Across the Great Divide by Jeremy Arnold;

Author:Jeremy Arnold; [Arnold, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

RAWLS AND DERRIDA ON JUSTICE

HEGEL REMARKED THAT “quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood” (Hegel 1977, §31). The work of John Rawls is an exception. Few books of political philosophy are as widely read and well understood as A Theory of Justice (hereafter TJ), Political Liberalism (hereafter PL), and Justice as Fairness (hereafter JaF). Whatever difficulties there may be in Rawls’ arguments, understanding them is not one of them. An apt example of Hegel’s general rule is the work of Jacques Derrida. The difficulty of Derrida’s prose—or willful obscurity, as his critics would have it—has led to a number of plausible competing interpretations of his philosophical project as well as a number of outright rejections based, seemingly, on little more than hearsay from contemptuous philosophers. Derrida, like Rawls, has been discussed at length throughout the humanities—with the exception of analytic philosophy. While a few philosophers within or sympathetic to analytic philosophy have engaged Derrida’s work on language and/or philosophy generally—John Searle, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Samuel Wheeler, and Henry Staten come to mind—Derrida’s ethical and political writings are almost entirely ignored by contemporary analytic political philosophers. Derrida is acknowledged, if at all, only implicitly in rejections of nihilism, postmodernism, relativism, and other bogeys. For many political philosophers, to the extent that Derrida is familiar, he is for that reason not understood.1

This chapter explores Rawls’ and Derrida’s accounts of the concept and conceptions of justice because when read together Rawls and Derrida expose a deep difficulty in modern political thought: can we proceed without metaphysics in political theorizing? This question has been asked many times before, and often answered with a “no.” Alasdair MacIntyre argues that “we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualist point of view,” while “on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments” (MacIntyre 1984, 259). For MacIntyre, only a revised classical metaphysics can restore ethical coherence to modernity. William Connolly argues against the secularist hope for religious and metaphysical neutrality, arguing that there is no escaping difficult questions of ontology, faith, metaphysics, and religion, whether we are theists or not (see Connolly 1995; 2000; 2005; 2008). Many communitarians claim that justice, rights, freedom, and the like, only make sense given substantive moral commitments embedded in specific forms of life, most of which rely on rich ideas about the self, the world, the divine, and so on. And yet, many liberals, both classical and contemporary, as well as various other political thinkers, have tried to do without recourse to metaphysics, ontology, or theology.

Rawls and Derrida navigate this debate in similar ways, albeit from opposite directions: they both try to articulate a “post-metaphysical” conception of justice by embedding justice in the specific legal and political history of the West. The central innovation in Rawls’ view from TJ to

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