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Stephen Crowe's avatar

Here’s my piping hot Rawls take for you: I’m sure that Rawls sincerely wished to expand the amount of justice in society, but as far as I know, his theory of justice didn’t achieve that in any way. By the time he published it, all the significant features of the welfare state were already in place, thanks to the twin pressures of the labour movement and competition with the Soviet Union.

What his theory does do is to provide a kind of “How the Camel Got his Hump” story for the welfare state that already exists. Liberalism cannot tolerate the fact that society reflects the ongoing outcomes of class warfare. Rawls's theory of justice allows a liberal technocrat to retroactively justify the existence of welfare liberalism to themselves, and to willfully mystify the material forces that brought it about.

So I'm skeptical about Rawls's value to a new socialist movement. Does it make sense to try to develop a new socialist morality before the movement for it exists, or is that putting the cart before the horse?

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Jarrod Baniqued's avatar

If I may humor myself, perhaps we are in a state of Schrodinger’s Karl, where Marx is dead and alive at the same time and his quantum wave function collapses when we find out

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