Abstract
In Political Liberalism, John Rawls describes a metaethical procedure – political constructivism – whereby political theorists formulate political principles by assembling and reworking ideas from the public political culture. To many of his moral realist and moral constructivist critics, Rawls's procedure is simply a recent version of the ‘popular moral philosophy’ that Kant excoriates in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. In this article, I defend the idea of political constructivism on philosophical and political grounds. Initially, I argue that political constructivism is the best available methodology for self-legislating, socially embedded and fallible human beings; then I show that political constructivism may produce principles that could garner the principled assent of Euro-American Muslims such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani. The article concludes by considering how political constructivism might be employed to formulate new political principles for Euro-American societies experiencing and confronting the Islamic revival.
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Notes
Taylor (2011, pp. 3–58) and Freeman (2007, pp. 324–364) describe the mechanics of Kant's constructivism, Kantian constructivism and political constructivism. Each variety of constructivism articulates a conception of the person, a procedure to mirror that conception of the person, and a constructed political theory including principles, institutions and a political psychology of justice. Constructivism, unlike realism, holds that we make rather than discover principles; political constructivism, unlike Kant's or Kantian constructivism, holds that the public political culture, rather than pure practical reason, provides the material used to construct principles. On the impact of Kant's constructivist thesis on the history of western philosophy, see Rockmore (2006, 2007).
In the Law of Peoples, Rawls discusses decent peoples, including of the imagined Islamic republic of Kazanistan, who value broad conceptions of human rights and popular consultation but do not share the same cultural and institutional arrangements as liberal democracies. Rawls brackets the question of immigration in that book, but we may anticipate that political theorists, adopting the idea of wide reflective equilibrium, will eventually need to address the considered convictions of immigrant communities.
The language of binaries and spectrums may conceal the many types of political theories and theorists that this article wishes to engage. Monique Deveaux, for instance, argues that liberals might stop debating about autonomy to consider how the concept of agency illuminates ‘ever subtler expressions of reflexivity and action, such as as subverting a cultural tradition from the inside’ (Deveaux, 2006, p. 173). I emphasize, then, that political constructivists view virtually all political concepts, to borrow a felicitous phrase from Michael Oakeshott, as ‘temporary platforms of conditional understanding’, that is, useful launching pads for thinking that may ultimately need to be rebuilt (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 2).
See the precious few references to Euro-American political philosophers in Euben and Zaman (2009).
For Rawls, the idea of wide reflective equilibrium demands that philosophers have an obligation to unsettle themselves, that is, to force themselves to hear new voices (1999c, pp. 288–289). Rawls's tentative reflections about Islam – for instance, highlighting the problematic nature of the concept of ‘decency’ when describing certain non-liberal peoples (Rawls, 1999a, p. 67) – exemplifies this broadminded disposition.
An example of the new American multiple consciousness may be Obama's decision to go by Barack (meaning ‘blessed’ in Arabic) rather than Barry. See Obama (2004, p. 104).
On the political ideas and behavior of the Muslim American community, see Abdo (2006) and Cesari (2010).
Muslims following Al-Alwani's interpretation of Islamic politics may hesitate to join a Rawlsian overlapping consensus if that means adopting quasi-Kantian conceptions of the person and society. We may need to construct another alternative to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus, and overlapping consensus (Rawls, 2005, pp. 133–172).
Al-Alwani's writings often convey a militant tone that should alarm Euro-American liberals: ‘Many Muslim governments cite indigenous non-Muslim majorities as an excuse to deprive their Muslim majorities, who often represent 98 per cent of the total population, of the right to be ruled by the Shari’ah’ (Al-Alwani, 2005, p. 187). In this sentence, Al-Alwani is worlds away from J.S. Mills’ defense of individual liberty in On Liberty. The challenge for liberals is to engage illiberal interlocutors with confidence that political dialogue and cooperation tends to soften hard-liners (see Roy, 2008, p. 59) and that better ideas and practices have a tendency (but no guarantee) to prevail (Rawls, 1999a, p. 62).
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