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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.

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Rawls on Politics and Punishment

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