The Great Rawls Debate of 2024

Liberals go wrong in ignoring Marxism’s core insights about class. But the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls has something to offer Marxists as well.

Several weeks ago, University of Toronto political philosopher Joseph Heath set off a discourse bomb with his blog post “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” in which he argued that the philosophical developments of the late twentieth century showed that Marxism was obsolete as an intellectual tradition.

Heath’s post focused on the intellectual trajectory of “analytical Marxists.” This was a loose group of Anglo-American philosophers and social scientists active in the 1970s and ’80s who attempted to provide a systematic justification of Marxism’s core claims while rejecting what they saw as confused philosophical baggage from Hegel and other indefensible aspects of the tradition. Heath argued, in short, that the analytical Marxists tried and failed to come up with a defense of Marx’s distinctive moral criticism of capitalism: that it is inherently exploitative. 

Instead, many of these thinkers began gravitating toward something like the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls, who developed a comprehensive moral framework for assessing capitalism’s injustices from a non-Marxist egalitarian perspective. 

Rawls developed a systematic account of the principles that society’s major institutions must abide by to be just. He argued that these principles for society are the ones people would choose if they didn’t know anything about the particular identity or social position they would be born into (choosing behind a “veil of ignorance”): for instance, their class, their race, their gender, or their religion. 

In that situation, Rawls thought, people would agree on principles of justice that protected everyone’s civil liberties and political rights equally; that ensured true equality of opportunity to hold different jobs and public offices, regardless of one’s circumstances of birth; and that permitted economic inequalities only if they were to the benefit of the least-well-off group in society. That meant that any inequality would only be justifiable if the poorest benefited directly from it (by incentivizing people to take on difficult or undesirable tasks or jobs, for example). 

Rawls’s theory was impressive and very influential. And it's this theory that, Heath argued in his recent piece, rightly convinced the analytical Marxists to drop their Marxism.

In Defense of Marxism

Heath’s piece provoked a number of responses, criticizing him both for his potted intellectual history and on the philosophical substance. In a response on his own Substack, Ben Burgis took apart Heath’s claims about the analytical Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen’s political trajectory. I did an interview with Vivek Chibber for Jacobin, in which we discussed some of the questions raised by Heath’s article. Chibber emphasizes that Marxism’s defining contribution was not its moral critique of capitalism, but its theory of class and its account of how capitalism produces the possible conditions of its own abolition.

Heath has since written a follow-up post cataloging what he sees as Marxism’s core theoretical failures, and last week Dustin Guastella published a response to both of Heath’s posts. Guastella’s article is worth reading. His main intervention, which is certainly correct, is that Heath “fails to recognize or even mention the most significant theoretical contribution offered by the [Marxist] tradition. To paraphrase James Carville: it’s the class system, stupid.”

There are a few points where Guastella is off the mark though. For one thing, he seems to concede to Heath that Marxists today don’t really have ambitions beyond reforming capitalism — that, as Heath puts it, we are really just “welfare capitalists” who are advocating “tepid proposals for corporate governance reform.”

It’s true that Marxists advocate for reforms under capitalism, and most of us aren’t preaching about a Bolshevik-style revolutionary break with the existing system. Many of us see the need to preserve existing elements of capitalist society, like markets and representative political institutions. 

On the other hand, we’re not just pursuing gradual, incremental reforms. The ambitious visions of market socialism laid out in recent years by Mike Beggs or Sam Gindin, for instance, would involve far-reaching changes to how our economy and our workplaces are run. Achieving the sort of public ownership and workplace democracy they’re talking about will require massive and potentially extralegal workers’ struggles beyond the ballot box or the halls of Congress. And if history is any guide, when workers wage those fights in the future, the ruling class will use repression and even violence to try to beat them back.

In Defense of Rawls

Guastella, like Burgis and Chibber, also takes Heath to task for suggesting that Rawls “killed” Marxism. But Guastella goes a bit further, suggesting that Rawls’s philosophy has nothing to offer Marxists. Rawls, he writes, “created a very attractive, and logically consistent, argument for socialism. One that was entirely independent of Marxism,” but

Despite its theoretical elegance and moral defensibility, Rawlsian socialism is actually more impotent than the Marxian variety. That’s because while Rawls offers an argument for how the world ought to be, he doesn’t explain how the world works, nor how we might get to the promised land. Worse, Rawls’s commitment to liberalism — the political ideology most compatible with capitalist modernity — seems, at best, ill-suited to challenge the tenets of market society. Rawls may have completed and perfected liberalism as a theoretical system — ironically, by incorporating long-held socialist insights — but in doing so he has shown the utopianism of the liberal project. With all due respect to Heath, perhaps after Rawls, it is not Marxism but liberalism that has become otiose.

I have a few issues with this. One very minor clarification: Rawls did not intend to argue for socialism specifically; he thought that a society with widely shared private property ownership might also meet his criteria for justice. But many have thought (and I would agree) that taken to its logical conclusion, Rawls’s theory implies a commitment to socialism.

Guastella, perhaps echoing Alasdair MacIntyre, casts aspersion on the liberal tradition as “ill-suited to challenge the tenets of market society.” It’s not clear to me why that would be, at least if we’re talking about the egalitarian-Kantian version of liberalism that Rawls is channeling; the vision of free and equal persons committed to fairness and mutual respect at the heart of his system is quite at odds with the egoistic, acquisitive view of human nature that capitalism’s apologists usually rely on. That said, I have some sympathy for the view that liberalism, as a philosophical tradition, doesn’t provide us with firm enough moral foundations. (For some relevant discussion of this question and Rawls’s potential shortcomings from a liberal socialist perspective, see Matt McManus’s recent reflections on MacIntyre.) 

What I really don’t get is the idea that it is somehow an objection to Rawls that he doesn’t give us a strategic theory for how to get to the just society he envisions. Yes, we need such a theory, and I agree with Guastella that Marxism’s class analysis provides us with our strategic North Star. At the same time, as Chibber argued in my interview with him and as I’ve discussed here previously, we need a moral framework to explain what we find objectionable about capitalism and to guide us in constructing an alternative social order. 

I’m not sure I’m willing to take Rawls’s theory of justice wholly onboard, but a theory like it — one that gives a systematic argument for the moral principles society’s major institutions should aim to realize — is something socialists can’t do without. The fact that Rawls doesn’t also take up questions of strategy (or, for that matter, the origins of capitalism, or many other related questions) is not a knock against his work. Rawls does not offer a comprehensive theory of social change, but his ideas can still make a valuable contribution to the socialist tradition.