The inequality of wealth
Rawls attempted to show that principles of justice cannot be based solely on an individual’s moral framework. Rather, they are based on the way the individual’s sense of morality is expressed and preserved in social institutions – such as the education system, the healthcare system, the tax collection system, and the electoral system. Rawls was particularly concerned with the process by which wealth inequalities translated into different levels of political influence, with the result that the structure of social and political institutions was inherently biased in favour of wealthy individuals and corporations.
"In justice as fairness, the concept of right is prior to that of the good."
John Rawls
Writing at the time of the Vietnam War, which he considered an unjust war, Rawls argued that civil disobedience needs to be understood as the necessary action of a just minority appealing to the conscience of the majority. He argued against the US government’s policies of conscription, which allowed wealthy students to dodge the draft while poorer students were often taken into the army because of one failed grade. The translation of economic inequalities into discriminatory institutions such as conscription was deeply troubling to him, particularly when those institutions were the very bodies that purported to implement or act on behalf of justice.
Principles of justice must be based on more than just individual morality, according to Rawls. The entire framework of society must be taken into account when formulating a system of justice.
Principles of justice
To Rawls, for justice to exist, it has to be considered “fair” according to certain principles of equality. In his theory of justice-as-fairness, Rawls develops two main principles of justice. The first is that everyone has an equal claim to basic liberties. The second is that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and attached to positions and offices open to all”. The first principle – the principle of liberty – takes priority over the second principle – the principle of difference. He justifies this by arguing that, as economic conditions improve due to civilization’s advancement, questions of liberty become more important. There are few, if any, instances where it is to an individual’s or a group’s advantage to accept a lesser liberty for the sake of greater material means.
Rawls identifies certain social and economic privileges as “threat advantages”. He calls these “de facto political power, or wealth, or native endowments”, and they allow certain people to take more than a just share, much as a school bully might take lunch money from other students by virtue of being bigger than them. Inequality – and the advantages based on this inequality – could not lie at the basis of any principle or theory of justice. Since inequalities are part of the reality of any society, Rawls concludes that “the arbitrariness of the world must be corrected for by adjusting the circumstances of the initial contractual situation”. By “contractual situation”, he means a social contract between individuals – both with each other and with all the institutions of the state, even including the family. However, this social contract involves agreements between individuals on an unequal footing. Since the state has an equal responsibility towards each citizen, justice can only be secured if this inequality is corrected at its root.
For Rawls, social institutions are key to making this correction – by ensuring that all individuals have equal access to them, and by developing a redistribution mechanism that makes everyone better off. Rawls considers liberalism and liberal democracies to be the political systems best suited to ensuring that this redistribution is done fairly. He believed that communist systems focus too much on complete equality without considering whether that equality produces the most good for everyone. He thought that a capitalist system with strong social institutions is more likely to secure a fair system of justice. Where capitalism would produce unfair outcomes left on its own, social institutions imbued with a strong sense of justice can correct it.
Multicultural society
Rawls sees a further role for just institutions in binding society together. He believes that one of the most important lessons of modernity is that it is possible to live together under common rules without necessarily sharing a common moral code – as long as all individuals share a moral commitment to the structure of society. If people agree that the structure of society is fair, they will be satisfied, despite living among people who might possess significantly different moral codes. This, for Rawls, is the basis of pluralist, multicultural societies, and social institutions are key to ensuring fairness in such complex social systems.
The veil of ignorance
Rawls argues that, initially, the principles underpinning redistribution need to be decided behind what he calls “a veil of ignorance”. He imagines a situation in which the structure of an ideal society is being decided, but none of those deciding on that structure knows what their place in the society will be. The “veil of ignorance” means that nobody knows the social position, personal doctrine, or intellectual or physical attributes they themselves will have. They might belong to any gender, sexual orientation, race, or class. In this way, the veil of ignorance ensures that everyone – independent of social position and individual characteristics – is granted justice: those deciding on their circumstances must, after all, be happy to put themselves in their position. Rawls assumed that, from behind the veil of ignorance, the social contract would necessarily be constructed to help the least well-off members of society, since everyone is ultimately afraid of becoming poor and will want to construct social institutions that protect against this.
"Envy tends to make everyone worse off."
John Rawls
Rawls accepts that differences in society are likely to persist, but argues that a fair principle of justice would offer the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society. Other scholars, including Indian theorist Amartya Sen and Canadian Marxist Gerald Cohen, have questioned Rawls’s belief in the potential of a liberal capitalist regime to ensure these principles are adhered to. They also question the benefit of the “veil of ignorance” in modern societies, where inequalities are deeply embedded in social institutions. A veil of ignorance is only of value, many argue, if you are in the position of starting from scratch.
Criticisms of Rawls
Sen believes that Rawls makes a false distinction between political and economic rights. For Sen, inequalities and deprivation are largely a result of the absence of an entitlement to some goods, rather than the absence of the goods themselves. He uses the example of the Bengal famine of 1943, which was caused by a rise in food prices brought about by urbanization, rather than an actual lack of food. The goods – in this case food – do not represent an advantage in themselves. Instead, the advantage is defined by the relationship between people and goods – those who could afford food at the higher price versus those who could not. Sen further argues that the social contract in Rawls’s definition is flawed, since it assumes that the contract only occurs at an interpersonal level. He argues that the social contract is instead negotiated through the interests of a number of groups not directly party to the contract, such as foreigners, future generations, and even nature itself.
For Rawls, equal access for all to institutions such as public libraries is essential for a fair society, allowing everyone the same life chances regardless of their place in society.
Intrinsic inequality
Gerald Cohen questions the trust Rawls places in liberalism. Cohen argues that liberalism’s obsession with self-interest maximization is not compatible with the egalitarian intentions of the redistributive state policy that Rawls argues for. He sees inequality as intrinsic to capitalism, and not simply a result of an unfair state-redistribution system. Capitalism and liberalism, for Cohen, can never provide the “fair” solution that Rawls was looking for.
Despite these criticisms, Rawls’s Theory of Justice remains one of
the most influential contemporary works of political theory, and is still the bestselling book published by Harvard University Press. His ideas have spurred a series of debates on the restructuring of the modern welfare system, both in the US and across the world. Many of his former students, including Sen, are at the core of these debates. In recognition of his contribution to social and political theory, Rawls was presented with the National Humanities Medal in 1999 by US President Bill Clinton, who stated that his work had helped to revive faith in democracy itself.
The Bengal famine was caused by unequal economic relations between people. Rawls’s system, centred on political rather than economic structures, appears not to explain such disasters.
JOHN RAWLS
Rawls was born in Baltimore, USA, the son of prominent lawyer William Lee Rawls and Anna Abell Stump Rawls, president of the Baltimore League of Women Voters. His childhood was marked by the loss of his two brothers to contagious illnesses, which he had unknowingly passed on to them. A shy man with a stutter, Rawls studied philosophy at Princeton University. After completing his BA, he enlisted in the US Army and served in the Pacific, touring New Guinea, the Philippines, and occupied Japan. He then returned to Princeton, earning his PhD in 1950 with a thesis on moral principles for individual moral judgments. Rawls spent a year at the University of Oxford, UK, where he established close relations with legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart and political theorist Isaiah Berlin. Over a long career, Rawls trained many leading figures in political philosophy.
Key works
1971 A Theory of Justice
1999 The Law of Peoples
2001 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
See also: John Locke • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Immanuel Kant • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • Robert Nozick
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Anti-colonialism
FOCUS
Decolonization
BEFORE
1813 Simón Bolívar is called “The Liberator” when Caracas in Venezuela is taken from the Spanish.
1947 Gandhi’s non-violent protests eventually achieve independence for India from British rule.
1954 The Algerian War of Independence against French colonial rule begins.
AFTER
1964 At a meeting of the UN, Che Guevara argues that Latin America has yet to obtain true independence.
1965 Malcolm X speaks of obtaining rights for black people “by any means necessary”.
By the middle of the 20th century, European colonialism was in fast decline. Exhausted by two world wars and challenged by the social changes that accompanied industrialization, the grip of many colonial powers on their territories had loosened.
Grassroots movements demanding independence emerged with growing speed in the post-war era. The UK’s hold over Kenya was shaken by the growth of the Kenyan African National Union, while India secured independence in 1947 after a long struggle. In South Africa, the fight against colonial rule was entrenched in the far longer battle against apartheid oppression. Yet questions began to emerge about exactly what form post-colonial nations should take, and how best to deal with the legacy of violence and repression left behind by years of colonial rule.
Post-colonial thinking
Frantz Fanon was a French-Algerian thinker whose work deals with the effects of colonialism, and the response of oppressed peoples to the end of European rule. Drawing on the earlier perspectives of Marx and Hegel, Fanon takes an idiosyncratic approach to the analysis of racism and colonialism. His writing is concerned as much with language and culture as with politics, and frequently explores the relations between these different areas of enquiry, showing how language and culture are shaped by racism and other prejudices. Perhaps the most influential theorist of decolonization – the process of emancipation from colonial oppression – Fanon has had a major impact on anti-imperialist thinking, and his work inspires activists and politicians to this day.
"What matters is not to know the world but to change it."
Frantz Fanon
Fanon examined the impact and legacy of colonialism. His view of colonialism was closely tied up with white domination, and linked with a strong egalitarianism, rejecting the human oppression and loss of dignity that colonial rule entails. In part, this reflects Fanon’s role as a participant in the fight against oppression. In his book A Dying Colonialism, he puts forward an eyewitness view of the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonial rule, detailing the course of the armed conflict and the way it led to the emergence of an independent nation. The strategy and ideology of the armed anti-colonial struggle are presented in their entirety, and he carries out a detailed analysis of the tactics used by both sides.
The Algerian War raged from 1954–1962 as French colonial forces tried to quell the Algerian independence movement. Fanon became a passionate spokesman for the Algerian cause.
Framework of oppression
Fundamentally, however, Fanon’s contribution was theoretical rather than practical, exposing the structures of oppression at work within colonial systems. He examined the hierarchies of ethnicity that provided the backbone of colonial oppression, showing how they ensure not only a strictly ordered system of privilege, but also an expression of difference that is cultural as well as political. In Algeria – and in other countries, such as Haiti – a post-colonial political order was created with the explicit intention of avoiding this kind of domination.
"The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of an outlet; the native is trapped in the tight links of colonialism."
Frantz Fanon
Fanon’s vision of decolonization has an ambivalent relationship with violence. Famously, his work The Wretched of the Earth is introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre in a preface that emphasizes the position of violence in the struggle against colonialism. Sartre presents the piece as a call to arms, suggesting that the “mad impulse to murder” is an expression of the “collective unconsciousness” of the oppressed, brought about as a direct response to years of tyranny. As a result of this, it would be easy to read Fanon’s work as a clarion call to armed revolution.
The Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule in Kenya was violently suppressed by British forces, causing divisions among the majority Kikuyu, some of whom fought for the British.
Colonial racism
However, concentrating on the revolutionary aspect of Fanon’s work does a disservice to the complexity of his thought. For him, the violence of colonialism lay on the part of the oppressors. Colonialism was indeed violence in its natural state, but a violence that manifested itself in a number of different ways. It might be expressed in brute force, but also within the stereotypes and social divisions associated with the racist worldview that Fanon identified as defining colonial life. The dominance of white culture under colonial rule meant that any forms of identity other than those of white Europeans were viewed negatively. Divisions existed between colonizers and the people they ruled on the basis of the presumed inferiority of their culture.
Fanon believed that violence was part and parcel of colonial rule, and his work is a damning indictment of the violence meted out by colonial powers. He argues that the legitimacy of colonial oppression is supported only by military might, and this violence – as its solitary foundation – is focused on the colonized as a means of ensuring their acquiescence. Oppressed peoples face a stark choice between accepting a life of subjugation and confronting such persecution. Any response to colonialism needed to be developed in opposition to the assumptions of colonial rule, but also independently of it, in order to shape new identities and values that were not defined by Europe. Armed struggle and violent revolution might be necessary, but it would be doomed to failure unless a genuine decolonization could take place.
Towards decolonization
The Wretched of the Earth remains Fanon’s most significant publication, and provides a theoretical framework for the emergence of individuals and nations from the indign
ity of colonial rule. Exploring in depth the assumptions of cultural superiority identified elsewhere in his work, Fanon develops an understanding of white cultural oppression through a forensic analysis of the way it functioned: forcing the white minority’s values onto the whole of society. Nevertheless, he prescribes an inclusive approach to the difficult process of decolonization. Fanon’s ideas are based on the dignity and value of all people, irrespective of their race or background. He stresses that all races and classes can potentially be involved in – and benefit from – decolonization. Moreover, for Fanon, any attempt at reform based on negotiations between a privileged elite leading the decolonization process and colonial rulers would simply reproduce the injustices of the previous regime. Such an attempt would be rooted in assumptions of privilege and, more significantly, would fail, because there is a tendency of oppressed peoples to mimic the behaviour and attitudes of the ruling elites. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the middle and upper classes, who are able – through their education and relative wealth – to present themselves as culturally similar to the colonialists.
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