O futuro da filosofia política

Durante cinco décadas, a filosofia política anglófona foi dominada pelo igualitarismo liberal de John Rawls. Com o liberalismo em crise, será que estas ideias sobreviveram ao seu tempo?

Katrina Forrester

Boston Review

Imagem: John Rawls (centro), Jeremy Corbyn (esquerda), e Robert Nozick (direita)

Desde as convulsões da crise financeira de 2008 e a turbulência política de 2016, tornou-se claro para muitos que o liberalismo está, em certo sentido, fracassando. A turbulência deu uma pausa aos economistas, alguns dos quais responderam renovando o seu estudo sobre a desigualdade, e aos cientistas políticos, que desde então se voltaram em massa para problemas de democracia, autoritarismo e populismo. Mas os filósofos políticos liberais anglo-americanos têm menos a dizer do que poderiam.

O silêncio deve-se em parte à natureza da filosofia política hoje - às questões que considera valer a pena colocar e às que deixa de lado. Desde Platão, os filósofos sempre perguntaram sobre a natureza da justiça. Mas durante as últimas cinco décadas, a filosofia política no mundo de língua inglesa tem se preocupado com uma resposta específica a essa questão desenvolvida pelo filósofo americano John Rawls.

O trabalho de Rawls em meados do século XX marcou o início de uma mudança de paradigma na filosofia política. Na sua esteira, os filósofos começaram a explorar o que significavam justiça e igualdade no contexto dos modernos estados de bem-estar social capitalistas, usando esses conceitos para descrever, com detalhes impressionantes e meticulosos, a estrutura ideal de uma sociedade justa - uma que acabou por se assemelhar muito a uma versão da social-democracia do pós-guerra. Trabalhando dentro deste quadro, elaboraram desde então um conjunto de princípios morais abstractos que constituem a espinha dorsal filosófica do liberalismo moderno. Estas ideias foram concebidas para nos ajudar a ver o que a justiça e a igualdade exigem - da nossa sociedade, das nossas instituições e de nós próprios.

Esta é uma história de triunfo: o projeto filosófico de Rawls foi um grande sucesso. Não é que os filósofos políticos posteriores a Rawls não discordassem; argumentos refinados e acalorados são o que os filósofos fazem de melhor. Mas ao longo das últimas décadas construíram um consenso robusto sobre as regras fundamentais do jogo, concebendo-se como envolvidos em um projeto intelectual comum com um quadro conceitual compartilhado. Os conceitos e objetivos que regem a filosofia política têm sido, durante gerações, mais ou menos tidos como garantidos.

Mas se a filosofia política moderna está ligada ao liberalismo moderno, e o liberalismo está fracassando, talvez seja altura de perguntar se estas ideias aparentemente intemporais sobreviveram à sua utilidade. As ideias de Rawls foram desenvolvidas durante um período muito distinto da história dos EUA, e a sua teoria tem uma ligação íntima com a democracia liberal do pós-guerra. A filosofia política liberal é cúmplice dos seus fracassos? Estará a filosofia política, tal como o próprio liberalismo, em crise e precisando de reinvenção? E se sim, como será o seu futuro?

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Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, though he had been working on its ideas for more than twenty years. Its 600 pages provided a way for philosophers to judge society in accordance with two principles of justice—a principle of liberty, which affirms citizens’ basic rights and freedoms, and of equality, which calls for inequalities to be limited and resources arranged so that they benefit the least well-off members of society. Rawls’s vision was of an ideally just society—a “property-owning democracy,” where inequalities were heavily circumscribed and everyone had a stake.

Rawls supported his claims with a complex set of arguments—most famously, his idea of an “original position,” a thought experiment where parties behind a “veil of ignorance” choose principles of justice according to which society can be organized, regulated, and judged. As these concepts and many others illustrate, Rawls invented an entire language, transforming the conceptual vocabulary of political philosophy to an unprecedented degree. By the end of the twentieth century, countless books were dedicated to the elaboration of its terms.

One reason Rawls’s ideas had such a profound impact is that philosophers believed they filled a vacuum of philosophical imagination. Many political philosophers said the field died during World War Two, when it became impossible to think about justice or utopia; thanks to the prevailing outlook of anti-totalitarianism, a slippery slope to authoritarianism was seen behind every progressive reform. It was in this context that A Theory of Justice was heralded as having revived political philosophy, giving philosophical form to the dream of a just society that liberals found embodied in postwar social democracy. And it is remarkable just how successful Rawls’s book and ideas became: only a decade after its publication, one bibliography listed 2,512 books and articles in conversation with them. It is no understatement to say that over the course of the 1970s political philosophy was remade in his image.

Rawls’s ideas and those of his students cohered into a doctrine known as “liberal egalitarianism.” At first his readers asked whether his arguments worked, how much equality they demanded, and what they meant in practice—liberalism, socialism, or something else altogether. Over time, his theory of “justice as fairness” and its principles of liberty and equality were applied to novel moral and political situations. The logic of liberal philosophy toward greater abstraction and complexity pushed philosophers to look to challenging philosophical puzzles, and they found plenty within Rawls’s theory: what kinds of inequalities between people were unjust (and what kinds were permissible); how institutions, like courts, and democratic procedures should be structured to facilitate both individual and collective flourishing; the conceptual relationship between ideas such as equality and liberty, justice and fairness, morality and responsibility; and the classic questions of “distributive justice”—who gets what (not just wealth and income, but also self-respect), and who owes what to whom.

By the mid-1970s, Rawls’s ideas were being extended in new directions. Some used demands for global justice, originating in the Global South, to update Rawls’s theory for a new era of international interdependence. Others, prompted by environmental crisis, addressed obligations to future generations and developed new theories of intergenerational justice. Subsequent generations of political philosophers would contest Rawls’s methods and concepts, but for many they would take on the appearance of common sense; even those who opposed it were shaped by it. By the late twentieth century, Anglophone political theorists operated in the shadow of justice theory, and Rawls had become a sort of patron saint, the visionary behind an egalitarian dream of distributive justice. “Political philosophers,” the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick wrote already in 1974, “now must either work within Rawls’s theory, or explain why not.”

The apparatus Rawls built became not only a doctrine to be consulted in light of any new problem, but also the philosophical architecture of a highly flexible and adaptable ideology—the ideology of modern liberalism. That flexibility was its philosophical beauty: it provided a general framework for answering countless particular questions. In this way, philosophical liberalism became synonymous with Rawls, and political philosophy came to stand for a kind of liberalism.

But there was an irony to this Rawlsian renewal of philosophy. The 1970s also saw the collapse of the social liberalism that surged to dominance after World War II, propelled by the concrete political and economic successes of capitalist welfare states. As those states faced fiscal and legitimacy crises, neoliberal ideologues and policymakers gained power, and ideas of the public interest and common good fractured. Viewed in this context, Rawls’s program seemed to have spectacularly bad timing. The publication of his grand philosophical defense of the welfare state came on the eve of its crisis: to some it looked as if it hailed from a bygone era, the last gasp of a dying ideology. The success of Rawls’s theory in the coming decades only deepened its untimeliness: the more welfarism fractured in politics, the more entrenched Rawls’s arguments became in political philosophy.

The story of Anglo-American liberal political philosophy is therefore not just a tale of philosophical success. It is also a ghost story, in which Rawls’s theory lived on as a spectral presence long after the conditions it described—and under which it emerged—were gone. Rawls had intended his theory to be dynamic, but in practice it was haunted by the assumptions of postwar liberalism, and it lost its grip on reality as reality itself transformed.

Liberal egalitarianism was formulated in a very different society from our own—one with steady growth, lower economic inequality, higher union density, and greater racial and gender inequality, in which welfare systems had widespread legitimacy even as they were exclusionary, piecemeal, and unstable. It was also a society forged through war and empire, structured by the Cold War and sustained by the Bretton Woods settlement. This postwar liberalism in which Rawls’s theory emerged was not quite the rosy social democracy some imagine it to have been.

And, in fact, Rawls’s “property-owning democracy” was never a simple defense of the welfare state. His unpublished papers reveal that as a young man writing in the 1940s and early 1950s, Rawls defended a much more minimalist liberalism than that for which he is now remembered. He was wary of concentrations of power (especially in the state), worried about coercion (by corporations but also unions), and hungry for social stability. He started off closer to some early neoliberals than social democrats, though he gradually moved to the left.

An ideology of liberal consensus reigned in the postwar years: it was widely assumed by white affluent liberals that U.S. society was built on a core of consensus, or at least its real possibility. Rawls was no different. His philosophy reflected many of the contradictions of postwar liberalism and its afterlives, both its successes and its limits. The 1960s, when Rawls put the finishing touches to his theory, was the age of affluence, civil rights, and the Great Society, but it also marked a period of urban crisis and mass incarceration, and the beginning of a new era of deindustrialization and financialized capitalism in which public investment was cut and the labor movement quashed. Philosophers working in the Rawlsian framework assumed the triumphs but did not yet foresee the costs. When Rawls first penned his theory, he thought things were getting better: after the civil rights movement would come racial liberalism; the excesses of capitalism could be contained, and inequality limited. By the time he published his ideas in 1971, it reflected the optimism of an earlier age. But Rawls’s untimeliness was part of his success: as the social movements of the 1960s shattered the postwar liberal consensus, Rawls’s theory—not yet published—survived the turbulence unscathed. When it emerged, it provided the basis for a new consensus, at the very moment other liberal theories were in crisis.

The political theory born from Rawls’s interpretation of postwar liberalism was flexible: it started as a minimalist liberalism, but it could be stretched into a justification for liberal socialism. Yet it had a distinctive character, which had consequences for the future shape of political philosophy. It focused on juridical and legislative institutions but assigned a smaller role and less value to other social, political, and international institutions. It was based on a deliberative vision of politics that saw democracy as modelled on discussion. Its distributive framework squeezed out other ways of thinking about the dynamics and organization of economic, social, and political life.

These aspects of Rawls’s vision constrained the kinds of politics it could incorporate or make sense of. As his theory was widely taken up, ideas incompatible with these parameters were set aside or dropped out of mainstream philosophical discourse altogether. Liberal philosophers dispensed with older arguments and concerns—about the nature of the state, political control, collective action, corporate personality, and appeals to history. Their conceptual choices often had political implications, regardless of the political motivations of the theorists themselves, who sometimes became trapped in conceptual structures of their own collective making. As subsequent generations built on the arguments of their forebears, a philosophical paradigm took on a political shape that none of its discrete theorists might have intended. It had its own logic and its own politics, which helped determine what ethical and political problems would count as sufficiently puzzling to warrant philosophical concern.

For example, liberal egalitarians tended to insist that what mattered were institutional solutions to current inequalities; past injustices weren’t relevant, and arguments that relied on historical claims were rejected. That meant that demands for reparations for slavery and other historical injustices made by Black Power and anti-colonial campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s were rejected too. It also meant that political philosophers in the Rawlsian strain often read later objections to the universalist presumptions of American liberalism as identitarian challenges to equality, rather than as critiques informed by the history of imperialism and decolonization.

As the concerns of philosophers were consolidated, facility with Rawlsianism became the price of admission into the elite institutions of political philosophy. Many on the margins saw that it was only by adopting the form of liberal egalitarianism or its mainstream alternatives that other ideas—Marxian, feminist, critical race, anticolonial, or otherwise—could be considered. Just as often, rival political visions or arguments were not rejected outright, but accommodated within the liberal egalitarian paradigm—often in a way that diffused their force. When marginalized ideas were taken up by liberal philosophers, they were frequently distorted to cohere with the larger paradigm. Analytical Marxism was engaged insofar as Marxism could be made into a theory of property distribution, and thus compatible with the Rawlsian focus of distributive justice. The same was true for democratic ideas, which had to be made compatible with theories of discussion and deliberation. As the British philosopher Brian Barry made explicit in debates that lie at the origins of global justice theory within philosophy, in order to fit the canons of justice theory one needed to “domesticate” the demands by theorists of the New International Economic Order for the overhaul of relations between Global North and South. The very capaciousness of liberal philosophy squeezed out possibilities for radical critique.

In this moment of conceptual consolidation, the political crises of the 1970s largely passed Anglophone liberal philosophers by. Few wrote about crises of legitimacy and the challenges of post-industrial society. Many social theorists were trying to address the collapse of Marxist and liberal grand narratives—by rethinking the subject of the working class, and by moving analyses of work beyond the factory to the school, prison, clinic, and bedroom. Rawlsians did not worry much about these collapses or the social changes these rival theories sought to explain—changes of class, capital, work, the state, or the subject. Instead they offered a new grand system at a time when many other systems were rejected. It was in part because of this refusal to engage these new challenges that liberal egalitarianism survived the undoing of the postwar liberal settlement.

This is not to say that political philosophy was untouched by political change. In the 1980s, a number of liberal and Marxist philosophers developed a rival egalitarianism—“luck egalitarianism,” as it has become known—designed to address the limitations of Rawls’s institutional focus, which they thought let individuals off the hook. They explored questions of individual responsibility and control over choices. Many were leftists, but they took on an individualizing discourse of responsibility, dependency, choice, and market solutions identified with the New Right. Others challenged proceduralism and marketization in the name of community or human rights. A school of thought known as communitarianism became the dominant alternative; its advocates prioritized community over the individual and the social self over the atomistic, liberal one (though in practice many communitarians returned to ideas that Rawls had himself begun from and left behind). The Rawlsian liberal’s focus remained with juridical, legislative and democratic institutions and individuals. What both they and their communitarian critics missed were the larger changes to the administrative state and the rise of neoliberal policies—those that outsourced and privatized public welfare functions, expanded the state’s carceral functions and the reach of public management, and introduced competition, deregulation, and new transnational forms of clientelism and governance.

These blind spots didn’t stop Rawls’s theory from remaining the touchstone for both his followers and his critics. The rise of Rawlsianism is thus a story of triumph—the triumph of a small group of affluent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, and constructed a universalizing liberal theory that took on a life of its own. They began from where they were, focusing almost entirely on North American and Western European welfare states, except in their imagination of the global. Yet they wanted their political philosophy to have a broader reach; they tried to expand their theories across space to encompass wider communities, nations, the international realm, and ultimately the planet. They also moved across time, drawing on the past to reimagine the future and to make political philosophy as universal and unconstrained as possible. But in the end, they remained within the contradictions of postwar liberalism.

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Nos últimos anos, contudo, aspectos do paradigma rawlsiano têm estado sob pressão à medida que uma nova geração investiga os seus limites. O seu pressuposto predominante e o seu objetivo de consenso parecem hoje fora de alcance face a tantas divisões acentuadas. As dúvidas levaram muitos filósofos a ideias que as primeiras gerações de rawlsianos ignoraram.

Alguns estenderam as ideias de Rawls às empresas, locais de trabalho, mercados de trabalho, mercados financeiros, algoritmos, fronteiras e sindicatos como locais para teorias de justiça. Outros adaptaram teorias de exploração e dominação para complementar os princípios distributivos. Os autodenominados realistas políticos tentaram recolocar a política na filosofia política, tornando as teorias da democracia mais sensíveis à natureza do conflito político real. Houve também um afastamento do foco distributivo, bem como da visão deliberativa da democracia que modela a política em uma sala de seminários. Nestas críticas, os limites das fases anteriores do igualitarismo liberal são iluminados. Talvez não seja surpreendente que uma filosofia política que começou como avessa à ideologia, aos interesses e ao poder coercitivo dos Estados, das empresas e dos sindicatos se tenha tornado em uma teoria do discurso ideal desvinculado da política, mas hoje isso tem sido considerado insuficiente. Problemas que outrora tinham sido excluídos pela natureza não-histórica da teoria da justiça também são agora interrogados, à medida que alguns revisitam questões éticas - como as reparações - levantadas pelos legados do colonialismo. O estudo da ideologia e da ética dos oprimidos assistiu a um ressurgimento, recorrendo a ideias da teoria racial crítica, do feminismo e do marxismo.

Assim, os filósofos políticos estão adaptando-se, alargando constantemente o quadro igualitário em novas direções. Mas isso é suficiente? Não está tão claro se as ideias rawlsianas podem ajudar-nos a enfrentar as necessidades do nosso momento. Tal como grande parte das ciências humanas (e graças em parte às restrições de um sistema acadêmico profissionalizado e cada vez mais precário), a filosofia política continua a ser orientada para a resolução de problemas específicos e não para a construção de novas teorias sistemáticas. Mesmo que as preocupações substantivas dos filósofos políticos tenham começado a mudar à medida que novos assuntos entram no domínio filosófico, muito debate ainda ocorre à sombra de um conjunto de ideias que refletem os pressupostos de uma época diferente. Há benefícios em trabalhar dentro de uma tradição intelectual, mas também pode haver custos se a tradição tiver dificuldade em esclarecer as circunstâncias em mudança. Afinal de contas, os radicais nos Estados Unidos inspiram-se mais no marxismo do que no liberalismo.

Isto deve-se em parte ao legado político ambíguo da teoria de Rawls. Do nosso ponto de vista do outro lado da crise financeira, o igualitarismo liberal pode agora parecer ter sido o liberalismo de esquerda perfeito para o “fim da história” trazido pelo fim da Guerra Fria. Naquele período de relativa calma e otimismo liberal, quando a política parecia tecnocrática e era caracterizada por um novo consenso, o igualitarismo liberal não parecia tão diferente - apenas um ou dois passos à esquerda - do centrismo da Terceira Via de Bill Clinton ou de Tony Blair. Ao expor a sua teoria, Rawls quis fornecer uma forma de julgar as reformas incrementais das sociedades que se aproximam gradualmente da justiça. Na década de 1990, o igualitarismo liberal - tal como a democracia liberal - parecia hegemônico, e parecia que a filosofia rawlsiana poderia simplesmente aspirar a reformar um liberalismo já bem sucedido, embora imperfeito. Nesta perspectiva, o igualitarismo liberal pode parecer responsável por um estreitamento da imaginação utópica e cúmplice na ascensão de um neoliberalismo tecnocrata - reforçando em vez de ajudar a desmantelar as suas injustiças. Agora que as reivindicações do fim da história parecem não apenas complacentes mas equivocadas, o papel político deste liberalismo filosófico é mais incerto.

Mas, ao mesmo tempo, as teorias de Rawls também podem ser vistas como um regresso bem-vindo a um momento estatista de bem-estar social de meados do século que agora, no deserto do neoliberalismo austero, assumiu o fascínio de uma espécie de utopia. No clima atual, os arranjos distributivos exigidos pelo igualitarismo liberal - desde os cuidados de saúde universais à educação gratuita e à ampla dispersão do capital - são radicais. Alguns argumentam que esses acordos podem oferecer modelos institucionais para o recente renascimento das aspirações socialistas na esquerda britânica e norte-americana; o corbynismo conta com os rawlsianos entre seus teóricos.

Este fascínio utópico mostra até que ponto subestimamos a distância política percorrida entre o consenso liberal do pós-guerra que deu origem ao igualitarismo liberal e o nosso próprio tempo. À medida que o centro de gravidade se deslocava para a direita, Rawls e os seus seguidores tornaram-se definitivos no liberalismo de esquerda. Estas ideias significaram algo diferente nas décadas após a Depressão e a Segunda Guerra Mundial do que no rescaldo da Nova Direita e dos sucessos dos ataques neoliberais às instituições estatais democráticas.

Assim, enfrentamos uma ambiguidade: se partes da filosofia liberal parecem ligadas à estrutura política do neoliberalismo tecnocrata, outras parecem bem adequadas ao nosso próprio momento de desigualdade dramática, com o seu anseio por princípios universalizantes. O igualitarismo liberal continua certamente a ser um recurso sem paralelo para esquemas organizarem e justificarem a distribuição de propriedade e limitarem a desigualdade; durante os anos da Terceira Via, a desigualdade foi frequentemente ignorada na política, mas nunca foi ignorada pelos filósofos. A este respeito, o fato de a filosofia política liberal não se ter adaptado totalmente à era pós-década de 1970 é um dos seus pontos fortes. A filosofia política anglófona também resistiu fortemente aos movimentos intelectuais desnaturalizantes, antiessencializantes e particularizantes que ganharam terreno na segunda metade do século XX. As aspirações universalistas e normativas de Rawls sobreviveram aos desafios do pós-estruturalismo e das teorias críticas pós-marxistas. Durante muito tempo essa recalcitrância pareceu conservadorismo, mas agora pode ser um recurso. Se os filósofos políticos abandonassem alguns dos seus pressupostos naturalizados e considerassem certas formas de argumento como vinculadas a um momento político que já passou, talvez pudessem realizar um novo trabalho político em defesa dos seus princípios de longo alcance de justiça social - não apenas de justificação, mas de persuasão.

Permanece a questão de saber se a tradição igualitária pode enfrentar as crises do nosso futuro, mas muitos aspectos da visão rawlsiana sugerem que ela não pode estar à altura do desafio. Algumas das nossas preocupações mais prementes residem nos seus pontos cegos. Nos anos que se seguiram à ascensão do igualitarismo liberal, o Estado expandiu-se, mas também foi privatizado. A natureza do capitalismo e do trabalho transformou-se e continuará a fazê-lo, provavelmente de formas dramáticas e inesperadas. O eleitorado dos menos favorecidos foi reconstruído e tanto a sua composição como o seu lugar como agente de mudança e não como destinatário de bens precisam de ser novamente interrogados. A política está mudando, à medida que autoritários, movimentos radicais e novos oligarcas lutam em um novo cenário internacional moldado por instituições financeiras irresponsáveis, novas plataformas de comunicação social, novas tecnologias e alterações climáticas.

Os igualitaristas liberais têm algumas das ferramentas para lidar com estas mudanças, mas as nossas questões também requerem novos enquadramentos que se afastem de um inventado em um período de batalhas ideológicas bastante diferente de hoje. É hora de perguntar o que seria necessário para ter uma filosofia política adequada à nossa época.

Nota do editor: Este ensaio foi adaptado de In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, de Katrina Forrester. Copyright 2019 da Princeton University Press. Publicado com permissão.

Katrina Forrester é professora assistente de estudos governamentais e sociais na Universidade de Harvard. A sua pesquisa centra-se na história do pensamento social e político do século XX e nas suas implicações para a teoria política. Seu primeiro livro, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, foi publicado pela Princeton University Press em setembro de 2019. Seus escritos foram publicados no The New Yorker, no The Guardian e na London Review of Books, entre muitos outros outlets. Ela twitta em @katforrester.