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Introduction Chapter NOTES Introduction 1. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 11–12. 2. As I explain at the beginning of the second chapter, understanding modern antistatism means exploring the older “politics of redistribution” (with its familiar left–right spectrum) rather than the newer “politics of recognition” favored by contemporary theorists, with its own terminology, such as “political,” “comprehensive,” “modus vivendi,” etc. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 327–335 for a summary of the difference. 3. Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty,”172. Chapter One 1. Cohen is quoted in Hoffman, “Distinguished Philosopher, Professor Dies at 81.” Nussbaum, “The Enduring Significance of John Rawls.” For a concise review of the academic measure of Rawls’s significance over the last three decades, see Young, Beyond Rawls, 51–52. 2. Neal, “Three Readings of Political Liberalism.” The phrase “realistic utopia” is Rawls’s own, meaning when political philosophy “extends what are ordinarily thought of as the limits of practical political philosophy”: see Rawls, The Law of Peoples,6. 3. Wall and Klosko,“Introduction,” 3; Dworkin,“Liberalism,” 127. For a very concise summary of this moment in the narrative, see Wall and Klosko,“Introduction,”2–6. 4. The challenge to neutrality, as Sandel notes, takes two forms, only the dominant form of which will be examined here.The other form focuses on the question of the priority of the individual or the collective, which I examine in the next chapter, specifically as articulated by Alasdair MacIntyre, another of the communitarians. For a summary of that other debate, see Sandel, “A Response to Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 185. For another important description of these two communitarian challenges to neutral liberalism, as relating to ontology and to advocacy respectively, see Taylor, “Cross-Purposes,” 159–163. Cited and paraphrased material is from Sandel,“A Response,”186–187; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 491. 5. For denials of communitarian influence, see Freeman, “Introduction,” 28; Mulhall and Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism,”463; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, xix. 6. MacIntyre, “The Privatization of the Good,” 344–361. Rawls first used the phrase “fact of pluralism” in a 1988 essay,“The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.” See Rawls, Collected Papers, 449–472. He refined it (for his purposes) in Political Liberalism into “the fact of reasonable pluralism.”As will become clear, the unrefined version is more useful for my purposes. Notes to Pages 15–23 163 7. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236 for a nice summary of this fact: i.e., that political liberalism amounts to people being “communitarians in private life, and liberals in public life.” 8. Sandel is another theorist often called communitarian, though I read him as a virtue liberal below.The passage is from MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” 302–303, which Beiner cites and discusses in Beiner, “The Quest for a Post-Liberal Public Philosophy,” 3–4. My focus here is on MacIntyre’s moral relativism as typical of not only communitarians but liberals, too; I turn to the antistatism expressed here in the next chapter. 9. See e.g., Neal,“Three Readings of Political Liberalism.” 10. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii, xviii–xix. 11. Ibid., xxviii. 12. Young, Beyond Rawls, 13–14. 13. Schonsheck,“Rudeness, Rasp, and Repudiation,”175, 180. 14. Dreben,“On Rawls and Political Liberalism,”316, 328–329. 15. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xl–xli. 16. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 5–6. Gray claims Isaiah Berlin as a predecessor, though Berlin’s “value pluralism” can also be found at the heart of William Galston’s work (a virtue liberal theory discussed momentarily) not to mention John Rawls’s political liberalism. See Gray, Two Faces, 30–33; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 48–62; Rawls, Political Liberalism, 303n. I draw two lessons, both elaborated upon below,from this nearly unanimous embrace of Berlin’s legacy,the first of which is that the various liberal theories have much more in common than their proponents allow. The second is that Berlin’s moral ideal of the skeptic remains the unacknowledged moral program of most contemporary liberal theory. 17. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 1, 11, 12, 11–12. Gray does not name names, but I assume that he means Rawls’s political liberalism when he writes in 2000 that “[t]he hope of a rational consensus on values supports the liberal philosophies that prevail today” (2000, 3), for political liberalism is by far the prevailing form of liberalism today.In a more recent book, Gray expands his claim (making it even less persuasive) to contend that not only political liberalism but the West itself is reluctant to accept the reality of pluralism. “Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign,” Gray explains.“As societies become more modern, so they become more alike.At the same time they become better. Being modern means realising our values—the values of the Enlightenment, as we like to think of them.”But “the suicide warriors who attached Washington and New York on September 11th, 2001, did more than kill thousands of civilians and demolish the World Trade Center.They destroyed the West’s ruling myth.”And “[t]he flaw in the modern myth,” Gray writes,“is that it tethers us to a hope of unity, when we should be learning to live with conflict” (2003, 103). See Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, 1, 103. 18. Gray,“Modus Vivendi,”12, 19. 19. Ibid., 10; Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 21, 106.This similarity between modus vivendi liberalism and political liberalism is particularly notable in their very modest programs for global law. Compare Gray’s proposals in Two Faces to those in Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 3–10. 20. Perfectionist liberals often are confused with both virtue liberals and communitarians on this count, and I return to this again later in the chapter. 21. Douglass and Mara,“The Search for a Defensible Good,”277; Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 23.Virtue liberalism is discussed in a number of places, though with different names: see, e.g., Rosenblum,“Introduction,” 5–6 (on “moral idealism liberalism” as opposed to “modus vivendi liberalism”); Kymlicka and Norman, “Return of the Citizen,” 297–300 (on “liberal virtue theory”); Berkowitz, Virtue, 24–32 (on “modern liberalism”); and Galston, Liberal Purposes, 213–237 (on “liberal virtues”). 22. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 177; Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, xiii; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 10. 23. Emphasizing, like all of these theorists, the irreducibly pluralist nature of contemporary civil society,Robert Post and Nancy Rosenblum have very recently summarized this same spectrum 164 Notes to Pages 24–29 of responses to that pluralism. While their intention is to mark out the variety of theories available today, mine is to note their fundamental sameness in simply assuming pluralism to be irreducible. See Post and Rosenblum,“Introduction,”12–15. 24. Ronald Beiner has also noted that liberal theorists often surrender their moral program with a sense of virtue rather than loss. Liberals, it is assumed, avoid “passing judgment on the moral substance of a way of life,” for to do so “violates the overwhelming ‘fact of pluralism’ that sur- rounds us. For liberals, pluralism—the condition whereby individuals are committed to irrec- oncilably different moral ideals, personal aspirations, visions of the good life—is a sociological given in all modern societies.”See Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit,7. 25. On the only local significance of reason for MacIntyre, see Nussbaum,“Non-Relative Virtues,” 33. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 3; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxvi; Dreben, “On Rawls and Political Liberalism,”318; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 13; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxviii. 26. Sullivan,“Bringing the Good Back In,”152; Rawls, Collected Papers, 303–358. 27. Beiner has described this same normative restraint in contemporary theory and traced it to theorists’ unwillingness to recognize that “theory must be animated by imperatives of its own that are distinct from our need, as citizens, for salubrious maxims of political practice”— that theory is not freestanding but involves a “search for ground”:see Beiner,Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, x, xi.Though our proposals ultimately differ, Beiner’s book also finds political the- ory’s weakness precisely in what is nowadays so widely considered to be its strength, and for this reason I found the book’s very existence reassuring while developing my critique of the account of the fiction of reason. For other examples of Beiner’s criticism of political theory’s readiness to adapt itself the status quo instead of vice versa, see the first half of the book, especially “Preface:The Theorist as Critic,” “Liberalism in the Cross-Hairs of Theory,”and “Reconciling Liberty and Equality”: Beiner, Philosophy, xii–xiii, 4, 9–10, 16, 22–24. 28. Rorty, “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 118; Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,”258, 265, 268. Like many liberal theorists who focus on the account of the fiction of reason, Rorty enlists Rawls, not least I think with the hope that some of the gravitas of Rawls’s account of the fact of pluralism might lend itself to this other account. Others contend, though, that Rawls himself, in Political Liberalism, backed away from the radical historicism of his transitional writings of the 1980s. See, e.g., Sandel,“A Response to Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 194–195. For the purposes of my argument, I obviously prefer Rorty’s version of events to Sandel’s. 29. For more criticism of this demotion of theory to handmaiden to history, see also Beiner’s judgment of Rorty and Galston’s of Rawls: Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 10, 11, 55–56; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 42–45.
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