre, who had journeyed from Marxism to Christianity and a trenchant rejection of the modern, condemned the “emotivist self,” devoid of social identity, and praised a premodern and anti-Enlightenment vision of the self constituted by kinship and motivated by virtue.¹¹³ A critique of the Rawlsian subject and the vocabulary of moral worth, responsibility, culture, and character also came to stand in for worries about the kinds of people produced by the “technocratic” “adversary culture.”¹¹⁴ Ideas once characteristic of the antibureaucratic left were deployed by the neoconservative right, whose antibureaucratic arguments focused on attacking the welfare functions of the state rather than on corporate bureaucracy.¹¹⁵ The language of communitarianism was used both for conservative ends, in the racially coded discourse around welfare entitlements and poverty, and in the liberal response, later found in the pages of Third Way journals like The Responsive Community, which accepted and rendered legitimate many premises of the right’s discourse.¹¹⁶ Some on the left saw this clearly: Barbara Ehrenreich urged Sandel not to mistake the New Right’s racism and authoritarianism for a search for moral meaning, nor to allow for a liberal “coziness” with right-communitarianism.¹¹⁷

The immense impact of the communitarian critique was in part a function of this malleability.¹¹⁸ But communitarianism also became influential within political theory because it did not seriously threaten the assumptions of the postwar liberal order. While New Left theorists of community had also critiqued monopoly capitalism and the bureaucratic state, the discourse of the social self after the cultural turn was motivated more by a worry about the contamination of a moral realm by market and contractual relations and by the attack on universal principles and choosing persons. The communitarian search for the good was the inverse of the New Right’s antibureaucratic libertarianism: it deemed procedural right and the political creation of “strangers” by the “deontological republic” more of a threat than corporate power.¹¹⁹ While some communitarians worried that the egalitarian turn to choice and responsibility undermined the socialist value of fellowship and community, many abandoned socialist principles, did not demand the socialization of ownership, wealth, and power, and prioritized the preservation and extension of traditions, “shared understandings,” and identities instead.¹²⁰ As debates about ownership thrived among egalitarians, the communitarian retort to the distributive paradigm was to focus on moral meaning. Yet like the liberals they criticized, few communitarians foregrounded problems of political action or control. In Sandel’s influential critique, politics appeared as a deus ex machina in its final pages, as a call that through politics “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”¹²¹ But what that politics might look like, and how it might differ from anything liberal egalitarians envisaged, was rarely worked through. Moreover, those who mourned the decline of community and the growth of anomie and alienation tended to see that story as a cultural or quasi-metaphysical one. Few told the story of the breakdown of unions and communities as a product of deliberate political action or as the result of policies of state repression. Unlike a growing number of theorists who developed critiques of liberalism from the standpoint of democracy, among communitarians the demands for collective politics were acknowledged but not interrogated.¹²²

Many aspects of communitarianism could thus be accommodated within the paradigm of liberal political philosophy, as the liberal critics of communitarianism themselves insisted.¹²³ This set it apart from both the more radical critiques of the liberal self—that focused on the discursive, regulated subject or dissolved the subject entirely and left little room for communitarian views of encumbered yet autonomous agency—and the feminist theories that challenged the gendered male subject of contractarian liberalism and contested both the liberal distinction of private and public and the communitarian commitment to small associations like the family.¹²⁴ By contrast, the communitarian critics left in place key aspects of the Rawlsian vision. There was a family resemblance between them. Interpretivist communitarianism originated in the same Wittgensteinian moment as Rawls’s theory. Walzer, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Sandel were seen as the Hegelian opposition to Rawls’s Kantianism: in the critical words of Bernard Williams, they deployed the later Wittgenstein for “Right-Hegelian purposes.”¹²⁵ But in doing so, they revisited Rawls’s early concerns. Just as deliberative democratic theorists addressed the democratic deficit of distributive justice theory by returning to the Tocquevillian town hall meeting with which Rawls had begun, communitarians looked to Hegel, Wittgenstein, and ideas of community typical of Rawls’s youth too.

This was not lost on communitarians, or on Rawls himself. Sandel acknowledged the “intersubjective sounding passages” where he discussed the importance, for Rawls, of social union for self-realization and Rawls’s claim that the “self is realized in the activities of many selves.”¹²⁶ He thought these claims showed Rawls’s fundamental inconsistency, given his theory of the unencumbered self.¹²⁷ Yet Rawls’s “intersubjective sounding passages” were not “metaphors.” They illustrated the centrality of community to his conception of persons and society, and his view of identities and moralities not as something chosen but as attachments to be discovered. As Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice, “in drawing up our plan of life we do not start de novo.”¹²⁸ Rawls, like Sandel, had once loosened the bounds of the self to allow for pluralist group agency.¹²⁹ Moreover, in attributing to Rawls something like a theory of possessive individualism, Sandel took as his starting point precisely the atomistic, egoistic contract theory that the young Rawls rejected.¹³⁰ Rawls and his critics had a common history, even if they did not remember it the same way.

Rawls stressed that he had been misrepresented by his communitarian critics, whose ideas he saw as tending toward conservatism. In a 1986 lecture describing the “contemporary philosophical scene,” he depicted Walzer, MacIntyre, and Sandel as “the three stooges.” (Rawls considered adding Taylor, but he did not make the final cut.)¹³¹ Others protested Rawls’s misrepresentation, stressing that liberal egalitarians in fact also objected to the individualizing and administrative tendency of utilitarianism and worried about alienation under technocracy.¹³² When Rawls eventually published Political Liberalism, he responded to the communitarians in ways that misleadingly suggested a change of mind.¹³³ That book generated new debates about Rawls’s focus on problems of toleration and pluralism, democracy, public reason, and justification. Many read it as a retreat from universalism toward communitarianism.¹³⁴ But Rawls had always had something in common with the position communitarians defended. On problems of judgment and justification, the gulf remained significant: Rawls never gave up the theoretical apparatus that he developed to distinguish ethically between existing values and practices.¹³⁵ Yet he was consistently frustrated with the communitarians: they misunderstood the extent to which his theory was an answer to their problems. Rawls’s concern, like Walzer’s, was to interpret and reveal what was already there. They shared other ideas too, about what modern subjects were like and where meaning was constituted. Both envisaged a democratic pluralist community where the associations that mattered morally were not those created or encompassed by the state, but consisted in a community of persons that flourished beneath the state. Walzer’s critique, Rawls wrote in 1983, was “generally very inaccurate, or worse. I am not sure in most cases how far the views of TJ [A Theory of Justice] properly understood, differ from the things he wants to say, or conclusions he wants to reach on substantive questions.”¹³⁶

The communitarian critique of liberal egalitarianism was not the only one spurred by the cultural turn and the dissatisfaction with “atomism.” A number of others involved a return to tradition and a reimagining of the past. Some suggested friendly amendments to liberalism: the legal philosophers’ search for civil republicanism, for instance, and the egalitarian shift from the market to the Tocquevillian forum.¹³⁷ More critical was the recovery by historians of civic republican ideology, which involved deemphasizing the study of liberal national constitutions and principles.¹³⁸ J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and those associated with the Cambridge School of the history of political thought were among those who sought to puncture liberalism’s triumphalist narratives, particularly the claims of rights theories to universal, timeless status, as part of their recovery of republican ideals of freedom as independence and nondomination.¹³⁹ In debates about American citizenship and the interpretation of the American tradition, both historians and theorists sympathetic to interpretivist approaches used the arguments about the noncomparability of forms of life to defend a nonfoundationalist, Rortyian “ethnocentrism.”¹⁴⁰ Political theorists began to write declinist histories of the procedural republic that were often tragic in tone. In these, private ideas of freedom and myths of state neutrality were created when “immigration,” the “growing diversity of the nation,” and “the emerging consumer society” rendered republican visions of self-rule impossible.¹⁴¹

Such narratives did normative work for communitarians who rejected objective foundations for judgment and emphasized local cultures above universalizing liberalism. Walzer had long based his vision of citizenship on group commitment and a constitutive vision of the self, though he had also suggested that the liberal welfare state made a return to a politics of civic virtue implausible and undesirable. Now he overlaid his earlier commitment to political solidarity and the ethics of oppressed groups with an appeal to communal and cultural experience. This pushed toward ethnocentrism of the kind Rorty deemed justifiable, as Walzer came to insist on social criticism in a “national-popular mode.”¹⁴² This provoked a reaction among liberal philosophers (Walzer said it made him an “apostate”), who argued that deference to community left him with little recourse for choosing between conflicting traditions and few grounds to defend the leftist politics he held dear.¹⁴³ Did this deference not tend toward conservatism, especially now that the welfare state was under siege from a resurgent right? Walzer worked hard to dispel this reading of his work. He was adamant that his account of social criticism still allowed grounds for critique and insisted that his commitment to human rights and a “moral minimum” provided a standard for judgment—a universal ground in the flux of interpretation—that radical interpretivism and historicists did not.¹⁴⁴ Walzer’s critics were not satisfied. There seemed to be a “progressive teleology” at work in his theory. Without an ideal theory (and with no philosophy of history joined to his immanent critique), Walzer’s justificatory framework relied on an unjustified faith in the democratic nature of the American polity that looked to find solutions within its “national history and culture.”¹⁴⁵ Despite the expansion of the procedural state and the commodification of ethical life, American democracy could be presumed to be unfolding through history.

These reinterpretations of democratic America resonated with the story of constitutional change that Rawls had upheld in the wake of the civil rights movement. Both Rawls and his critics relied implicitly on such a teleology—one liberal, the other civic—that assumed an incremental path toward democratic inclusion and integration in a constitutionalist, consensual ideal.¹⁴⁶ In these stories, which proliferated in the early 1990s, America was a site of democratic realization. “Returning to ‘we’” would provide the basis for change and reform.¹⁴⁷ Such stories were intended also to offer normative visions of local communities, in which the democracy of everyday life went untouched by the expansion of the technocratic institutions of the state, market, and courts. Some made central the ascriptive hierarchies and inequalities of American society, but they nonetheless reaffirmed the ideals of American values and institutions, even where they recognized their practical failures.¹⁴⁸ In different ways, these histories thus evaded how social and racial conflict shaped the American dream on which liberal and communitarian pluralism rested, how stability was purchased at the cost of ignoring those conflicts, and how the dream itself not only was exclusionary but produced hierarchy, inequality and new forms of domination at home and abroad.¹⁴⁹ They replicated older models of American exceptionalism by downplaying histories of subordination, vesting hopes in an undifferentiated democratic agent unaffected by exclusions of race, class, or gender, and treating the history of black chattel slavery as a unique original sin or a contingent aberration.¹⁵⁰ The vision of a society founded in moral consensus, potential or actual, was never far from view.

In these narratives, the distance between liberals and their communitarian critics collapsed. Yet the opposition between them persisted, and it continued to structure divisions within political theory. Communitarians focused on who people were, rather than what they had or what they did. As such, they had distinctive preoccupations. Indeed, it was through the debates about community that group claims found a place within mainstream liberal political theory, which focused centrally on individuals. Rawls had designed his decision procedure to remove class interest and group prejudice, and the Rawlsian framework largely dealt with individual rather than group disadvantage. There had been little attention paid to the struggles of subordinated groups and the agency of oppressed minorities: the political demands of the women’s liberation, anticolonial, and black freedom movements had not permeated mainstream philosophy, except insofar as they could be rendered compatible with institutional egalitarianism in the form of principles of antidiscrimination and affirmative action.¹⁵¹ But now group claims entered the communitarian framework, not through debates about equality, domination, or disadvantage, but via the appeal to communal experience, tradition, and identities understood through categories of constitutive social meaning. The group claims that political theorists now considered were those that demanded the recognition of cultural difference and adapted the communitarian and pluralist critique of Rawls as part of recognition theory, elucidated by Walzer and, most influentially, Taylor.¹⁵² This opened up new areas of concern about the politics of oppressed groups. Yet it risked depoliticizing them: ascriptive identities were not destabilized, as categories produced by institutional power or forms of economic subordination to be overcome, but naturalized, “discovered,” and “negotiated” “through dialogical relations with others.”¹⁵³

Thus, even as the liberal-communitarian debate faded from view, a version of it was reinscribed. Self-consciously Hegelian recognition theory became a counterpoint to Rawls’s mature Kantian liberalism of redistribution.¹⁵⁴ It responded to the inability of distributive theories to account for the injuries—of dependency, of “misrecognition”—that persisted when baseline economic and social needs were met in welfare state societies.¹⁵⁵ For Taylor, recognition of identity was a “vital human need.”¹⁵⁶ It was possible to build a collective form of resistance out of the struggle for recognition that took as its starting point the “hurt feelings” born of the experience of unjust treatment.¹⁵⁷ These ideas laid the ground for defenses of multiculturalism and debates about the affirmation of equal citizenship amid the recognition of difference.¹⁵⁸ They also provided a counterpoint to the ascendant global justice theory, with its commitment to a moral cosmopolitanism of persons, and a basis for defenses of cultural nationalism, “ethnic pluralism,” and the rights of indigenous peoples.¹⁵⁹ Yet, from the point of view of many liberal egalitarians, the recognition framework risked restricting its diagnoses of subordination to what Barry called the realm of “culture,” rather than “equality” (and it added little to Rawls’s account of the social bases of self-respect.)¹⁶⁰ Despite the roots of recognition theories in critiques of domination, distributive theorists retorted that the theorists of multiculturalism and difference who were its heirs fell short.¹⁶¹ The fact that the politics of oppressed groups entered political theory via the debate about recognition meant that egalitarian theorists dismissed them as insufficiently concerned with distributive justice.

The turn to community and group experience prompted a response from another set of liberal critics who now waged a battle on two fronts. While the backlash against neo-Kantian ideas of personhood produced the self-interpreting view of constitutive agency and the social self, it also generated an alternative account of the liberal individual that challenged both Rawlsians and their communitarian critics. As political theorists refocused on the self, a minimalist liberalism emerged, more Humean than Hegelian, that questioned the consensus vision, distributive paradigm, and deliberative rationality of liberal egalitarians. In the 1980s, the grander universalizing claims of egalitarianism were disaggregated—a process hastened by the abandonment of socialism by the mainstream European left, exemplified by the French socialists’ change of direction and the split between the British Labour Party and the Social Democrats.¹⁶² A realist politics of worst-case scenarios returned, and forms of anti-totalitarianism were rejuvenated, in what Walzer called an attempt “to revive the spirit of the cold war.”¹⁶³ As anxieties about the right spurred a liberal anti-leftism, a number of liberals reoriented their theories and turned from distributive to humanitarian claims, reconceiving the claims of individuals against powerful political forces.¹⁶⁴

Those who had emphasized the importance of lived experience and storytelling against legalistic, abstract, and distributive liberalism now tried to put a different kind of individual agent back into moral and political theory, one that captured the complexities of ethical and political life and took a perspective that viewed a life lived as a whole. Bernard Williams joined his philosophy to a humanistic moral psychology to question the unrealistic picture of the self and identity at the heart of the morality system. Cavell, as well as Richard Wollheim in his The Thread of Life (1984), adapted psychoanalytic accounts of the self to stress the continuity of the “process of living.”¹⁶⁵ They conceived of individuals as more particular and less capable of voluntary action, and as acting in contexts that were less well structured and ethically rigid. Shklar reoriented her political theory around a timeless vision of a conflictual, alienated, and “ambivalent” self, characterized not by its capacity for choice but by its “failure to choose.”

For Shklar, that self, with its accompanying deflationary account of responsibility, stood at the core of her objections to the reason-giving, decision-making self of philosophical liberalism.¹⁶⁶ She looked to deinstitutionalized notions of individuality and to ideas of the individual abstracted from their institutional contexts and the contractualist paradigm. In the early 1980s, she had been resistant to the humanitarianization of politics and to claims that “humanitarian causes were non-political.” Though she did not “weep for socialism,” Shklar wrote, she was “as revolted as Tawney ever was by what he called ‘the mood of tranquil humanity.’”¹⁶⁷ She objected to making the body the basis for a minimal politics of institutions, designed to protect only “bare life.”¹⁶⁸ She focused on institutionally unprotected agents, particularly those excluded from citizenship, and berated the new global justice theory for its neglect of problems of membership: the “issue of excluding aliens,” she wrote in 1983, was neglected by “the general question of international redistribution with which Barry and Beitz deal.”¹⁶⁹ Her concern was with refugees, but also with internal exiles, victims of injustice, and those alienated from legal and political systems. In an unpublished essay, she tried to isolate a realm of “pure conscience”—contrasted with decisions made by appeal either to principles or to the “we” of community—and returned to ideas that liberal egalitarians had set aside during the debates about conscientious objection decades earlier, when they abandoned claims of conscience for the principles of justice.¹⁷⁰

Over the subsequent decade, these attempts to look beyond distributive justice led Shklar to the humanitarianism she had earlier eschewed. Shklar’s agents were creatures, endowed with humanity, whose psychological experiences were matched by their bodily ones. She raised the physical needs of individuals to the same status as the psychological and formulated a negative politics based on their protection. What mattered was breathing, living, real-life agents, not their better selves or their potential futures. The task of politics was to look after them. The rights of the body, and the right to be protected from torture and cruelty, were the building blocks of Shklar’s self-declared “survivalist” politics.¹⁷¹ This was a minimalism designed to protect the humanity of individual agents after the optimistic stability of the age of affluence had given way to survivalist pessimism. Shklar’s survivalism signaled a retreat to an anti-totalitarian liberalism. She famously described it as “The Liberalism of Fear.”¹⁷²

The liberalism of fear became an influential alternative to liberal egalitarianism. At its core was the argument that liberalism exists to protect individuals from cruelty, fear, and the abuses of institutional power. Shklar’s lifelong portrait of the fragility of individuals became foundational to the anti-totalitarian Cold War liberalism of her later years.¹⁷³ When Williams, Rorty, and others adapted Shklar’s idea, they prioritized the minimalist politics of individual human rights, sufficiency, and survival. Though all attacked, with varying degrees of ferocity, the Kantian pursuit of reason, they explained and justified their use of the liberalism of fear differently. Rorty’s rejection of the pursuit of objective truth led to a defense of the liberalism of fear as what “liberals”—defined as those “who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do”—contingently, thanks to “time and chance,” believed.¹⁷⁴ By contrast, Williams trod a path between a Nietzschean and Foucauldian suspicion of Enlightenment ideals and a defense of those ideals (which led him to condemn pragmatists, Rorty included, as “deniers of truth”). He defended the liberalism of fear as a “bottom-up,” anti-universalist “universalism” that stressed “the reality of politics.”¹⁷⁵ What mattered was individual life, and Williams thought that liberalism was better placed than its alternatives to allow individuals to lead meaningful, “authentic” lives. This was a liberalism that required social democratic institutions, but no more than that. Williams did not advocate a collective politics to secure those institutions: during the 1980s turmoil on the British left, he had been clear that socialism in its conventional sense was no longer viable.¹⁷⁶ Like Shklar, he lowered his sights.

The individual agents who formed the building blocks of these minimalist liberalisms were meant to be more ordinary, less moral, and less abstract than the Kantian persons they rivaled. They were the Humean counterparts to liberal philosophy’s Kantian turn. As such, they were often described in biographical or historical, rather than moral, terms. Their personal histories went beyond the communal pasts of social selves and the open futures of the abstract moral person with bundles of goods and life plans. Yet this liberalism was also tied to a muscular realism. The emphasis of Shklar and others on psychic fragility, ordinary vices, and humanity aimed at a benign institutional politics to take care of individuals. But the appeal to fear led to an emergency politics of its own. Many kinds of unpleasant, unfair, unjust, and exploitative domestic and international political arrangements could be justified in the name of protecting individuals from fear: humanitarian interventions, war, or the injustices accepted for the sake of the lesser evil.¹⁷⁷ The liberalism of fear, born of an attempt to repoliticize moralist liberalism, could thus lead to a different kind of deradicalizing moralism that appealed not to universal principles but to history.¹⁷⁸ It warned not to ignore the cruelty involved in much utopianism, and it challenged philosophers who neglected their duty of “not forgetting or lying about the horrors” of politics.¹⁷⁹ Whatever the intentions of its authors, the refrain of the liberalism of fear became a disciplining move against “transformative politics” and those who “forgot” where radicalism could lead.¹⁸⁰

History here was both a teacher of lessons and a bearer of warnings. The appeal to history was less a call to write history or an attempt to integrate time as a principle of explanation or a vehicle of analysis into political theory. It was a summons to heed the horrors of the twentieth century, and it often involved the invocation of slippery slope arguments that suggested that the grander egalitarian schemes of philosophers might culminate in disaster.¹⁸¹ In the 1990s and after, these claims about the history and memory of war would underpin justifications for humanitarian intervention.¹⁸² Yet certain liberal theorists also appealed to history more broadly, as part of a revolt against liberal egalitarianism’s “timeless” quality.¹⁸³ While communitarians looked to history as part of an appeal to tradition, or for narratives of lived experience, the minimalist critics of liberal egalitarianism invoked history as part of a broader appeal to complexity, contingency, and uncertainty. Sometimes they drew lessons that functioned less as warnings and more as political constraints, deploying historical cases to evidence the limitations that human nature placed on political change. For those like Shklar, Williams, or Rorty, who in different ways saw liberal philosophy’s commitment to rationalist principles as a kind of displacement that enabled a distancing from and avoidance of psychic and political realities, history was a way of bringing those realities to life.¹⁸⁴ It could show the contingency of moral beliefs, as well as the uncertainty and complexity that accompanied any translation of political principles into practice.¹⁸⁵

These ideas of contingency, complexity, and uncertainty were increasingly adapted to justify a political philosophy that focused on legitimacy as much as justice.¹⁸⁶ Rawls had chosen the principles of justice to limit the effects of contingency on collective life. Shaped by midcentury anti-totalitarianism, he had stressed the fragility of constitutional democracies and the luck involved in being born in one. In the hands of the new anti-totalitarian critics, the appeal to contingency became a way of rejecting the confidence of liberal egalitarianism and undermining its more universalizing claims.¹⁸⁷ Such appeals had been mobilized in critiques of historical materialism or determinist views of history, as well as in social theories that sought to elevate agency against structure or to destabilize the position of the theorizing subject.¹⁸⁸ It was also used against liberal egalitarian certainties. In Rorty’s hands, contingency was a neopragmatist tool for challenging the justification of liberalism and social democracy as transhistorically just.¹⁸⁹ For Williams, once history revealed the contingency of beliefs, the justification of liberalism required a kind of “confidence” (which itself came to match that of the universalizing philosophy he scrutinized).¹⁹⁰ Such invocations of historicism and contingency often stood in tension with the transhistorical moral psychologies posited by liberal theorists like Shklar. These liberals did not follow the radical theorists of contingency all the way: they did not seek to overthrow Enlightenment liberalism, but to find nonfoundationalist grounds for its defense, even as they disrupted the appearance of easy consensus and ideological unity among philosophers.

To do this justificatory work, some liberal theorists turned to a different set of historical narratives—not about American democracy or the welfare state, but about the origins of liberalism. In rejecting communitarianism and diffusing the challenges of difference, they appealed to vindicatory histories that were first told in the early Cold War.¹⁹¹ Instead of framing liberalism as the antidote to socialism, they emphasized liberalism as a victory for toleration amid pluralist conflict. Rather than the revolutionary era, the birth of capitalism, or the founding of the welfare state, it was the wars of religion that became liberalism’s founding moment. This had been a trope of postwar democratic theory, which championed diversity against the absolutism of totalitarian and objectivist moral theories that attempted to “impose” “unity of belief.” At the turn of the 1990s, that move was made again, not just by critics but also by proponents of liberal egalitarianism as part of their response to the challenges of multiculturalism. For Rawls, Barry, and others, whose liberalism hardened in otherwise distinctive ways, the wars of religion became the founding moment of a secular, pluralist liberalism whose task was to tame group life as much as the market or the left.¹⁹²

The liberalism of fear produced various attempts to politicize liberal political philosophy by making it concrete and by revealing the fragility of individuals in contexts of power. Yet it was also deradicalizing. The liberal turn to contingency and conflict was put to use, not for a collective politics, but for an individuating one, in which psychic conflict mattered more than class or group struggle. The appeal to history had a conservative tendency when history played the role of constraining the possibilities for transformation. Moreover, histories of exclusion, exploitation, or appropriation were either ignored—as they were with the Rawlsian rejection of the normative relevance of historical argument—or understood to signal failures of implementation rather than a challenge to liberal ideals themselves. These were histories of liberalism that were not bound directly to histories of empire and capital, accumulation, or power. They tended instead to appeal to humanity, both to pose a challenge to difference and to question the priority in distributive theories of equality over poverty reduction.¹⁹³ The liberalism of fear signaled a worry about the overextension of the distributive paradigm.¹⁹⁴ Such worries were not new: Williams had decades earlier pointed to the limits of a single-minded commitment to distributional equality, particularly given its requirement of extensive state intervention, on grounds that such a commitment would conflict with another idea of equality, the equal respect of persons. But these worries were restated with renewed force by those who were concerned about pluralism and value conflicts and who stressed the liberal critique of the state and executive power.¹⁹⁵ Over time a new critique of Rawlsianism was built from this: an appeal to “political realism,” which took both conservative and leftist forms, and looked to a foundational politics of legitimacy that was prior to distributive justice.¹⁹⁶ Instead of distribution, stability came back into view.

The irony was that these debates also retraced Rawls’s early steps. Indeed, the thinkers who came to hold canonical status, as liberal or critic, had one feature in common: they in some ways returned to ideas that Rawls had left out and left behind. Rawls had begun with the problems of the self and its social relations, both communitarian and humanitarian. His early social theory had been designed, in the shadow of totalitarianism and war, to limit the powers of the interventionist state, at a moment when the task of building political constituencies to support that state or its policies was assumed to be already successful. The small associations he imagined were not groups to be built through politics but communities, families, and churches that existed by convention—much the same as those assumed in many of the new communitarian pluralisms. He also began from a minimalist, barebones liberalism that feared the power of the state and did not make redistribution the first priority. Among the most prominent alternatives to liberalism were thus a domestic anti-statism, a moral psychological liberalism, and a Wittgensteinian communitarianism—alternative ideas similar to those that the young Rawls had downplayed or discarded.

The very capaciousness of Rawlsian liberalism, its capacity to domesticate and diffuse alternatives, led to a narrowing of the ideological terrain. The moral focus of liberal philosophers was mirrored by that of their critics, whose alternative theories also occupied the terrain of morality and the self. Distributive justice theory, in its focus on foundational questions, had tended to neglect problems of political control, collective agency, and the institutional mechanisms of power. But now communitarians did so as well. Just as Marxism had been defanged and made compatible with liberalism, now the politics of group disadvantage was subsumed into communitarian concerns with identity. Minimalist liberals defended fragile individuals and saw abuses of power everywhere in the state and the community, but rarely in the workplace or the corporation. The appeals to community and fear downgraded redistribution. Neither liberal egalitarians nor their most prominent critics provided broader accounts of the different modes of social and economic life or their potential transformation. That remained the province of the left, and of those outside mainstream political philosophy. The legacy of these debates was therefore to constrain the politics of political philosophy even as they broadened its psychological and ethical scope. This was not only a return to an older communitarian and anti-totalitarian worldview but a kind of retreat. The outcome of the realist and communitarian critique of Rawlsian liberalism was an ethical vision made up of fragile individuals and social selves. It was also a philosophy, and a politics, with a less ambitious reach.