John Rawls is dead

Harvard press release ^

[cornelis]

The Honorable Richard A. who gets an F from Gertrude Himmelfarb in Commentary an F from Alan Wolfe in the New Republic and F from Christopher Caldwell in National Review for his 2001 title Public Intellectuals?

The one that the venerable Ann Coulter praised for his critique of the SCOFLA fracas? Here's a self-evident if-then: If Coulter praised him, Posner is conservative! And since election 2002, we can tank, by precedent, for the Chicago man, now that the Harvard man has died.

link

[FreeTheHostages]

Hello. Your link begins: "The reputation of Richard Posner amoung professors of the Left, its measure being taken from published and casual comments, might not be any black if he boiled babies in their own blood and ate them."

The link then notes that he’s a big law and economics guy. The link then notes that he’s recently published one book that most conservatives might disagree with.

That's your evidence?? That's your evidence??? That Judge Posner isn't a conservative????

This outer space place gets more and more stranger. The very laws of physics are here being bent.

So you say he's not a conservative.

[FreeTheHostages]

Some reviews from the latest Posner book which you claim reveals him not be a conservative after all. The book is about people who are uninformed speaking off-the-cuff and cheapening what it means to be an informed intellectual (and he gives examples of shallow pundits from the left and the right). I think there are a lot of people posting on this thread who should read Posner's warning and take it better to head, before they post of waht they know not:

It is an intense and often angry book, a high-spirited, richly provocative moral diatribe against trivialization of the national culture...This is an intense and studious book--brilliant with energy, commitment and proper zeal...Posner's mind is so acute and often so surgically ironic that his prose can be delightful.

--Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun

Posner is, despite it all, a marvel. He is hyperactive like Harold Bloom, audacious like Christopher Hitchens and a practical man of the world like Alan Greenspan. About how many Americans can that be said? So he deserves attention no matter how infuriating he can be. Moreover, he charges gaily into the fray, voraciously aware of his own superiority.

--David Brooks, New York Times Book Review

Richard Posner is a polymath, a one-man think tank, the grown-up version of the kid who always sat in the front row and knew the answer to the teacher's questions...The latest of his countless books is an occasionally insightful, often maddening effort to kill off all rival claimants to the throne.

--Gary Rose, Wall Street Journal

The marketplace in ideas is no mere phrase to Mr. Posner, an alarmingly prolific federal judge, author and scholar who has decided that the traffic in opinions can be usefully described in economic terms, with numerical values assigned to dozens of opinion-mongers who offer their wares in the great media bazaar. The book has been catnip to journalists and intellectual scorekeepers, who have been bickering over the standings for weeks. The ups and downs of American intellectuals, especially the New York variety, fascinates the more bookish part of the population in the same way that college football rankings or Baseball Hall of Fame elections mesmerize sports fans.

--William Grimes, New York Times

In Public Intellectuals Posner turns his poison pen on scores of public intellectuals, including the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Luttwak, and Paul Ehrlich, those "talking heads" who disseminate their thoughts to the wider public on issues of political and ideologically import. Of particular interest are environmental decay, the darker side of realpolitik, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, former President Bill Clinton's impeachment, and the deadlocked 2000 presidential election. Through the application of market economics and statistical analysis, Posner first identifies the seemingly endless supply of and demand for public intellectuals to pontificate on these matters and their various genres...He also highlights the fact that market discipline is sorely lacking...[Posner's] marshaling of arguments, combined with his copious footnotes and extensive source material, makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read.

--Peter McKenna, Christian Science Monitor

[Posner] writes faster than you can read. And he's a public intellectual in the specialized sense he describes and decries in his book: a "critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern"...Judge Posner's main argument is that "public intellectuals are often careless with facts and rash in prediction." They lack, moreover, "insight and distinction, the filling of some gap in intellectual space"...Posner's writing is indeed limpid and muscular, but it's grounded (the celebrity-intellectuals tables notwithstanding) in substantial evidence carefully marshaled into showy and sometimes pedantic footnotes. His conclusions follow from his fully disclosed, if controversial, analytical methodology.

--Adam Liptak, New York Observer

In Public Intellectuals...Posner trashes fellow smarties who expound on public issues outside their expertise. He says they abandon rigor when they write general interest books and op-ed pieces, publish open letters, and speak on television. They are in decline, he says, because more of them than ever have safe jobs as professors, protecting them from the consequences of bad predictions and stupid proclamations...Posner fires both left and right, nearly always hitting the mark.

--Peter Coy, Business Week

[shrinkermd]

I read this thread. I never quite understood what Rawls really said when I read him. Ditto for Dworkin. I guess I am just stupid.

I did sort of figure out they convinced the nation's elites that it is a matter of simple justice for our society to deprive the majority of citizens of their money to benefit a minority. What is more,in their egalitarian system, there's no need to debate the merits of progressive taxation, anti-poverty programs, socialized medicine and affirmative action because by definition to debate is to deny a just society. Oh well, they also fooled Bill Clinton who gave Rawls the Medal of Freedom. Maybe Clinton is dumb too since I note that any number of the posts claim these two were "conservatives."

This whole thread is complicated. I note somehow it stumbled across Judge Posner of public intellectual and other fame. Now, we could spend all night trying to define him. I surely am glad Judge Posner has not died!

[beckett]

Here's an appreciation of Rawls from the right that you may enjoy:

National Review Online: Richard Epstein on John Rawls

[beckett]

According to Ben Rogers in The Guardian, Rawls abandoned a capitalist welfare state at the end of his life in favor of "property-owning democracy."

This was followed by Justice As Fairness, A Restatement (2001), which provided a brief overview of his main ideas. Based on lecture notes, it did not make for easy reading, but showed that Rawls's thought had moved leftwards. Where, in A Theory Of Justice, he had suggested that just liberal principles might be realised in a "capitalist welfare state", he now contended that they could only be achieved in either "a property-owning democracy" characterised by universally high levels of education and "the widespread ownership of productive assets", or in a market-socialist regime.

Rawls probably placed more hope in the prospects for property-owning democracy than he did for market socialism. He had certainly come to despair of the capitalist welfare state, which acquiesced in a dramatic rise of social inequality in the 1980s and 90s. And, of course, as Rawls shifted leftwards, the Anglo-American left shifted rightwards. That must partly explain why, though Tony Crosland, Roy Hattersley and other old Labour thinkers cited Rawls approvingly, he has not been embraced by New Labour.

[FreeTheHostages]

You're correct. I agree with these observations about Rawls.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another editorial comment on Rawls :

John Rawls, defender of the welfare state , influential political philosopher, dead at 81

[thucydides]

I have read with some interest your exchanges on Rawls on this thread. Certainly Rawls was much admired on the left because he seemed to furnish a logical rationale for state redistributionism. In the end, the objection to his ideas of social justice is that there could never be a successful or prosperous society under his rules. He should have read his Hayek. That said, Rawls was to all accounts a wonderful human being, and I share your disappointment with those who apparently take joy in his demise.

[mrustow]

Thank your for your posts. I haven't read through them all, so I am responding to an earlier one.

I was extremely gratified to learn what a decent man John Rawls was. Most moral philosophers aren't worth much as philosophers, and some are really vicious specimens of humanity. I studied with some of the best and the worst of the lot; unfortunately, the worst came last. It's nice to be reminded that there are people who not only come up with theories of morality, but who conduct themselves with decency.

Much of the response to John Rawls has had less to do with the man's actual theory, than to his social place within late 20th-century American philosophy, and his use and abuse by other academics. In an obit (on another thread), libertarian Tibor Machan credited Rawls with rescuing American political philosophy. That judgment had never occurred to me, but the moment I read it, I thought, "But, of course!" In the face of the nihilistic desert in which anal philosophy, combined with Marxism, had left American political philosophy, I suppose Rawls gave moral philosophers a giddy, liberated feeling. (Since I had never lived in that desert, had taken my Kant straight-up in West Germany, and would quickly exit the anal desert, I never knew that feeling of liberation.)

In studying Rawls in graduate school, I know that for the prof I studied with, a radical feminist named Virginia Held, the value of any ethical or political theory was limited to its practical, political utility. And I know Held was not alone. That anti-intellectual attitude, and the lack of alternatives, had much to do with Rawls' influence. Note that although Robert Nozick provided an alternative (in 1978, I believe), Nozick was a coward who backed off from his own theory for entirely non-intellectual reasons (his friends in Cambridge didn't like it), and there was no social support among philosophy professors for seriously considering alternative theories.

With that said, Rawls did appear to have problems, when I read him 16 years ago.

The notion that Rawls was a Kantian is deeply problematic: his "Kantian constructivism" looked more pragmatic than Kantian to me. With Kant, there's no room for "constructivism"; moral truth is absolute, certain, and eternal.

The notion of "reflective equilibrium" seemed circular.

Rawls tried to make nice between Kant AND Aristotle. No can do.

[FreeTheHostages]

"The notion that Rawls was a Kantian is deeply problematic: his "Kantian constructivism" looked more pragmatic than Kantian to me."

I enjoyed your post. Yes, I agree with that it's on one hand reflective equilibrium is deeply "problematic" -- you fall into the hands of those who wask what use is this philosophy? That's a Lenin-ish approach to philosophy.

Well, but Rawls was Kant. He was Kant plus Sedwick. The fact that you can't mix the two is an interesting point.

Rawls, in class, brought us through the mechanistic Original Position and declared himself an attempt to extend Kant to the social realm. But then, near the end of the class, he noted how really it all wasn't that mechanistic, there was reflective equilibrium, and per Sedwick there should be in any good moral philosophy. Hmmm. The class at Harvard suffered from this schizophrenia too. Much as if Rawls couldn't honestly decide.

I think of what good ministers say about the practice of religion vs. theology: you know you're not joining a cult in our church because if anyone asks you to do something that's contrary to the Bible, that's not a true practice of theology, a true religion. There's a Bible to go on.

Outside of the Bible, the idea of moral philosophy as "reflective equilibrium" seems groundless. More like: "pick your cult."

Whether Rawls liked it or not, he was, as you suggest, credited with bring a less wishy-washy, less result-oriented, and more disciplined approach to political philosophy.

[MissMillie]

"I don't think any more proof than that is required."

Still haven't seen any "proof". (I think I asked for evidence, not proof.) I see what you have "faith" in.... but of course, the two are not necessarily the same, are they?

[exnavy]

Yes, the two are exactly the same.

[exnavy]

Actually the real proof is the bible, Gods word is not that of a liberal.

[Axenolith]

Now you too can create deeply intuitive postmodernist deconstructions :)

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

[MissMillie]

Do you have any evidence that the Bible is God's word?

[exnavy]

Nope, I just know it is.

If you don't know that it is, all I can do is to pray for you!

[MissMillie]

Fair enough.... I'll pray for you too.

[Amerikan_Samurai]

So was Rawls an undercover Socialist? He sounds sorta like a RINO as well.