A Just (Electric Lady) Land: Jimi Hendrix and John Rawls

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A Just (Electric Lady) Land: Jimi Hendrix and John Rawls

Robbie Sykes and Kieran Tranter

Dr. Robbie Sykes, BIntBus, LLB (Hons), PhD (Griffith), DipGrad (Otago). Robbie

Sykes is an adjunct research fellow at the Law Futures Centre, Griffith University.

Through his research, he seeks to jurisprudence to the philosophical concerns expressed

through popular culture, focusing particularly on rock music and video gaming.

Correspondence: [email protected]

Associate Professor Kieran Tranter BSc, LLB (Hons), PhD (Griffith). Kieran Tranter

is an Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University. He is interested

in forms of law and legal relations expressed through everyday objects and texts.

Word Count: 9578

Abstract, This article argues that the life and work of rock musician Jimi Hendrix

reveals that John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is politically inert. Rawls sought to convince of

the principles needed for a just society via an abstract scenario of his own making. Comparably,

Hendrix attempted to free the minds of his listeners by depicting, through his surreal lyrics and

prismatic guitar playing, mental journeys to elevated states of awareness. Hendrix’s depictions

of ineffable internal states elucidate the difficulties of utilizing the abstract to improve real

world justice. The psychedelic “trips” on which Hendrix takes his listeners parallel the

hallucinatory nature of Rawls’s vision: the divestment of identity demanded by Rawls’s logic

alienates his plan for society from the imperatives of life in the political world.

Keywords Cultural Legal Studies · Music · John Rawls · Jimi Hendrix

Introduction

This article stages a “jam session” between political philosopher John Rawls and rock star Jimi

Hendrix. Specifically, it argues that Hendrix’s life and music1 reveals Rawls’s grand theory of

justice as lost in a haze of political inertia. At first, the combination seems as jarring as the

contrast between the three-piece suits of Rawls, mild-mannered Harvard professor, and the psychedelic finery of Hendrix, mind-altering showman and “high priest” of 1960s counter- culture.2 Such incongruity suggests that Hendrix is of no use in understanding Rawls’s work.

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice3 (henceforth “ATOJ”) is carefully considered, patiently thought

out, and shows in its Harvard University Press publication the hallmarks of elite

institutionalism. In contrast, Hendrix’s onstage antics – gyrating wildly, playing the guitar with

his teeth, and letting loose streams of feedback – suggest a man with no regard for decorum,

let alone patrician concerns over governmental structure. Rawls meticulously plots out the

intricate details of the ideal order, while Hendrix is to be found enveloped in paisley swirls and

whorls of reefer smoke; hardly a candidate, it would seem, for perceiving the “big picture” of

society as charted in ATOJ. However, it is this contrast that makes Hendrix particularly useful

in critiquing ATOJ. The outsized character projected by the guitar god’s performances and the

vivid colors with which he painted his musical pictures highlights features of Rawls’s theory

previously shrouded in grey plaid. The starting point for joining the two is the aforementioned

notion of the “big picture.” Rawls and Hendrix are kindred spirits to the extent that they observe

the wider world with an attitude of detachment: Hendrix sits and smokes, going with the flow

and flashing knowing smirks at the follies of those caught up in the hustle and bustle; Rawls is

above the fray of quotidian society, divested of self-interest and calmly advocating how the

world could be improved.

Comparison with Hendrix shows that the seemingly-reasonable Rawls is, in fact, as

“out there” as any rock star shaman. Hendrix portrays the ineffectualness and frustrations of

daydreams and acid trips, shortcomings which, it is argued, also apply to Rawls’s theory. Ian

MacDonald points out that while the acid trip may reveal the energies that (purportedly)

structure reality, this insight cannot be acted upon: all one can do is sit back and “dig” the

beauty of forces that spark off each other without greater meaning.4 This “un-actionable intelligence” is also present in Rawls. This article concludes that ATOJ, despite its beautiful structure, is politically inert. Rawls’s work merely reinforces the status quo because it sits removed from important concrete realities. Hendrix provides a vivid understanding of Rawls because Hendrix, unlike Rawls, was aware of – indeed, sung about and enacted through his performances – the hindrances encountered in the abstract world.

This article’s tie-dyed juxtaposition of Rawls’s vision of justice and Hendrix’s musical world occurs in four sections that, adopting musical terminology, are labelled “sets”. In the first set, the use of popular music to elucidate jurisprudence is defended, and the possibility of connecting Hendrix’s work with Rawlsian justice is foreshadowed. The second set identifies

the journey to the abstract in Rawls and Hendrix. The third charts the impossibilities of the

return journey from the abstract to the real. In the fourth Hendrix’s recounting of psychedelic

uncertainty are used to explain why Rawls remains lost in the “haze” of political inertia unable

to substantiate an order of justice in the real.

Set One: Law and Music, Rawls and Hendrix

This article’s method strives to illuminate jurisprudence by analyzing it in relation to popular

music. Existing studies that couple law with music have sought insight by identifying

similarities between musicianship and the technical concerns of legal practice, with matters of

interpretation,5 improvisation,6 authenticity,7 and aesthetics8 being prominent lines of enquiry.

Classical,9 folk,10 country,11 and jazz12 are the musical genres usually employed in these

endeavors. Popular music, especially the rock format, has been largely neglected in law and

music’s interdisciplinary dialogue.13 This article differs from previous studies: not only does it

analyze law through rock music, but it also delves into broader philosophical concerns instead

of examining the specific tasks carried out by lawyers and judges. The analysis presented here

“riffs” on MacNeil’s version of cultural legal studies, which has argued for the usefulness of

popular culture in understanding law.14 MacNeil contends that popular culture is a forum in which jurisprudential discourses are present, albeit submerged, and that popular cultural artefacts are a rubric by which academic understandings of jurisprudence can be deepened and critiqued.15 Through this approach, popular culture is viewed as expressive of widespread

anxieties and hopes concerning legality. Film,16 television,17 comic books18 and video games19

have all been recruited to produce novel critiques of jurisprudential theories. This article asserts

that popular music should take its place alongside these forms as a means for cultural legal

enquiry.

Nonetheless, as the method employed in this article draws upon music rather than

fiction and visual drama, so it diverges at points from MacNeil’s undertaking. While fiction

offers self-contained works as diagnostic tools, the analytical resources present in the world of

rock include not only music, but concert performances and promotional videos with their

staging, costuming, and unique forms of physical expression, as well as album art and

photographic documentation of musicians’ lives and work, news media interviews, and

biographical accounts. All of these constituents factor into the discourses of rock music, and,

as argued by Georges-Claude Guilbert, coalesce into a larger text suitable for analysis.20 At the

center of this vortex of material is the rock star. The form of analysis to be undertaken here

looks to the life, as well as artistic enterprises of the rock star, and to the immaterial worlds

created in the rock star’s music, to throw into relief both the intellectual project of the legal

theorist and the social activity of law. Beyond merely illustrating legal theoretical concepts,

the rock star may provide a new angle from which law can be known, a union of the Apollonian

and Dionysian.21 Robbie Sykes and Kieran Tranter have previously argued that the stark

dissimilarity in the rhetorical styles of rock music and legal theory provide a method for

“amplifying” otherwise suppressed problems and inconsistencies within legal theory.22 This article continues such an approach, showing how Hendrix performs and problematizes Rawls.

The first step in this analysis is situating both musician and theorist in the context of the 1960s.

The progressive rock of this time, with its atmosphere of experimentation, exploration and advancement, resonated with the era’s “counter-culture”, an assortment of social movements attempting to remake and enhance human interactions.23 While lacking the hippie

excess of the counter culture generally and Hendrix more specifically, Rawls’s project was also

about bettering society.24 In both, this bettering was to be effected through increased personal

autonomy. In Hendrix’s electrified music-making, there was the proselytizing of Easy Rider25-

style individualism, an assertion of the figure of the libertine that lies at the core of the liberal

project. Rawls’s ATOJ explicitly privileges the liberal subject: the book casts society as a

framework providing opportunities for substantive individual liberty.26

However, there are greater synergies between Rawls and Hendrix than chronological

convergence in the cultural milieu of the late-1960s; both men were purposeful, deft artisans.

Hendrix did not just cause a din. He is remembered and celebrated nearly 50 years after his

drug related death in London in 1970 because he possessed “an ear” (i.e. a delicate musical

perceptiveness) and “a fine, sly sense of humor that – with characteristic lightness of touch – he was able to express in music.”27 Further, his musicianship crafted an immersive experience

directed to liberating the minds of listeners by depicting, through his surreal lyrics and

prismatic guitar playing, mental journeys to other worlds. A “lightness of touch” with a purpose

is also evident in Rawls, whose ATOJ has been lauded as having “a unity and elegance”.28

Through a finely-tuned argument, Rawls advocated for a society that prioritizes just order

rather than directing its citizens towards a particular conception of the good life. However, the

principles of justice that guide the creation of Rawls’s social framework can only be discovered

and appreciated by those who have “cleansed the doors of perception”,29 that is, shed their

personal characteristics and accompanying self-interest.30

It is these similarities – “betterment”, liberalism (broadly conceived), and letting go of the self – that suggest reading Rawls and Hendrix together is not entirely an indulgent “trip.”

ATOJ’s secondary literature highlight the Hendrix-ian scale and overload found in Rawls’s work: Simmonds describes it as a “massive book.”31 Furthermore, Pogge refers to the book as

a “‘green monster’, alluding to its size and the color of the first edition”32, while Wolff seems

to be describing a Hendrix jam33 when he makes mention that ATOJ “is extremely long”.34

Pursuing this comparison between the rhetorical style of Hendrix and Rawls, the next set

explores the letting go of self and mundane reality and journeying to the abstract.

Set Two: Journeying to a Place of Justice

This set focuses on the abstract, journeys and the “place” of justice in Rawls and Hendrix. It

shows how both present a location or space for justice. Justice is not assigned a role within a

theoretical construct but introduced and spoken about as a geographical feature, an actual place

that can be journeyed or travelled to. In both a tripartite arrangement is established; an

undesirable local of the present, a desirable other place and a notion of journey, quest,

adventure or travel from present to the more ideal world.

Mari Matsuda identifies that Rawls’s justice might be thought of as a location: “There

is, as Rawls suggests, a place called Justice”.35 Rawls’s principles of justice are to be used to

shape the social arena.36 In expounding a social contract theory, ATOJ is driven by a desire for

agreement, a sort of “love-in” where people exist in harmony, a dream of peaceful co-existence

mirrored in the Woodstock37 era. Justice is physically built into the structure of society by

agreement because it creates a society that respects individuals. Under Rawls’s system, the

good is deprioritized in favor of the right.38 Good is subjective; right is more objective and geometric. As there are differences of opinions on the good life,39 it is unlikely that the good

will help define justice in any way that can be universally consented to.40 If people temporarily abandon their conceptions of the good life in order to agree upon a structure within which they can pursue those goods, consensus is possible.41 However, Rawls’s system is not only spatial

in the sense that justice is secured by structure; it is also “spacious” in that his justice is

concerned with providing an environment without obstructions. Individuals are justly treated

when the social framework protects their ability to pursue individual conceptions of the good

life.42 While no assortment of institutions realistically capable of being implemented provides

full expression of every value that might be used to constitute society,43 Rawls believes that

liberalism and the prioritization of justice provide the most accommodating possible

arrangement.44

Hendrix conceptualizes relations between people as capable of being improved by

extracting humans from their current setting and situating them in a less overbearing

environment. Hendrix’s imagined (acid- and science fiction-tinged) utopias offer a life free of

the problems that beset the present. For example, in “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To

Be)”,45 he relates the story of a couple who escape the violence that ravages the world by starting a new life undersea. On land, “war is here to stay” and “every inch of earth is a fighting nest”, so the man and his lover “decide to take a last walk through the noise to the sea, not to die but to be reborn, away from the land so battered and torn.” The couple dive for their new home, an “aqua world”, where they meet with a friendly reception from undersea creatures and commence a peaceful existence. The most prominent display of a just and distant place in

Hendrix’s work is that of Electric Ladyland, described as a “love land”,46 free of mental and

social torment. Hendrix’s tales of escape to better worlds draw attention to the fact that

fundamental to Rawls’s system is a belief that all existing milieus incorrigibly hinder awareness

of justice. Rawls writes that his “...aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes

and carries to a higher level of abstraction [emphasis added] the familiar theory of the social

contract...”47 Like the forced aquatic exodus of Hendrix’s couple, a more just life mandates a

departure from the unenlightened, sordid societies of the present.

Hendrix often took pains in describing the journeys required to arrive at his fantastical mindscapes. For example, Electric Ladyland is reached by magic carpet, a voyage that requires one to “fly over the love-filled sea”,48 while in “Spanish Castle Magic”,49 Hendrix sings of a

“really groovy place” that is “very far away. It takes about a half a day to get there if we travel

by dragonfly.” The idea that ATOJ takes the reader on a Hendrix-ian journey underscores how

important distance is to Rawls. This is true not only in the sense that the principles of justice

are just because they reside in a purer world than our own, but also in that the journey itself is

an important part of the process by which justice is to be understood and accepted. Examined

directly, the principles of justice may not be convincing.50 However, Rawls believes that they

will be acceptable to all who travel along with the process by which the principles were

selected.51 Then, what appear as strident, controversial assertions will be exposed as logically

progressing from undisputed notions.52 Specifically, the principles are compelling because they originated in a construct defined by parameters of fairness.53 This founding scenario bestows

upon Rawls’s theory its title “justice as fairness”,54 and justice as fairness is best described as

a journey that Rawls invites the reader to undergo. For Hendrix and the counter-culture, journeys were “trips”, with LSD on blotting paper or laced in the Kool-Aid serving as one’s mode of transport.55 The point here is that reaching ATOJ’s just world means altering one’s

perceptions. The (oftentimes drug-induced) psychedelic “experience” that Hendrix asks others to undertake in “Are You Experienced?”56 makes the listener sufficiently perceptive to glimpse a better way of life. To Rawls and Hendrix, this kind of perception is occluded by quotidian routines, which engender selfish and short-sighted priorities. Hendrix stares out the window in amusement at the people scrabbling around in pursuit of their self-interested goals.57 For

Rawls, selfless reflection in the ivory tower nurtures true understanding. Rawls maintains that

abandoning some elements of everyday physical reality is the sacrifice required to locate

principles of justice, and he labels this altered state the “original position”.58 The original

position is a way of thinking by which participants negotiate and decide upon the principles of

justice.59 Actors inhabiting this state select the principles from behind a “veil of ignorance” that strips them of their social standing, their mental and physical endowments, and their personal beliefs about what constitutes the good life.60 Allegedly, being deprived of these

idiosyncrasies ensures parties can bargain as equals and will not select principles that privilege

people with particular characteristics.61

Rawls’s original position and veil of ignorance remove the differences that lead to

inequality, demands of travelers to jettison their personal concerns. This losing-oneself in the

journey seems remarkably Hendrix-ian. In “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”,62

Hendrix’s lyricizes “It’s time we take a ride, we can cast all your hang-ups over the side.” In

“Are You Experienced?”,63 he suggests that a person’s anxieties will disappear once they have

shed their personal concerns. Going to the “really groovy place” “puts everything else on the shelf.”64 Comparison with the LSD-consciousness portrayed by Hendrix exposes how disembodying Rawls’s veil of ignorance and original position really are. Hayden describes the original position as:

a scenario in which individuals representing several generations are to be abstracted from time and space and required to choose principles for an actual society, into which they would be eventually returned, which they could all agree to support as the most just possible.65

Being “abstracted from time and space”, as well as what Douzinas and Gearey call the

“destruction of identity”66 that occurs in the original position sound suspiciously like the loss

of ego experienced on a “good” LSD trip and the all-encompassing care for humanity that

results.67 In the case of the original position, this mindset of “universal concern”68 is manifested as a preoccupation with fairness and unanimous agreement on the principles of justice. In

Hendrix’s it is the shedding the corrupted social self and letting a primal love, care and peace flourish.

However, this analogy between the original position and the unreal outlook of a drug-

induced mentality raises the concern as to whether disembodiment is, in fact, an adequate state

in which to decide upon practical societal reform. The experience of the counter culture

commune movement showed that shedding the debasing roles mandated by “the system” and

letting primal urges flourish did not utopia make.69 This is the concern of the following set.

Having journeyed to a place of justice with Rawls and Hendrix, how can the enlightened get

back and remake the real? 10

Set Three: Impossible Returns

Everything is groovy in the original position, where, Rawls argues, people would agree on two

principles of justice.70 The first principal is based on the human fact that people are desirous

of a greater amount of goods over a smaller amount.71 It specifies that everyone is equally

entitled to a share in the largest amount of liberties to which access can be equally granted.72

The second principle of justice administers society’s “distribution of social and economic

advantages”.73 This principle has two components: it holds that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”74 Rawls further develops these

two components under the names of “the difference principle” and “fair equality of

opportunity”. The difference principle element allows for inequalities in the distribution of

goods, but unlike utilitarianism, requires that all of society, rather than a simple majority, must

benefit from the inequality.75 The superior prospects of the more privileged must in turn

increase the prospects of the less advantaged.76 Rawls provides the example of entrepreneurs,

whose greater access to the benefits of society compared to unskilled laborers is likely to

encourage innovation and confer material benefits upon the rest of society.77 Rawls denies that

allowing inequalities that benefit all of society creates a meritocratic arrangement.78 While the

gap between people’s abilities is not entirely evened out, such disparity is utilized to improve the lot of the less fortunate.79 However, it is in the movement from the abstract agreed-to

principles and the real lived world that Rawls’s beautiful dream unwinds.

In this set Hendrix will be shown as performing three problematizations of the

principles of justice: the potential discriminatory operation of the difference principle; Rawls’s

lack of an account of production; and the difficulties with the principles of justice in guiding

the establishment of institutions able to effect redistribution.

The first problematization is that Rawls’s principles may fail to secure the major objective of his theory – freedom. The potentially self-defeating operation of his theory of justice is brought about by a contradiction between Rawls’s assertion of the equal moral worth of all individuals and the way in which the difference principle holds that individuals’ abilities should be utilized as assets to improve the lot of everyone in society. This criticism tends to find its groove within libertarianism. Libertarianism bangs out a rather monotonic beat concerning limiting the state to ensuring personal freedom and private ownership.80 In contrast,

Rawls’s permits state intervention in matters of distribution.81 Under this approach, the state is allowed to intrude upon individual rights if doing so is necessary to rectify matters of deprivation.82 To Nozick, one of Rawls’s main libertarian protagonists,83 redistribution is not liberal as it persecutes those with a particular (material) conception of the good:

Why should the man who prefers seeing a movie (and who has to earn money for a ticket) be open to the required call to aid the needy, while the person who prefers looking at the sunset (and hence need earn no extra money) is not? Indeed, isn’t it surprising that redistributionists choose to ignore the man whose pleasures are so easily attainable without extra labor, while adding yet another burden to the poor unfortunate who must work for his pleasures? If anything, one would have expected the reverse.84

To libertarians, treating individuals as means to the improvement of society intrudes upon the integrity of the individual, an integrity that Rawls establishes as one of the foundations of his theory.85 While it might be suggested that people’s abilities are distinct from people themselves; a sort of liberalist aestheticism that separates out, for example Hendrix the man from Hendrix the musician; separating people from their activities significantly complicates and possibly thwarts the entire conception of the liberal individual.86 It is precisely the dangers of separating the person from their doing that is manifest in Hendrix. Hendrix’s minders and

managers did not distinguish the person from the guitar player. For almost the entirety of the

time that he was a popular musician, Hendrix was subjected to a grueling schedule of constant

touring, which exhausted and depressed him and increasingly stifled his creativity.87 On tour,

it was Hendrix who was being used or “distributed”, rather than just his abilities.

The second problematization springs from the disharmony between the difference

principle and the veil of ignorance. The difference principle is reliant on the proposition that

societal inequalities are compensated for by a redistribution of the surplus of goods that they

create.88 A full account of such a surplus would include an explanation of the origins of these goods.89 However, the production of goods is occluded by the veil of ignorance.90 Rawls’s

characterization of the negotiations in the original position portrays the goods as being

somehow bestowed upon people rather than being created by them.91 This lack of a credible

theory regarding the mode (and indeed the means) of production is evident with Hendrix. The

“experience” remains in the transient ephemeral present of psychoactive pharmaceuticals and

sonic stimulation: six after all could “turn out to be nine” and all that the “white collared

conservative” seems to be able to do is “point their plastic finger” and hope “my kind will drop and die.”92 In Hendrix who owns and who makes seems to be lost in a world of pure identity

of us and them. Even while some of Hendrix’s contemporaries like Steppenwolf were

beginning is see the “God-dam pusher” and his users with “tombstones in their eyes”93 from

the acid revolution, Hendrix seemingly remained blasé. This lack of a real account of where

goods come from, and what are the consequences to persons in the distribution and

consumption of goods in Hendrix reveals what is missing in Rawls’s “theory of pure

distribution”.94

The third problematization of Rawls emphasized by Hendrix comes from the absence

of an explanation as to how the principles are actually used to select concrete institutions and

form a government: the criticism that Rawls “has no theory of the state.”95 When combined

with Rawls’s non-existent account of production, his theory of justice lacks a sufficiently

detailed argument as to how redistribution under the difference principle is to be effected in

reality.96 The redistribution of goods would be an involved process instituted through numerous

techniques and regulations, and would require effective, centralized power consolidated in

those responsible for administering the principle.97 Rawls theory is supposed to distribute

goods, but lacks the mechanisms to do so. The world of ideals and the real word seem separated

by an insurmountable chasm. Hendrix encountered similar gorge:

Most of the time I can’t get it on the guitar, you know? Most of the time I’m just laying around day-dreaming and hearing all this music. And you can’t, if you go to the guitar and try to play it, it spoils the whole thing, you know? – I just can’t play guitar that well, to get all this music together.98

The world to which Hendrix travelled in his mind was incapable of being wholly translated

into something tangible. It was a world made up of ideas rather than specifics, as Hendrix

decries in “Love or Confusion”:99 “My mind is so messed up, going ‘round and ‘round. Must

there be all these colors without names, without sound?” Hendrix’s music has often been

conceptualized as a response to his visions. For example, Chenoweth emphasizes ideas such as

“non-verbal communication” as characteristic of the counter-cultural practices with which

Hendrix was associated,100 Friedlander and Perry talk of Hendrix having a “vision”,101 and

according to Waksman, in the studio, Hendrix carried out “fantasies of sound”.102 These

nameless, soundless concepts give little direction as to how they are to be realized in the

material. The same holds true of Rawls’s abstract justice. It is difficult to ascertain whether

Rawls’s principles will actually result in the creation of a just society.103 Like many musicians of the 1960s (such as the Rolling Stones), Hendrix possessed in abundance an ironic sense of humor inherited from the Beat poets of the 1950s. This irony implies a desire to circumvent the follies of those committed to any given ideology. The problem with such detachment is that 14

it precludes engagement with the world. One retreats into grandiose theory or acid trips.

Everything is a “gas”, and it is impossible to take a stand on matters. Despite the detail and sophistication with which Rawls describes the principles of justice, they disconnect (“drop

out”104) from “social, economic, and political reality.”105 It is this disconnect that explains why

Rawls’s principles cannot manifest a more workable system. In attending to distribution and opportunity, the principles of justice are meant to structure a society that gives people control over their lives. Rawls’s concern is for those who suffer from arbitrary inequalities. However, the insubstantial plan for the implementation of Rawls’s just society, as well as the abstraction that founds the principles of justice, underlines a serious flaw. Rawls’s principles and the world they entail represent a world of fuzz-toned, distorted perceptions.

In this set Hendrix showed that Rawls seems to “drop out” in the return from the just

world to the real. Hendrix highlights how the contradictions in the principles leads to a lack of

attention on the practicalities of production and distribution which in turn means the principles

are unlikely to be realized in a concrete social structure. This abstraction, an inability to move

from back from the ideal to the real, is the reason that Rawls’s theory does not induce universal

acceptance of justice as fairness. Rawls remains lost in the haze of political inertia.

Set Four: Lost in the Haze

This set opens with a focused examination of how Rawls’s theory fails to be convincing in the

concrete world. It shows Rawls lost in a haze and then returns to Hendrix to explain that Rawls

remains lost due to his political inertia.

Rawls’s structure has been recognized as possessing attractive qualities: Maffettone

deems Rawls’s theory to be complex and thoughtful, identifying in Rawls a mindfulness of the

forces endangering liberalism not only from the outside but also from within, as well as a

balance between utopian ambitions and pragmatic concerns.106 However, it is these features

that make the theory alienating. The fundamental method of justification in ATOJ is to alter

individual’s consciousness using the original position. For example, there is no reason for the

better-off to agree to the difference principle as an element of justice.107 Even though they might do so in the original position, when returned to the concrete world, they would have to find themselves in a society that was already without class stratification and inequalities of wealth to see redistribution as an attractive proposition.108 The communitarian appraisal of

Rawls is a preeminent critique that draws attention to how abstractness of argument makes his

theory unconvincing.109 The starting point chosen by liberals such as Rawls is the site of

critique for the communitarians.110 Liberal theories commence by identifying the values that

society should facilitate.111 This kind of beginning is evident in Rawls’s statement that “justice

is the first value of social institutions”.112 Communitarians dispute liberals’ ordering of the

relationship between principles and society and argue that the principles against which

institutions are to be assessed are not antecedent to society but are descriptive of it.113 While

principles might explain societal structures, principles do not originate these interactions.114

Because they are subordinate, principles lack argumentative force: “practice precedes theory;

and it is hard to see why persons in actual societies should take notice of such abstract principles

or their deductive implications.”115 The critique is that, in the world of the social, Rawls’s

principles are not necessarily worthy of notice. To agree to the logic of Rawls’s justice one

must entertain an abstract consciousness, but to reach this state of mind requires divestment of

the preferences and allegiances that constitute their very existence.116 As such liberal frameworks are “empty of ethical substance”, as they require no particular content.117 Due to

this emptiness, Rawls’s theory is not faithful to people’s actual interactions and their

communities.118

The communitarian critique suggests that Rawls offers only an affirmation of the status-

quo.119 By the end of the show – a show of abstraction, journeys and impossible returns –

Rawls appears to affirm the distributive landscape of the present.120 Furthermore, because

Rawls has justice as a matter of distribution in the first place, it commodifies people’s dealings

with each other: “Justice becomes lawful possession”.121 This is a state of nihilism because, in

being commodified, every value becomes interchangeable.122 The original position makes

everyone the same. All is haze. Perhaps it does so out of “the modern concern with, and fear

of, the other person.”123

It is the fear of the other that makes abstraction attractive in neutralizing difference. In

turning individuals into constructs, ATOJ deprives people of their identities and experiences,

such as “pain and anger”, and, in doing so, silences them.124 Not only is it impossible to abstract

away identity, but it is an injustice to attempt to do so. According to Matsuda, Rawls’s

principles are unacceptable precisely because they are arrived at by way of abstraction.125 The true dynamics of social interaction are omitted from the original position’s portrayal of an imaginary community.126 Rawls uses abstraction to insulate against viable competing accounts

of the social and to make appealing the reason that lies within the bounds of this theory.127

While Rawls supposedly compares the society he has imagined to actual conditions, this

outside world cannot intrude upon his model because the select parameters of the original

position prohibit its entry.128 As the outside world is unknowable, the appropriateness of the

original position cannot be verified. Acquiescence to the original position is predicated “on

faith alone.”129

At this point, Hendrix’s life and work illuminates the ramifications of ATOJ’s rarefied

perspective. Hendrix also promises perspicacious vision, presenting himself “as a teacher of sensory awareness”130 and offering his “experience” with the use of psychedelic drugs to guide the first-time user of LSD.131 But in guiding the novice tripper, Hendrix is able to mold their

thoughts, shape their reality. This highlights Rawls’s own position of authority:

There is really only one person on the abstract side of the veil of ignorance, because everyone there has the same limited information. My objection is that unavoidably the person behind the veil is John Rawls.132

The occupants of the original position inevitably agree to Rawls’s principles because those

“behind the veil”133 are made in Rawls’s image. However, as the critics that decry Rawls’s

abstract argument have demonstrated, people in real life are not constructed according to

Rawls’s values and so often cannot and will not accept the original position.134

In short Rawls’s principles are not universally acceptable because they are written to

appeal to a construction of humanity that does not exist in the tangible world.135 Even though

Rawls is aware of difference and seeks to contain it in a liberal structure, he is unsuccessful in using abstraction to dissolve these dissimilarities. The trippy feeling of Hendrix’s music is a reminder that Rawls’s theory, while it aims for universal rationality, is only the dream of one

man.

Rawls sought to convince using the original position, a reality that he defined. Hendrix communicated through a world of his own construction. Hendrix acts as a creator-god in his onstage performance style. Hendrix had an intense physicality to his playing, which included pretending to use his teeth on his guitar’s strings and playing the instrument behind his back.

Hendrix waved his hands around while playing, miming as if he was creating the sound with his bare hands like a voodoo child136 who could chop down mountains and raise islands. The world that Hendrix creates through these actions is distanced from the demands of lived community. Frank Zappa parodies this attitude in his anti-hippie consciousness song

“Absolutely Free”:137

[spoken] The first word in this song is discorporate. It means to leave your body

Discorporate and we’ll begin.

Freedom, freedom.

Kindly loving.

You’ll be absolutely free.138

Rawls and Hendrix possess this absolute freedom in the realms they oversee. Both have the

power to construct their worlds as they see fit, excluding and retaining features of reality as it

suits. In consequence, they are always distanced from others, marooned inside their own

creations. Rawls’s abstractions find their equivalent in the tonality of Hendrix’s playing.

Hendrix attempted to manifest the nameless, soundless colors of his visions through techniques

in his guitar playing that lay outside of conventional musicality. According to Friedlander,

Hendrix “...expanded guitar playing beyond a fusion of stylistic elements, past the borders of

notated music into the realm of sounds.”139 In other words, Hendrix’s music involved not only the specificity of playing actual musical notes, but also drew upon more abstract noises in an attempt to convey the sensations of the world that lies beyond the tangible. Whiteley states the centrality of tone in the music of Hendrix:

…the Jimi Hendrix Experience was ultimately based on an immense vocabulary of sound. Volume-affecting sustain, wah-wah pedal, fuzz tone and reverb are especially important in a consideration of style.140

A distinctive characteristic of Hendrix’s music is his use of controlled feedback, the noise

created by overloading amplification equipment.141 Waksman says that “...his [Hendrix’s]

array of bent, distorted notes teetering over the edge of tonality and feedback shrieks struggling

to avoid the inevitability of sonic decay introduced sounds that had really never been heard

before in any musical setting.”142 All of this “heavy metal thunder”143 is suggestive of the

excess in ATOJ that is perhaps a reaction to the theory’s essential detachment. The sonic decay

that precipitates feedback is the breakdown of rationality that Rawls’s theory of justice experiences outside of ATOJ.

Two elements of the rhetorical style by which Rawls attempts to convince others of his just principles are repeating motifs and textual embellishment. These elements map onto

Hendrix’s rhythm and lead guitar playing, respectively. First, the recursive style of Rawls’s writing, in which he reiterates a series of interdependent points,144 is equivalent to Hendrix’s

hypnotic rhythm chops, once again suggesting a trip-like departure from the concrete world, as

well as an inescapable loop that traps its subject in a distorted reality. Whiteley says of

Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”,145 for example, that: “The melody line is simple and based on a

recurring motif which moves towards an incantatory, mesmeric effect.” Similar to the

enthralling effect of Hendrix’s riff-making, Rawls’s repeated evocations of various arguments

are intended to draw in and captivate the reader.

Second, the magnitude of Rawls’s and Hendrix’s outputs is similar. Rawls was a kind

of virtuoso, capable of discharging words in the way that notes torrentially poured from

Hendrix’s guitar, and, in ATOJ, Rawls created a work equal in length and density to one of

Hendrix’s marathon solos. Rawls himself was surprised by the length of the book and later

suggested that it was excessive.146 The mesmerizing recurrences and extensive detail of ATOJ

do not help win people over to the theory, but multiply the very qualities that make it

unpersuasive.

According to Chenoweth, the inability of those in the counter-culture to have a

significant effect upon the real world lead to a finding solace in the fantastical, in the world of

the mind.147 There is a similar retreat on Rawls’s part. Rawls’s theory ultimately fails to bring

about change in society because of its continual return to an aesthetic of abstraction. In response

to the ineffectiveness of this form of argument, Rawls can only offer more distanced rhetoric.

Favoring logical insularity and attractive construction, Rawls repeatedly uses his reasoning to

gain distance from the concerns of the tangible world instead of making a connection with the

shared reality of the political space. Hendrix’s work offers a critique of this escapist thought

pattern by dramatizing the sensation of being marooned in a trip, of being stranded in

detachment and uncertainty. Hendrix was aware that visions, or trips, could go bad. The song

“Purple Haze”148 conveys distress over LSD-induced psychedelic sensations,149 a “higher but disorientating state of consciousness”150 that, rather than bestowing understanding or guiding

the tripper, instills confusion as to what is true and false. Hendrix’s lyrics lack the confidence

of the experienced: “Don’t know if I’m coming up or down. Am I happy or in misery?”; “don’t know if it’s day or night”; “help me”; “oh no”; “can’t go on like this”. 151 Hendrix offers a

warning of a phenomenon unacknowledged in ATOJ; that visions haze over lived realities.

Both Rawls and Hendrix may have tried to escape this fate by embellishing their visions with

details and complications, but their fantastical worlds inevitably collapse when they come into

contact with the concrete.

Rawls and Hendrix have no response to others in the concrete world who disputes their

visions. The history of strident critique of Rawls is reflected in the experiences of the counter-

culture, who “had originally assumed that education through their lyrics could prod a society

to change…[but]…quickly found that much of America was unreceptive and actually hostile

to their ideals.”152 In “Manic Depression”,153 Hendrix communicates an awareness of the

difficulties of manifesting a vision. His lyrics:

I know what I want

But I just don’t know, honey

How to go about getting it

Feeling, sweet feeling

Drops from my fingers

Manic depression has captured my soul

….

Music, sweet music

I wish I could caress, caress, caress

Manic depression is a frustrating mess.154

While Hendrix’s vibrant, even manic performance style, and tracks like “Voodoo Chile”155

and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”,156 express a confidence towards his abilities in the world

of the abstract, other tracks such as “Purple Haze”,157 “Manic Depression”158 and “Wait Until

Tomorrow”159 speak of dejection and depression at the ineffectiveness of these ideas in the

concrete world.

Hendrix exposes the frustrations Rawls is unable to perceive. Rawls tries to establish a

solid foundation for justice with principles that all could agree upon. Principles attracting such

unanimity must necessarily be unassailable. Rawls found the source for these principles in

abstraction. Similarly, Chenoweth describes Hendrix and the counter-culture as pursuing

“unattainable perfect goals of universal love, complete freedom, absolute nonconformity and

massive change in the national character”.160 Hendrix and the counter-culture saw themselves

as godlike in the world of the mind.161 However, their principles were impossible to institute

because of the abstractness.162 This simultaneous internal self-appointed godliness and real life ineffectiveness Chenoweth calls “exultant-despondent” behavior163 self-diagnosed by Hendrix

as manic depression.164 Hendrix’s aimlessness intensified towards the end of his life. He flirted with the possibility of working in different genres but did not make a decisive step, instead remaining “drifting in a sea of excess freedom”.165 The personal and creative freedom that

Hendrix cultivated deprived him of impetus for action, and left him without direction,

exhausted and OD by age 27. Hendrix’s tragic drifting in a sea of excess freedom shows that

the liberation from identity provided by the original position alienates ATOJ from the

particulars that make meaning out of life and give a sense of necessity to living.166 Rawls does not secure assent to his theory because, in the state of total freedom he provides, the choice to agree is a meaningless one; all is haze. Rawls, wanting those in his social contract hypothetical to choose freely, strips them of what he supposes to be their constraints. However, the freedom he generates, leading inevitably to the principles of justice, paradoxically results in an environment of un-freedom. In response, the only true choice may be to opt out of Rawls’s scenario altogether. Hendrix advocated that people shrug off their “hang-ups”167, the wary and

fearful attitudes that are born out of trauma. However, perhaps these attitudes should not be so

easily discarded, for they speak to the very real harm that people can – and indeed do – cause each other in society as a result of their misconceptions of, and ignorance towards others’ differences. Perhaps what Rawls through Hendrix suggests is a theory of justice that does not marginalize difference but embraces it; that is less the bombastic showman and more the listener to the sounds of others.

This is why Rawls theory cannot remedy, and may even sustain indifference to the inequalities it seeks to address, because its theoretical structure causes those crucial realities to haze out. It is political inert. Hendrix warns of these dangers: our minds will remain “messed up” with “all these colors without names, without sound.”168 The colors are nameless and

soundless; that is people cannot express their identities because their identities have been

stripped away, leaving them without voices. As concrete reality fades from sight on the journey

to the original position, also justice recedes. Rawls’s theory will remain detached, floating in

outer space until it interfaces with those it attempts to help, until it stages a true “Be-In”169 with

the real people that are society’s disadvantaged.

Conclusion: “Still Raining, Still Dreaming”170

As with some 1960s counter-cultural efforts to change society, there is hopefulness to Rawls’s

project.171 He offered universal understanding, in his own words “a society which…everyone

accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice”,172 and believed that

this goal was achievable because a “public sense of justice makes their secure association

together possible.”173 There would be a better world because of this “shared conception of

justice establishes the bonds of civic friendship”174. But the difficulty in effecting this change

also parallels the incomplete achievements brought about by the 1960s counter-cultural movement and the kind of altered thinking portrayed by Hendrix.175 In looking for a foundation

upon which to base societal change, Rawls and Hendrix had recourse to the abstract, using it

to develop principles that, despite their virtuosic complexity, were unable to resonate with real

social forces.176 In translating these imagined worlds into the concrete, their visions are revealed as hallucination. Rawls’s envisioned society, as with Electric Ladyland, will remain forever “up ahead.”177 Hendrix, however, recognized and grappled with the problem of

abstraction in a number of his tracks; not seeing clarity and truth, but haze.

Rawls’s through Hendrix shows the dangerous attraction of abstraction to thinking justice. Abstraction seems to be the magic carpet that can transport thinking from the complicities and complexities of a lived word of difference, to a refined realm of truth and clarity. However, that journey is a “trip” and a trick. The abstract journey to justice reveals a stage with only one man making noise. The band might have been the Jimi Hendrix Experience

– but it was Hendrix that the punters had come to experience. Supposedly, anybody can don the veil of ignorance and be transported to the original position, but in doing so they become transmuted into John Rawls. Abstraction isolates. It hazes over difference, and leaves the showman used up and asphyxiated in the Samarkand Hotel, Notting Hill, London.

In the final year of his life, as he was trying to find a way beyond the “total freedom”

of psychedelia, Hendrix experimented with earthier music rooted in soul grooves.178 This

furtive and partial transition may suggest that coming down from the high of abstractions,

journeys and fantasy realms, is what is needed for a theory of justice. Not abstraction but more

grounding in the lived reality of embodiment, pain and passion. The sound of justice should

have less “out of body” trips and more soul.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor William MacNeil, Professor Andy Bennett and the reviewers

for their advice and suggestions. All errors and omissions are ours.

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1 Particularly his concert performances and studio albums: Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced (Track Records, 1967); Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold as Love (Track Records, 1967); Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland (Track Records, 1968). 2 Lawrence Chenoweth, “The Rhetoric of Hope and Despair: A Study of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Jefferson Airplane,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 25. 3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 4 Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties Third Revised Edition, (London: Vintage, 2008): 17. 5 Adam Gearey, “Outlaw Blues: Law in the Songs of Bob Dylan,” Cardozo Law Review 20 (1999) 1401; J. M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, “Interpreting Law and Music: Performance Notes on ‘The Banjo Serenader’ and ‘The Lying Crowd of Jews’,” Cardozo Law Review 20 (1999): 1513. 6 Carol Weisbrod, “Fusion Folk: A Comment on Law and Music,” Cardozo Law Review 20 (1999): 1439; Sara Ramshaw, “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 2 (2006): 1. 7 David S. Caudill, “Fabricating Authenticity: Law Students as Country Music Stars,” Cardozo Law Review 20 (1999): 1573; Sara Ramshaw, “‘He’s My Man!’: Lyrics of Innocence and Betrayal in The People v. Billie Holiday,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 16 (2004): 86; Sara Ramshaw, “The Creative Life of Law: Improvisation, Between Tradition and Suspicion,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 6 (2010): 1. 8 Desmond Manderson, Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Michael Richmond, “Law and Popular Music: An Etude in Two Movements,” Legal Studies Forum 22 (1998): 79. 9 Desmond Manderson, “Et Lex Perpetua: Dying Declarations & Mozart’s Requiem,” Cardozo Law Review 20 (1999): 1621. 10 Weisbrod, supra note 6. 11 Caudill, supra note 7. 12 Ramshaw, supra note 6. 13 An interesting example of law and popular music scholarship can be found in Patricia Salkin and Irene Crisci’s work in charting the law and culture of the post war suburbanization of America through the music of Billy Joel: see Salkin and Crisci, “Billy Joel: The Chronicler Of The Suburbanization In New York,” Touro Law Review 31 (2015): 111. 14 William P. MacNeil, Lex Populi: The Jurisprudence of Popular Culture, (Pao Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007): 1.

15 Ibid. See also Kieran Tranter, ““Frakking Toasters” and Jurisprudences of Technology: The Exception, the Subject and Techné in Battlestar Galactica,” Law and Literature 19 (2007): 45. 16 MacNeil, supra note 14, Alison Young, The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect, (Abingdon: Routledge- Cavendish, 2009), Timothy D. Peters, “Beyond the Limits of the Law: a Christological Reading of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight,” Griffith Law Review 24 (2015): 418. See generally Stefan Machura and Peter Robson, “Law and Film: Introduction,” in Law and Film, eds. Stefan Machura and Peter Robson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 17 Tranter, supra note 15. See generally Robson and Silbey, ibid. 18 Jason Bainbridge, ““This is the Authority. This Planet is Under Our Protection” - An Exegesis of Superheroes’ Interrogation of Law,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 3 (2007): 455; Thomas Giddens, “Comics, Law, and Aesthetics: Towards the Use of Graphic Fiction in Legal Studies,” Law and Humanities 6 (2012): 85; Thomas Giddens, “Navigating the Looking Glass: Severing the Lawyer's Head in Arkham Asylum,” Griffith Law Review 24 (2015): 395, Dale Mitchell, “Paradoxes and Patriarchy: A Legal Reading of She-Hulk,” Griffith Law Review 24 (2015), Thomas Giddens, “Law and the Machine: Fluid and Mechanical Selfhood in the Ghost in the Shell,” in Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law, ed. Thomas Giddens (London: Routledge, 2015). 19 Robbie Sykes, “‘Those Chosen by the Planet’: Final Fantasy VII and Earth Jurisprudence,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (2017), Ashely Pearson and Kieran Tranter, “Code, Nintendo’s Super Mario and Digital Legality,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (2015): 825, Michael Barnett and Cassandra Sharp, “The Moral Choice of Infamous: Law and Morality in Video Games,” Griffith Law Review 26 (2015): 482. 20 Georges-Claude Guilbert, Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood and the American Dream (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2002): 1–2. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside ed. Michael Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1993). 22 Sykes and Tranter, “'You Gotta Roll/Rule with It’: Oasis and The Concept of Law,” Griffith Law Review 26 (2016): 571. 23 Sheila Whiteley, The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture, (London: Routledge, 1992): 1. 24 Richard Marens, “Returning to Rawls: Social Contracting, Social Justice, and Transcending the Limitations of Locke” Journal of Business Ethics 75 (2007): 63; Aaron James, “Constructing Justice for Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 281. 25 Easy Rider directed by Dennis Hopper. Warner Bros., 1969; Barbara Klinger, “The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider,” in The Road Movie Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, (London: Routledge, 1997). 26 Thomas Pogge, Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 28. 27 John Perry, Electric Ladyland, (New York: Continuum, 2004): 30. 28 Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, “Pogge: John Rawls”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9yUJLBzGX8 (accessed January 13, 2017). See also Pogge, supra note 26 at vii, which calls A Theory of Justice “…an elegant and amazing unified intellectual structure…” 29 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954). 30 Michael J. Sandel, ed., Justice: A Reader, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 203. 31 Nigel E. Simmonds, Cenntral Issues in Jurisprudence: Justice, Law and Rights, (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2002): 48. 32 Pogge, supra note 26 at vii. 33 Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Chile (Electric Ladyland, Track Records, 1968), for example. 34 Robert P. Wolff, Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of a Theory of Justice, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977): 3. 35 Mari J. Matsuda, “Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted Visions of Human Nature: A Feminist Critique of Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” New Mexico Law Review 16 (1986): 613: 630. 36 Patrick Hayden, John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002): 23. 37 Woodstock directed by Michael Wadleigh. Warner Bros., 1970; Andy Bennett, ed., Remembering Woodstock, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 38 Rawls, supra note 3 at 31. 39 Jon Mandle, Rawls’s a Theory of Justice: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 11. 40 Paul Graham, Rawls, (London: Oneworld Publications, 2007): 20. See also Rawls, supra note 3 at 5. 41 Rawls, supra note 3 at 5: “Those who hold different conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that institutions are just...” Graham, supra note 40 at 20 highlights consensus: “…the key issue is not about obedience to the state but about how we stabilize a political order on the basis of agreement...” Pogge, supra note 26 at 34: “We can live together in harmony despite conflicting ideals of the good human being… so long as we know that we share a moral commitment to our society’s basic structure. For Rawls, this is one of the most important lessons of modernity…” 30

42 Rawls, supra note 3 at 25; 27; 31, Samuel Freeman, Rawls, (New York: Routledge, 2007): 44. 43 Percy B. Lehning, John Rawls: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 16. 44 Ibid; Rawls, supra note 3 at 302. 45 Jimi Hendrix, 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) (Electric Ladyland, Track Records, 1968). 46 Jimi Hendrix, Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland) (Electric Ladyland, Track Records, 1968). 47 Rawls, supra note 3 at 11. 48 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 46. 49 Jimi Hendrix, Spanish Castle Magic (Axis: Bold as Love, Track Records, 1967). 50 Rawls, supra note 3 at 121: “…the acceptance of these principles is not conjectured as a… probability.” 51 Rawls, supra note 3 at 120–121. Graham, supra note 40 at 26 on process: “The validity of principles derives from the procedure [original emphasis] by which they are chosen…”, and on acceptability: “People will be motivated to respect principles which they recognise they have chosen, or would choose...” 52 Rawls, supra note 3 at 121: “The argument aims eventually to be strictly deductive.” 53 Ibid: 120, Freeman, supra note 42 at 142–143; Graham, supra note 40 at 26. 54 Rawls, supra note 3 at 11, Norman Daniels, “Introduction,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ a Theory of Justice, ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1975): xiv. 55 It should be noted, however, that while LSD is symbolic of the kind of beatific thinking Hendrix conveys, this mental state is not only accessible via drugs. As Hendrix says in Are You Experienced (Are You Experienced, Track Records, 1967): “Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.” 56 Ibid. 57 On Hendrix’s autonomy and distance from other ways of life, see David Henderson, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (New York: Atria, 2008): 203. 58 Rawls, supra note 3 at 121. 59 Rawls, supra note 3 at 11. 60 Rawls, supra note 3 at 12; 137. 61 Rawls, supra note 3 at 12; 136. 62 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 46. 63 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 55. 64 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 49. 65 Hayden, supra note 36 at 1–2. 66 Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice, (Oxford, Hart, 2005): 127. 67 For example, Ian MacDonald, The Beatles at No. 1, (London: Pimlico, 2003): 99 writes that LSD worked on rock star John Lennon “…to elevate his psychologically conditioned sympathy for the underdog into a universal concern for love and peace...” 68 Ibid. 69 Philip Abrams and Andrew McCulloch, Communes, Sociology and Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 70 Rawls, supra note 3 at 14. 71 Ibid: 142. 72 Ibid: 302. 73 Ibid: 61. 74 Ibid: 60. 75 Ibid: 15; 61. 76 Ibid: 75. 77 Ibid: 78. 78 Ibid: 100. 79 Ibid: 101. 80 Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990): 74. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “Is Nozick Kicking Rawls's Ass? Intellectual Property and Social Justice,” UC Davis Law Review 40 (2007): 563. 84 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, (New York: Basic Books, 1974): 170. 85 Ibid: 228. 86 Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 78. 87 Classic Albums The Jimi Hendrix Experience Electric Ladyland, directed by Chas Chandler. Eagle Vision, 1997, on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s touring schedule, Noel Redding (bassist): “It was silly, really. I’m glad I’m still here.” Mitch Mitchell (drummer): “[the touring arrangements were]…giant stupidity; from a management 31

point of view, from agent’s point of view…” Trixie Sullivan, Hendrix’s manager’s personal assistant: “…they put him [Jimi] on at one side of the country for one day and you’re supposed to be 3000 miles away the next day to do another gig. No one seemed to think of a schedule where he could go from one place to the other in a normal manner.” 88 Wolff, supra note 34 at 207. 89 Ibid: 90 Ibid: 201. 91 Ibid: 207. 92 Jimi Hendrix, If 6 was 9, (Axis: Bold as Love, Track Records, 1967). 93 Steppenwolf, The Pusher, (Steppenwolf, ABC Dunhill Records). 94 Wolff, supra note 34 at 210. 95 Ibid: 201. 96 Ibid: 202. 97 Ibid: 202. 98 Steve Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness,” in The Popular Music Studies Reader, eds. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee (London: Routledge, 2006): 64. 99 Jimi Hendrix, Love or Confusion, (Are You Experienced, Track Records, 1967). 100 Chenoweth, supra note 2 at 25. 101 Paul Friedlander, Rock and Roll: A Social History, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996): 228; Perry, supra note 28 at 3. 102 Waksman, supra note 98 at 64. 103 Wolff, supra note 34 at 195. 104 Timothy S. Miller, The Hippies and American Values, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012): 93. 105 Wolff, supra note 34 at 195 observes that: “…Rawls says little or nothing about the concrete facts of social, economic, and political reality.” 106 Sebastiano Maffettone, Rawls: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Polity, 2010): 2. 107 Richard Miller, “Rawls and Marxism,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ a Theory of Justice, ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1975): 206. 108 Ibid. 109 Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism,” in Rawls and Communitarianism, eds. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2003): 460; Maffettone, supra note 106 at 158-159. 110 Kukathas and Pettit, supra note 80 at 92. 111 Ibid. 112 Rawls, supra note 3 at 3. 113 Kukathas and Pettit, supra note 80 at 92. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Sandel, supra note 86 at 175. 117 Douzinas and Gearey, supra note 66 at 126; Fagan, Andrew, “Paradoxical Bedfellows: Nihilism and Human Rights,” Human Rights Review 6 (2005): 80. 118 Douzinas and Gearey, supra note 66 at 126; Brian C. Anderson, “The Antipolitical Philosophy of John Rawls,” The Public Interest 151 (2003): 39: 40 writes that “…Rawls’s thought is a long lesson in how not to think [as in ‘avoid thinking’] about politics [original emphasis].” 119 Douzinas and Gearey, supra note 66 at 126; Bielefeldt, Heiner (1998) ‘Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Systematic Reconstruction and Countercriticism’ in Dyzenhaus, David (ed) Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism Duke University Press: 23 argues that “…those launching attacks again liberalism frequently turn out to be liberals themselves…” 120 Douzinas and Gearey, supra note 66 at 126. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid: 127. 124 Ibid: 127. 125 Matsuda, supra note 35 at 613. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Chenoweth, supra note 2 at 31. 32

131 Whiteley, supra note 23 at 26. 132 Matsuda, supra note 35 at 628. 133 Jeff Beck, Behind the Veil (Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, Epic Records, 1989). 134 Rawls’s theory screens out constituents of identity, such as culture: Doug Bond and Jong-Chul Park, “An Empirical Test of Rawls’s Theory of Justice: A Second Approach, in Korea and the United States,” Simulation Gaming 22 (1991): 443; race: Charles W. Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (2009): 161; and gender: Lisa H. Schwartzman, “Intuition, Thought Experiments, and Philosophical Method: Feminism and Experimental Philosophy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (2012): 307. Anthony J. Fejfar, “In Search of Reality: A Critical Realist Critique of John Rawls’ a Theory of Justice,” Saint Louis University Public Law Review 9 (1990): 289: 299 characterizes the denial of self necessitated by the original position as an unhealthy repressive act. Daniel Gutiérrez, “John Rawls and Policy Formation,” Review of Policy Research 22 (2005): 737: 740, meanwhile, contends that nobody can actually effect an escape from their identity, and Leon H. Craig, “Contra Contract: A Brief against John Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 8 (1975): 63: 69 asserts that, concerning the philosophical matters addressed by Rawls, no “substantial consensus” exists that can be escaped to. 135 Mandle, supra note 39 at 22 states “…the goal of establishing the congruence of the right and the good for all (or most) citizens in a well-ordered society of justice as fairness remains elusive [our emphasis].” 136 Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child (Slight Return), (Electric Ladyland, Track Records, 1968). 137 The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, (We’re Only in It For the Money, Verve Records, 1968). 138 Ibid. 139 Friedlander, supra note 101 at 220. 140 Whiteley, supra note 23 at 27. 141 Friedlander, supra note 101 at 228. 142 Waksman, supra note 98 at 65. 143 Steppenwolf, Born to Be Wild (Steppenwolf, ABC Records, 1968). 144 Wolff, supra note 34 at 4 calls the book “labyrinthine”. 145 Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze (Track Records, 1967). 146 Samuel R. Aybar, Joshua D. Harlan, and Won J. Lee, “John Rawls: For the Record,” Harvard Review of Philosophy Spring 1991 (1991): 38: 42. 147 Chenoweth, supra note 2 at 44. 148 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 145. 149 Whiteley, supra note 23 at 17. 150 Friedlander, supra note 101 at 223. 151 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 145. 152 Chenoweth, supra note 2 at 44. 153 Jimi Hendrix, Manic Depression, (Are You Experienced, Track Records, 1967). 154 Ibid. 155 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 33. 156 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 136. 157 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 145. 158 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 153. 159 Jimi Hendrix, Wait Until Tomorrow, (Axis: Bold as Love, Track Records, 1967). 160 Chenoweth, supra note 2 at 43. 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid: 28. 164 Manic depression is a stark counterpoint to the balanced state of mind that is Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium [our emphasis]”: Rawls, supra note 3 at 48. 165 Perry, supra note 28 at 3. Furthermore, on p 130: “In the late period interviews, he [Hendrix] certainly sounded depressed, lacking in direction.” 166 Gutiérrez, supra note 134 at 740. 167 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 46. 168 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 99. 169 The “Human Be-In” was a counter-cultural gathering held in San Francisco, 1967. 170 Jimi Hendrix, Still Raining, Still Dreaming, (Electric Ladyland, Track Records, 1967). 171 Evincing this hopefulness, Rawls, supra note 3 at 6 talks of “realistic utopia”, a phrase picked up on by several authors, including Freeman, supra note 42 at 11 and Pogge, supra note 26 at 27. Similarly, Wolff, supra note 34 at 195 writes that “A Theory of Justice can be placed historically in the tradition of utopian liberal political economy…” 172 Rawls, supra note 3 at 5. 33

173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Whiteley, supra note 23 at 2. 176 Mandle, supra note 39 at 34: “Although its centrality to contemporary philosophy is generally recognized, the arguments in A Theory of Justice are not, in fact, widely accepted.” 177 Jimi Hendrix, supra note 46. 178 Janie L. Hendrix and John McDermott, Jimi Hendrix: An Illustrated Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster 2007): 49.