“[Analytical] criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of [Rawls]. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on [Rawls] is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the [Rawlsian] system. Their polemics against [Rawls] and against one another are confined to this – each extracts one side of the [Rawlsian] system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by others. To begin with they extracted pure, unfalsified [Rawlsian] categories such as [‘Original Position’] and [‘Justice’], later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as [‘overlapping consensus’], [‘political liberalism’]”
Contemporary as it sounds, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t find this text in the latest Philosophy & Public Affairs; it is, of course, The German Ideology, with Rawls playing Hegel’s role. And how familiar it sounds (perhaps I’m being unfair; perhaps this is just what it is to be a “philosophical school”).
But I suppose the more interesting question is about political philosophers, and how they see their work and the work of others. Chris Brooke was telling us yesterday that the Young Hegelians themselves saw their relation to Hegel as a mere echo of the Greek schools’ relationship to the other great system builder, Aristotle. And how they orientated their research (for example, Marx’s doctoral thesis on “The Difference Between the Democritean and the Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” ) as a function of this self-understanding.
Then after Cohen and Ryan’s Hegel seminar today I was talking with Ben about how Hegel was the Owl of Minerva to Bonaparte’s world-historical individual, and wondering about (what else?) where Rawls stood in all this. Had we finally cracked the secret behind those cryptic remarks on America, land of the future?
We parted on the conclusion that Dworkin must have been the Owl to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s world-historical individual…
But this just opens up a whole can of worms: who was the Twentieth Century’s Kant? (Rawls, I suppose) Who is the Feuerbach, who is the Marx? Where does Nozick fit? How do we describe the late Rawls’ relation to his own earlier self, in the terms of this particular historical looking-glass? And how does one go about turning Dworkin on his head?
(Then again, maybe I’ve got all of this wrong, and Bernard Williams was on more of the right track with his ideas about Wittgensteinianism and Left-Wittgensteinianism, or even, in the same article: “These critics [Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel] stand to Rawls much as Hegel and his followers stood to Kant.”)
But if the Young Hegelians themselves thought of themselves in roughly this way, as some sort of post-Aristotelian philosophical fall-out, perhaps we need to add to the aphorism: [history repeats itself], the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, the third time as a spaghetti Western.
Code of Nature 
January 25, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I’m assuming the relevance of Bernard Williams and left Wittgensteinianism here is that any examination of general philosophical premises is itself a piece of philosophy and therefore the hoped-for exit from philosophy is an impossibility. But that seems to me like a more Kantian thought, since it seems to be conceptual; Williams’ point is rather not that the escape from philosophy is impossible as such, but that it is at least impossible for us here and now, because of the practices of criticism and justification in which we’re embedded. Kant says something like, Enlightenment is always there, and Williams says something like, who knows whether Englightenment is always there, but it’s bloody well here now.
January 25, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Rob,
What I meant with BW and Left-Wittgensteinianism (Cf. In the Beginning was the Deed) was that Williams makes his point about contemporary theory by making an extended analogy between the post-Kantian German scene and the post-Rawlsian scene. He notes that certain theorists (Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel) “stand to Rawls much as Hegel and his followers stood to Kant”, and uses the historical parallel to frame his thoughts about what is wrong with contemporary political philosophy. (He then constructs a second parallel between the receptions of Hegel and the (political) receptions of Wittgenstein, and argues that communitarians have so far mainly been of the Right-variety, and that perhaps its time to explore the Left-variation.)
That’s all I was alluding to – which is an unashamedly superficial point. [I’ve added the quote to the post to clarify.]
January 25, 2008 at 8:28 pm
(I guess its obvious that the Rawls->communitarian shift is much more like the Kant->Hegel shift than any Rawls->Dworkin/Rawls->Nozick shift…)
But on your, less superficial, point, isn’t the implication that we can only exit the enlightenment mode of philosophy by a non-philosophical development… (in the material conditions, for example)
January 25, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I suppose that depends on how immanent you think critique is, and what counts as exiting the Enlightenment mode of philosophy, both of which seem to me distinctly philosophical questions. Don’t make me choose between Bernard and Kant, because you may not like the answer.
There is I think a number of interesting questions about exactly how Hegelian the intellectual history of Rawls is. Firstly, there’s the banal sense in which both Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism seem almost illustrative of the Owl of Minerva idea. Secondly, there’s the sense in which the development between the two is one of reason reflecting on itself, of a social contract theorist trying work out the conditions under which social contract theory can be contracted into. Thirdly, there’s the way in which Political Liberalism is self-consciously Hegelian, in the sense that it sees itself as instantiating the first two ways in which it is Hegelian. Which of course makes it even more Hegelian.
I met with Stuart this afternoon, and was defending my chapter on how to design your original position from charges of empty formalism by trying to argue that what your original position does is make concrete the motivating idea of agency by having it reflect on itself. I still maintain that all the non-crazy bits in Hegel are just Kant, anyway.