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John Rawls Theory Of Justice And Political Liberalism

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In this small paper I am going to focus on the two crucial contributions of John Rawls to the field of political philosophy, namely, his theories of justice and political liberalism, as those were presented in Justice as Fairness (later restatement of his fundamental Theory of Justice) and Political Liberalism.
I will start with several major assumptions that guide Rawls ' thinking and should, in my opinion, guide any scrutiny of his ideas. First of all, he attempts to develop a political conception, that is, a framework for dealing not with all of the issues concerning a given society, but with essentially political affairs. Although he does not provide a theory of the political as such (in a sense of Schmitt), it is possible to see to what …show more content…

Such a situation is merely 'a device of representation ' and not a real condition. According to Rawls, these citizens would agree on two major principles: that 1) 'each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all '; and that 2) social and economic inequalities 'are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle) ' (Rawls 2001, 42). In other words, it would be reasonable for these citizens to pursue justice beyond individual presuppositions, prejudices and preferences, at least because it would be irrational for them to allow for such conditions under which their own preferences would be …show more content…

Rawls claims that 'the content of public reason is not given by political morality as such, but only by a political conception suitable for a constitutional regime ' (Rawls 1993, 254). If we assume that such a political conception is in fact one of the manifold reasonable comprehensive doctrines, then a situation becomes grim. There is a strong possibility that in such a case public reason would be simply privatized and ideologized by one of the parties. And Rawls ' statement that reasonableness and rationality are a panacea for ideological consciousness is simply ridiculous. As if all the existing reasonable comprehensive doctrines have already done away with ideological presuppositions and, thus, became 'reasonable

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