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Postmodern Political Values: Pluralism and Legitimacy in the Thought of John Rawls and Gianni Vattimo

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Abstract

There exists the putative assumption that since those values that legitimate social practices and institutions (liberty, equality, etc.) are liberal values, then the most coherent form of justification for their universal applicability must — and can only — be a liberal one. The aim of this article is to unravel the foundations of this assumption and, in doing so, to demonstrate that the transition from comprehensive to political liberalism is an expression of postmodern concerns at the heart of liberalism. The central claim I wish to make is twofold: first, John Rawls's concentration on the problem of legitimacy over and above justice leads to an acceptance of the social thesis, albeit in a minimal form. Two, as a consequence of this, the Kantian form of practical reason that informs his work has to be modified to avoid problems with motivation. In the succeeding section, I reverse the direction of argument and concentrate on an explicitly hermeneutical liberalism, that of Gianni Vattimo, which avowedly embraces the substantive implications of the social thesis and yet attempts to demonstrate that the aims of interpretation and understating entail a commitment to liberal political values. Although the social thesis can offer a plausible account of political motivation congruent with the demands of legitimacy, it must also be committed to a minimal formal account of practical reason much to the chagrin of the critics of postmodern ethics who accuse all contextual thought of exhibiting strong irrational tendencies. The intention of the conclusion is to show that whether one begins from the liberal commitment to formal values, or the postmodern contextual commitment to substantive, situated values, one must be committed to a political form of autonomy that is both non-comprehensive yet necessarily situated. Moreover, the recognition of these concerns necessitates a simultaneous avowal of postmodern themes in order for political liberalism to be fully coherent and persuasive as a political doctrine, as well as an explicit recognition of the formal claims of reason by any postmodern thought.

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Notes

  1. For reasons of economy of space, I make reference to the most relevant pieces of the enormous secondary material on Rawls. Rather cheekily, however, I direct the reader to the fantastic bibliography in Freeman (2007, 515–535), especially the section entitled ‘political liberalism’ and also to the discussions and suggestions for further reading in Mulhall and Swift (1996).

  2. For a discussion of the use of ‘pro tanto’ here, please refer back to the first section.

  3. The inadequate mention of ‘stability for the right reasons’ does not do sufficient justice to the subtlety of Rawls's own rather complex thinking on this issue. For more thorough and elaborate discussion, the reader ought to refer to Freeman (2007, chapter 8) and also Barry (1995).

  4. Postmodern thought characterized thus is, then, the target of Hegel's criticism of post-Kantian arbitrariness (Hegel, 1991, §140).

  5. The position is very similar to the one reached by MacIntyre (1988, chapter 18).

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Rose, D. Postmodern Political Values: Pluralism and Legitimacy in the Thought of John Rawls and Gianni Vattimo. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 416–433 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.16

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