John Rawls’s Genealogy of Liberalism

Abstract

Political Liberalism has generated an astonishing set of debates within contemporary liberalism. This is perfectly understandable, for the post-Rawlsian debates raise issues of profound significance for contemporary society (i.e., the current situation of radical ethnic, cultural, and religious pluralism); and I don’t doubt that the questions raised by Rawls about liberal citizenship and how it ought to accommodate illiberal forms of religion are entirely worthy of the attention they have received from political philosophers. But I think there’s one striking text in PL that has perhaps received less attention in the Rawls literature than it merits. I’m referring to Rawls’s effort to define liberalism, notably in the Introduction to PL, in relation to the 16-17-century Wars of Religion. Of course, it is hardly a novel idea to trace liberalism back to this historical context; on the contrary, it is virtually a cliche to say that liberalism arose out of the Wars of Religion (which of course doesn’t mean that it isn’t true to say this). So it is interesting that Rawls chooses to introduce his crowning articulation of his own version of liberalism with a story of this kind. More to the point, it is especially interesting exactly how Rawls crafts this story – so to speak, how he chooses to flesh out (however compactly or telegraphically) this old cliche/truism. It may even pay dividends for our understanding of the other debates that PL has aroused. Are the Wars of Religion still relevant to contemporary liberals? What I propose to do in this discussion of Rawls is to look at his highly compressed account of the genesis of liberalism in the Introduction of PL, and to explore how this genealogical narrative possibly shapes the larger theoretical agenda in late Rawls – which turns out to be highly problematical (for reasons I’ll try to explain). Rawls’s genealogy of liberalism in the Introduction to PL is amazingly concentrated, but I think it is of decisive importance for grasping both the nature of the philosophical structure laid out in PL and, so to speak, its animating principle.