Rawls on Politics and Punishment

Abstract

Rawls stabilizes and secures his liberal institutions with a stategy of reconciliation that progressively narrows and even closes the spaces of politics and contest. But the democratic politics and pluralism to which Rawls himself is committed thrive best in a setting that resists the closure that he postulates as their necessary condition. Rawls' theorization of punishment illustrates the point. In his effort to justify punishment and move it beyond the reach of contestation, Rawls is driven back to a discourse that his own theory of (distributive) justice disavows, the discourse of antecedent moral worth: Criminals are demonized as "bad characters" and misfits are viewed by Rawlsian citizens as outside agitators. These impulses touch every politics but they are aggravated, not alleviated, by Rawls' effort to contain contestation.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barber, Benjamin. 1988. The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Theory in a Democratic Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Benhabib, Seyla. 1988. "The Generalized and the Concrete Other." In Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell , eds., Feminism as Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bloom, Allan. 1975. "Justice: John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy ." American Political Science Review 69: 642-62.

Brubaker, Stanley C. 1988. "Can Liberals Punish?" American Political Science Review 82: 821-36.

Cavell, Stanley. 1990. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Connolly, William E. 1992. "Democracy and Territoriality." In Frederick C. Dolan and Thomas Dumm , eds., The Rhetorical Republic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

_. 1989. Political Theory and Modernity. Oxford : Blackwell.

Derrida, Jacques. 1989. "Signature, Event Context." In Ltd. Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Flathman, Richard E. 1987. The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

10.

Fraser, Nancy. 1991. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text 25/26: 56-80.

11.

Honig, Bonnie. Forthcoming 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

12.

Kant, Immanuel. 1970. "Appendix from The Critique of Pure Reason." In Hans Reiss , ed., Kant's Political Writings Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press .

13.

Mapel, David. 1989. Social Justice Reconsidered: The Problem of Appropriate Precision in a Theory of Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

14.

Mouffe, Chantal. 1990. "Rawls: Political Philosophy Without Politics." In David Rasmussen , ed., Universalism and Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

15.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.

16.

Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

17.

Okin, Susan. 1990 Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books.

18.

Pogge, Thomas W. 1989. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press.

19.

Rawls, John. 1955. "Two Concepts of Rules." Philosophical Review 64: 3-32.

20.

_. 1971. A Theory of Justice Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

21.

_. 1980. "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Philosophy." Journal of Philosophy 77: 515-72.

22.

Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.

23.

Walzer, Michael. 1981. "Philosophy and Democracy." Political Theory 9: 379-99.

24.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford : Blackwell.

25.

Wolin, Sheldon , 1989. "Contract and Birthright." In Presence of the Past. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.