by Daniel Bell
By emphasizing “luck” Jencks seeks to use the randomness of a roulette occupational wheel to minimize the earned quality of success. And it may be that there is much more luck to the occupational system than Marxists or meritocrats would like to admit. Yet “common observation” (that other residual category of analysis) would indicate that—again on the professional level at least—hard work is a necessary condition for success, and that if a rough equality of opportunity has allowed one man to go further than another, he has earned the unequal reward—income, status, authority—which goes with that success. The important question of justice—as I argue later—is really “how much” unequal reward, in what dimensions, and for what.
74 Classical Marxism always eschewed the task of creating a normative ethic for socialism. Kautsky, for example, in his Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, argued that socialism was a “necessary” outcome of human evolution, and did not have to be justified in moral terms. It was dissatisfaction with this view which led a number of pre-World War I socialist philosophers, principally Max Adler, to provide a neo-Kantian argument—the superior use of Reason in a socialist order —as the basis of its desirability. The victory of Bolshevism after 1917, and the spread of Marxism-Leninism, reasserted the eschatological vision as the basis of socialism.
75Emile, op. cit., p. 49.
76The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York, 1964), p. 101.
77 Ibid., in seq., pp. 149, 155–156, 157, 155, 174, 176, 178. Cf. Rousseau’s comments on wealth with Marx on the power of money, in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts: “Money is the alienated ability of mankind That which I am unable to do as a man ... I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary.’ (Moscow, 1969), p. 139. (Emphasis in the original.)
78The Social Contract, book I, chap. 6, ed. H. J. Tozer (London, 1948), pp. 109–110. In this context, one can see The Second Discourse and The Social Contract as a unified social cosmology which lays out an Arcadia and a Utopia based on man’s past, present, and future:
Past Present Future
State of Nature Civil Society Community
Natural Liberty Conventional Liberty Moral Liberty
79 Any single conclusion drawn from a thinker as protean, complex, and contradictory as Rousseau is manifestly unfair. This is one reading, and one which various writers since the French Revolution have given Rousseau. It is borne out both in text and in history.
80 Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New York, 1961), p. 50. Emphasis in the original.
Compare Tocqueville, in Democracy in America:
One must not blind himself to the fact that democratic institutions most successfully develop sentiments of envy in the human heart. This is not because they provide the means for everybody to rise to the level of everybody else but because these means are constantly proving inadequate in the hands of those using them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. This complete equality is always slipping through the people’s fingers at the moment when they think to grasp it, fleeing, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight; the people grow heated in search of this blessing, all the more precious because it is near enough to be seen but too far off to be tasted. They are excited by the chance and irritated by the uncertainty of success; the excitement is followed by weariness and then by bitterness. In that state anything which in any way transcends the people seems an obstacle to their desires, and they are tired by the sight of any7 superiority, however legitimate (p. 183).
81 John Stuart Mill, Representative Government (Everyman Library edition), p. 209.
82 Ibid., pp. 261, 263.
83 Thus, women made up about 38 percent of the delegates (as against 13. percent four years earlier), blacks 14 percent or the delegates (as against 5.5 percent in 1968), and delegates under thirty 22 percent (as against 4 percent in 1968). Yet the Daley delegation from Chicago, which was denied its seats on the ground that it was “un representative” claimed that the rules were undemocratic since they had been freely elected by majority vote. What, then, is democracy—majority vote or representation by social group?
84 The mind boggles at the logic of minority representation carried to its policital conclusion. If one observes the present claimants in the polity, a legislature on Mill’s principle would be composed of three sexes: men, women, and homosexuals; three age groups: young people, middle-aged and senior citizens; four religions: Protestant (assuming no division by sect), Catholic, Jews, and Muslim (and what of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Amish, and the like?); four disadvantaged minority groups: blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians; five middle-America ethnic groups: Irish, Italian, Polish, German, and Slavs; eight occupational groups, from the standard census classification. This leaves WASPs and “others” as only residual categories.
Though this to some extent caricatures Mill’s argument in Representative Government, I have taken one crucial aspect to its logical conclusion.
85 Herbert Gans, “We Won’t End the Urban Crisis Until We End Majority Rule,” New York Times Magazine (August 3, 1969).
86 Calhoun argued that agreement requires a consensus of all the major interests or factions, rather than a simple majority of people which cuts across such natural or social lines as regions, groups, or classes. This was a caricature, though a brilliant one, of the Madisonian model. It was a philosophical argument about representation in a heterogenous rather than a homogeneous society, in order to sustain human inequality, white supremacy, states’ rights, anti-majoritarianism, and minority power. It came, one should also note, at a time when American parties had begun to splinter. See James McGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (New York, 1963), chap. 3, esp. p. 57.
87 For a comprehensive summation of this problem, see Lipset, Lazarsfeld, Linz, and Barton, “The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner Lindzey, vol. II (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).
88 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 3.
Justice, for Rawls, does not encapsulate all the energies of the society; it is a principle of distributive standards, and is itself part of a larger social ideal to which a society commits itself. He writes:
A conception of social justice, then, is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed. This standard, however, is not to be confused with the principles defining the other virtues, for the basic structure, and social arrangements generally may be efficient or inefficient, liberal or illiberal, and many other things, as well as just or unjust. A complete conception defining principles for all the virtues of the basic structure, together with the respective weights when they conflict, is more than a conception of justice; it is a social ideal. The principles of justice are but a part, although perhaps the most important part of such a conception. A social ideal in turn is connected with a conception of society, a vision of the way in which the aims and purposes of social cooperation are to be understood.... Fully to understand a conception of justice we must make explicit the conception of social cooperation from which it derives (ibid., pp. 9-10).
(All citations in this section are from Rawls’s book; page citations appear at the end of each quotation.)
89 The idea of fairness necessarily assumes a social tabula rasa. Rawls writes:
In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract. This original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position
or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain (p. 12).
90 A final formulation by Rawls, having to do with priority and rankings, appears on his pp. 302-303. For the purposes of our argument we can stay with the initial formulations.
91 As Rawls further notes, “The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well” (p. 101). See, too, the discussion on p. 104 about whether individuals “deserve” the advantage of natural capacities.
92 In an interesting comparison, Rawls (like Rousseau) takes the metaphor of the family as the model for this principle. “The family in its ideal conception, and often in practice, is one place where the principle of maximizing the sum of advantages is rejected. Members of a family commonly do not wish to gain unless they can do so in ways that further the interests of the rest. Now wanting to act on the difference principle has precisely this consequence” (p. 105). The difficulty with this argument —if one regards society as the family writ large—is that the family, as Freud has argued, holds together by love, which is specific. One loves one’s wife and children —and tries to pass on one’s advantages to them. Where love is generalized to the society, it becomes “aim-inhibited” (because one loves all) and is consequently weak and ineffective. For this reason, Freud argued that communism is impossible in the larger society. See Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud, vol. xxi (London, 1961), pp. 112–113.
93 An earlier, slightly variant, version by Rawls appears on p. 62. The later version, emphasizing the advantage to the least favored, is more relevant to my argument. One can say in this context that utilitarianism, which is the logic of bourgeois economics, follows the indifference principle in that each person pursues his own goods independent of the others, and the invisible hand coordinates the society.
94 The claims of the poor are, of course, among the oldest traditions in Western thought and are central to the idea of Christian love. But Christian love—charity as caritas—accepted the poor as worthy in themselves and loved the poor as poor without endowing them with higher qualities than they possessed. In that sense, classic Protestant liberalism—with its sympathy and humanitarianism, rather than love—corroded the social conscience of the Catholic world. From a different source, the romanticizing of the poor, a tradition going back to Villon, also led to the erosion of caritas toward poor. (For a defense of Christian love as the basis of society, and a biting attack on English moral philosophy, i.e. Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Hume, see Max Scheler, op. cit., section IV, pp. 114–137.)
95 It is striking that Rawls, like Jencks, does not discuss either “work” or “effort”—as if those who had succeeded, in the university, or in business or government, had done so largely by contingent circumstances of fortune or social background. There is a discussion of meritocracy, but not of merit. This itself is a measure of how far we have moved from nineteenth-century values.
It is equally striking that, in the “social-attention cycle,” the policy concern a decade ago was with “excellence.” The Stern Fund sponsored a major study on the identification of excellence; John Gardner wrote a book entitled Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (New York, 1961). At that time, meritocracy was a positive word—so much so that Merrill Peterson, in his magisterial biography of Thomas Jefferson, said that, had Jefferson known the term, he would have used it to define his “natural aristocracy.” Today the concern is almost entirely with equality and the disadvantaged. Will the “social-attention cycle” come full circle in the future?
96 See, for example, the work of R. M. Maclver, The More Perfect Union: A Program for the Control of Inter-group Discrimination (New York, 1948), and on the religious side, John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Reflections on the American Proposition (New York, 1960).
97 Rawls, op. cit., p. 98. The criterion of using half of the median was also advanced by Victor Fuchs in “Redefining Poverty,’ The Public Interest, no. 8 (Summer 1967).
98 For an elaboration of these two concepts and their application to the subjective sense of fairness, see W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (London, 1966).
99 In classical ethical theory, the good is defined as independent of individual satisfaction. Aristotle distinguished between “being good” and “feeling good.” A person having an adulterous affair feels good but is not being good.
100 what if the “least fortunate” are there by their own choice? Christopher Jencks points out while “we have already eliminated virtually all economic and academic obstacles to earning a high school diploma ... one student in five still drops out.” And while one may guarantee working-class families the same educational opportunities as middle-class families, what happens if they don’t want to use this opportunity. Society may have an obligation to those who are kept down or cannot advance because it is not their fault. But if individuals—for cultural or psychological reasons—do not avail themselves of opportunities, is it the society’s responsibility—as the prior obligation—to devote resources to them? But if not, how does one distinguish between the genuinely disadvantaged and those who are not? This is the inextricable difficulty of social policy.
101 For the previous discussion of the Arrow theorem, see chap. 5. Rawls avoids the difficulty of the Arrow impossibility theorem by rejecting the condition of majority rule. As he writes:
It is evident from the preceding remarks that the procedure of majority rule, how ever it is defined and circumscribed, has a subordinate place as a procedural device. The justification for it rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice.... A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice.... When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that just legislation will be enacted.
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right....
This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognize the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it (p. 356).
Rawls is right of course, as with most traditional conceptions or justice, that the action of a majority does not make any decision just. The tyranny of a majority has long been recognized as a source of injustice, as much as the tyranny of a despot. The procedural question, however, is whether, as a consistent rule there is any better method than majority vote, subject to the democratic check of a minority having the right and ability to change the decision and become a majority, in reaching consensus.
Rawls seeks to avoid the Arrow dilemma by specifying a “veil of ignorance” when the initial social contract is bargained. Since each man does not know how well he might do, it is to his interest to gain at least a minimum prize. Thus, each man would accept a set of rules that maximizes the chance of winning at least a minimum prize, and he would therefore also want to make that minimum prize as large as possible. Presumably, such veiled bargaining should move the prizes (i.e. the primary social goods, such as income, self-respect, etc.) to the mean
. Yet as Lester Thurow points out:
Although maximizing the minimum prize seems egalitarian, it need not be.... Rawls believes that the trickle-down effect is so large that it would be impossible to design economic activities that concentrated income gains among high income groups. As an economist I do not share this faith. There are many economic activities with marginal amounts of trickle-down. To be really egalitarian social rules would have to state that individuals must choose those economic activities with the largest trickle-down effects (“A Search for Economic Equity,” The Public Interest, [Spring 1973]).
Thus, some coercive device may be necessary to achieve the desired outcome of a set of rules that will maximize the minimum prize, or give priority to the disadvantaged.
102 See Wassily Leontieff, “The Trouble with Cuban Socialism,” New York Review of Books (January 7,1971).
103 For a review of the data, and the argument, see Otto Eckstein, “The Economics of the ’6os, A Backward Look,” The Public Interest, no. 19 (Spring 1970).
104 This is by now a commonplace argument, used tediously, often by apologetic propagandists for free enterprise. But this does not make it—as an historical fact—less true. For some striking comparisons on the exact amount of decrease of disparity, see Jean Fourastie, The Causes of Wealth (Glencoe, III. 1960), previously cited.