Quote:
Originally Posted by v1k1ng1001
I've read and even taught Rawls. I will give him credit for setting aside his Kantian aspirations and making the pragmatic turn late in his career (Political Liberalism), albeit grudgingly. But the pragmatic scope of his work is limited. Political Liberalism is, on his own account, only useful in situations where 1. there is a constitutional crisis or 2. a new nation needs principles to form a constitution. Even then, the tools he provides are pretty thin. Rawls just seems to repeat the form of inquiry that many political theorists have subscribed to since Hobbs: derive a principle of natural right. This form of inquiry was pragmatically significant while new nations were being born and while old nations were in the throws of revolution, but today that pattern of inquiry is largely obsolete. The best you can say for Rawls is that his work has facilitated interesting discussions in its application within legal realism, as with Dworkin. Like his colleague Hilary Putnam, if Rawls hadn't been at Harvard or somesuch, no one would care what he had to say.
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I don't know anything about Rawl. I agree that the idea of a natural right is not relevant in our times. However, I object to the suggestion (but maybe I misunderstood your meaning?) that we don't need to do any political thinking, in the sense of thinking about how our political system works or should work. We may not be overthrowing kings or beheading anyone (and I hope we'll keep it that way), but I think democracy is in a very dangerous crisis and needs to be reinvented. Is being reinvented, whether we like it or not.
In 2002 in France, many people didn't bother to go to the voting booth. Supporters of the right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen did. As a result, the second round of the election was between two right-wing candidates, one of them being Le Pen. Everyone was shocked. For two weeks people (the same people who hadn't bothered to vote) demonstrated in the streets to show how opposed to Le Pen they were, and how much they didn't want him as a president.
A few weeks later, there was another election. Granted, it was a minor one. Nevertheless, you'd think these people would have learned their lesson. You'd be wrong. They still didn't bother to vote.
The current democratic system, built in centuries when political and economic knowledge was mostly restricted to an elite, when communication was slow and information took a long time to reach the leaders and even longer to reach the rest of the population, is not working in our world. Many people feel they know better or as well as our presidents or PMs how to run the country. It's an exageration, but it is true that they are much better educated and informed than they used to be. And now they get almost the same information the president or PM does, and just as fast.
I am very attached to democracy in principle, and to representative democracy since it's basically the only one we have so far, but it's increasingly obvious that it's no longer working, at least in the form we have inherited from the 18th-19th centuries.
We need to start doing some thinking. Call it philosophical or political, I don't care. But we need to start thinking before we wake up one morning and find the change has happened anyway - well, that's usually how it works anyway, so maybe we can just relax and watch - I don't know.
But anyway, I do think political changes must and will happen. I just hope it happens in a way I can still recognize as democracy. And I hope nobody gets beheaded along the way.