A Theory of Justice Fifty Years Later

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has reshaped liberal political theory, but what fruitful arguments does it generate today, fifty years after its publication? To show Theory's productive contemporary lives, I outline its key concepts and commitments, focusing on Rawls’ goal to uncover a consensus among reasonable persons. I highlight arguments in global justice and animal rights in which Theory's concept of the basic structure was fruitfully employed. Moreover, I argue that Rawls envisioned consensus as agreement only on very broad terms. Perhaps more than he realized, he left it to citizens to deal with everyday questions about justice, in which identities and power are central. I suggest that to extend Theory to such questions, theorists can combine its central values, such as those of self-respect and autonomy, with independent conceptions of power, so long as these treat arguments as irreducible to power relations.

Framing the Refugee

‘Framing the Refugee’ looks at the power of representation of liberal political theory with regard to refugees. In the author’s view, legal and political arbitrariness lies in the representing of refugees as lacking agency. His key point is that liberalism fails to conceive of refugees as politically capable actors, and he is thus complicit in the arbitrary neutralisation of their emancipatory potential and participatory powers. This paper emphasises the moral justifiability of that state of affairs by seeking some answers to the question of why liberal political theory construes a concept of the refugee that does not contain any element of political agency. Most obviously, the author acknowledges that refugees perform a significant social role in contemporary societies and are hence active members in them. Nonetheless, they remain neglected in their political role by most political theory. What does it mean to have political agency for the author? It means to have the power of self-representation, that is, of being allowed and even enabled by a given legal system to bring about change in the political order, or at least to participate in that change. But the author also calls attention to the role of ‘theory’ in addressing this downside of the contemporary liberal democratic order. Theory becomes even more crucial at times of urgency, that is, when theorists have a moral responsibility to deepen their philosophical imagination, as Hannah Arendt so forcefully noted. The theoretical task of ‘re-framing’ the refugee entails reconfiguring political philosophy and its traditional categories of sovereignty, citizenship and nationality. The liberal inability to accommodate the political agency of many members of the political community – especially of non-nationals – is a sign of the historical contingency of the current rules of political membership. This inability makes evident the imperative of rethinking politics in ways that avoid the arbitrariness of treatment and aim instead at equality and justice. If political leaders can re-write the rules of membership to suit their own ideological agendas, the same demand should be addressed by – indeed demanded from – political and legal theorists. However, this is not as easy as it seems, according to the author. In his view, political theory is confronted with fundamental challenges, the most obvious one being that ‘theory’ is usually unequipped to defeat its own ‘topology’. Note that in saying this the author is raising a more pressing concern about arbitrary law-making: it may be that arbitrariness – especially the arbitrary treatment of aliens by the sovereign state and by liberal democracies in particular – is inscribed in the very DNA of liberalism. No matter how odd this may seem, the author advances the view that ideas, however creative of a new order, or transformative of a given status quo, never appear in "free form", and are instead deeply rooted in a structure that constrains our imagination. The challenge is thus to develop a meta-theory that reconceptualises the very way liberal political theory frames marginalised sectors of society – such as the "poor" – as a product of an international economic order that robs those sectors of their agency as the very condition of its internal functioning. We must therefore question how the very idea of the refugee is produced, because it symbolises the construction of an inside and an outside that is complicit with the arbitrary play of legal statuses involved in migration policy. The author’s main point regarding this is that certain groups are sidelined by economic, political and social systems because they are already excluded from theoretical systems to start with. Keywords: refugees, agency, political theory, migration

Political theology and religious pluralism: Rethinking liberalism in times of post-secular emancipation

Recent debates in liberal political theory have sought to come to terms with the post-secular condition, characterised by deep religious pluralism, the resurgence of right-wing populism, as well as new social movements for economic, ecological and racial justice. These forces represent competing claims on the public space and create challenges for the liberal model of state neutrality. To better grasp this problem, I argue for a more comprehensive engagement between liberalism and political theology, by which I understand a mode of theorising that reveals the theological basis of modern secular political concepts. In considering two contrasting approaches to political or public theology – Carl Schmitt’s and Jürgen Moltmann’s – I argue that liberal political theory can and should open itself to a diversity of social movements and ecological struggles that pluralise the political space in ways that unsettle the boundary between the secular and religious.

Meaning and context in political theory

The two books offer a contextual reinterpretation of Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian liberalism. Nelson’s main thesis is that debates in liberal political theory re-enact theological debates about theodicy going back to the Pelagian controversy. This claim is criticized for its historical inaccuracy. Nelson’s invocation of theodicy as a refutation of luck egalitarianism and the Rawlsian rejection of desert rest on a claim of possibility that is too weak to uphold a plausible refutation. Forrester locates Rawls’s rejection of desert in the thinking of his contemporaries. She not only shows the development of Rawls’s thought but also details its broad influence. However, her thesis that the role of economic planning in a theory of justice remained undeveloped by Rawls ignores the intrinsic difficulties of designing a system of economic planning. The persistent antinomies of grace and free will in metaphysics, and of planning and the price mechanism in economics, show the continuing relevance of meaning beyond context.

Medicine and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition

Whereas bioethicists generally consider medicine a practice aimed at the individual good of each patient, in this paper I present an alternative conception of the goods of medicine. I first explain how modern liberal political theory gives rise to the predominant view of the medical good and then contrast this understanding of politics with that of Thomas Aquinas, informed by Aristotle. I then show how this Christian politics is implicit in certain aspects of contemporary medical practice and argue that Christians ought to draw more attention to this point in order to direct medicine toward the common good.

From Eternity to Here

The discourse of religious accommodation has stopped making sense and the reason it has stopped making sense is because our terminology is inherited from a tradition of political theological discourse that has been forgotten: the theology of divine accommodation. This chapter reconstructs the content of that tradition of political theology in broad strokes, arguing that the birthplace of secularism and the birthplace of liberalism both lie here. Once we recognize that, a number of doctrinal and conceptual puzzles can be solved, including how to define religion, whether to characterize secular humanism as a religion, and how broadly to construe the right to religious accommodation. It also solves the intellectual history puzzle of how Christianity came to be “terrestrialized,” paving the way for the evolution of liberal political thought. Contra the received wisdom that political theology and liberalism are intellectual and political antagonists, locating the origins of liberalism and secularism in the tradition of divine accommodation reveals conservative political theology and liberal political theory to be one and the same. It further reveals the centrality of law to the humanist tradition and the centrality of humanism to law.

Political Emancipation

This chapter considers the contradictions of women's emancipation in light of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It shows how the resistance to women's citizenship had less to do with the necessarily slow but inevitable progress of liberal democratic ideas than it did with a contradiction at the very heart of the political thinking that articulated them—a political thinking integral to the discourse of secularism. Liberal political theory postulated the sameness of all individuals as the key to their formal equality—abstracted from their circumstances there was no discernable difference among them, they stood as equals before the law. At the same time there were differences that were thought to refuse abstraction. These were people in a state of dependency, such as propertyless peasants, wage laborers, women, children, slaves. Therefore, they could not be counted as autonomous individuals—autonomy, after all, was at the heart of the very definition of individuality.

Políticas de aparición/desaparición (The Politics of Appearance/Disappearance)

Los asuntos concernientes a las políticas de la des/aparición son amplios, variados y complejos. Atendiendo a los procesos históricos y a las categorizaciones de la (des)aparición que de ellos se derivan, en este trabajo identificamos dos entradas analíticas que consideramos principales. En primer lugar, abordamos el significado de la aparición y la desaparición desde la perspectiva de la teoría política liberal. En concreto, analizamos cómo regímenes políticos distintos se relacionan con el individuo-ciudadano y el espacio púbico. En segundo lugar, respondiendo a una asentada tradición teórica que calibra la desaparición en relación a las políticas de la vida, evaluamos sus aportes y sus déficits explicativos para entender la cuestión en sus diversas manifestaciones históricas. Finalmente, luego de ensayar una tipología de la desaparición, el texto cierra con reflexiones sobre cómo abordar la historicidad de la desaparición y preguntas de investigación en relación a los dispositivos de desaparición y aparición contemporáneos. The politics of dis/appearance concern a wide variety of complex issues. Engaging with historical processes and the different categorizations of (dis)appearance that they have engendered, we identify two key analytical approaches: First, we consider the meaning of appearance and disappearance within the liberal political theory, and how different political regimes have related to the individual-citizen and the public space. Second, we reflect on the inputs and shortcomings of the studies in biopolitics, their understanding of disappearance as part of the politics of life and their historical manifestations. Third, we consider a possible approach to understanding what we have termed as “social disappearance”. After drafting a typology of disappearance, the article ends with some reflections on how we can approach the historicity of disappearance and with several research questions concerning contemporary devices (dispoisitif) or apparatus of disappearance and appearance.