Lately I've been writing about the influences that can be discerned in the theories of John Rawls. Rawls was a "social contract theorist"; to what extent were his theories shaped and framed by his reading of the great contract theorists such as Locke, Rousseau, or Kant? He was also influenced by the history of economic thought; so is it possible to find parallels or echoes of the thought systems of Adam Smith or Karl Marx in Rawls's thinking? And to what extent were there more local influences in the 1940s and 1950s that created fairly specific directions and characteristics in Rawls's thinking?
This is an interesting question in application to one particular philosopher. But it also raises a more general question: where do philosophical theories come from? To what extent is it the case that a given philosopher is working within a "micro-tradition" -- a particular and specific field of influence -- and to what extent is the thinker "original", bringing forward new ideas on a topic? And once a fundamental topic has been established for a thinker -- e.g., "What defines the principles of justice for a property-owning democracy?" -- to what extent does the theory then develop autonomously according to the arguments and analysis of the philosopher?
This way of formulating the problem invokes several related ideas: influence and tradition; originality and creativity; and orderly, logical development of a position or theory.
I suppose that there are many instances of philosophers who fall mostly in the "influence" part of the map: their philosophical work largely takes the form of carefully working out the ideas of their influencers. (This might be part of the legacy of Rawls; I suppose there has been quite an ocean of philosophical work dedicated to specifying more exactly what "primary goods" are, or how "reflective equilibrium" works.) This might be described as "normal science" -- taking the foundations of a field of study as being unquestioned, and then attempting to work out the details more exactly.
There are also some good examples of philosophers who were largely driven by the "logical analysis" part of the map: formulate a good, difficult question, and then spend the rest of one's career working out analytically sound answers to the problems this question spawns. "Naturalized epistemology" might fall in this sector; we might say that the philosophers who have tried to give a biological interpretation of the conditions of knowledge are taking one fundamental question -- how do biological organisms arrive at knowledge of their environment? -- and attempt to apply the findings of cognitive science and evolutionary biology to the issues that arise. Kant's philosophy also seems to have this character: once having chosen the topics "What can we know metaphysically?" or "What creates moral duty?", his mind seems to have proceeded analytically and logically, without correction or stimulus from a contemporary literature.
And what about originality? Are there examples of philosophers who have largely invented a set of questions and approaches that defined a new philosophy for a given domain? Wittgenstein is commonly recognized as a highly original philosopher; but certainly his theories were embedded in a tradition of philosophy. Several things are apparently true about Wittgenstein when it comes to influence and argument. (a) Many of his ideas and assumptions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
derived from careful readings of Frege and Russell; (b) his insights and assertions in Philosophical Investigations
were responsive to a surrounding set of ideas about language, behavior, and meaning, but his solutions and theories still strike one as being highly original; and (c) for certain themes and problems he continued to work carefully to move his position forward through analytical discovery and inference. So Wittgenstein seems to illustrate all three dimensions of philosophical theory formation and knowledge construction.
Several things seem to be true about the formation of the theories and perspectives of individual philosophers:
, edited by Diego Rios and Christoph Schmidt-Petri. Contemporary philosophers were asked to respond to five important questions about their approaches to the field of the philosophy of social science. The format offers the beginning of a triangulation among "beginnings," "fundamental assumptions," and "future directions" for each of these philosophers. The questions that were provided to the philosophers are these:
What I would like to see is a next step conducted by a gifted sociologist of the professions, who would attempt to map out the streams of influence and contribution that are documented within the essays in this volume. Andrew Abbott's careful analysis of the currents of thought constituting the discipline of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s is a good case in point (Chaos of Disciplines
). Another good example is William Sewell's attempt to provide a geography of the discipline of social history in the 1960s (Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
).
derived from careful readings of Frege and Russell; (b) his insights and assertions in Philosophical Investigations were responsive to a surrounding set of ideas about language, behavior, and meaning, but his solutions and theories still strike one as being highly original; and (c) for certain themes and problems he continued to work carefully to move his position forward through analytical discovery and inference. So Wittgenstein seems to illustrate all three dimensions of philosophical theory formation and knowledge construction. Several things seem to be true about the formation of the theories and perspectives of individual philosophers:
- They are introduced into a fairly specific "philosophical research community" through graduate education that provides paradigm examples of philosophical questions and issues and prescriptive advice about the nature of philosophical argument and analysis.
- They are introduced to their field at a particular moment in social history: World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the civil rights period, 9-11; and historical events and shifts have an influence on the formation of their thought.
- "Originality" can take the form of arriving at new questions ("How is group mentality possible?"); new methods of analysis (Frege-Russell's formal deductivism as a solution to the question of the nature of mathematical truth); or new substantive approaches to philosophical theory (Kant's Copernican Revolution in thought).
, edited by Diego Rios and Christoph Schmidt-Petri. Contemporary philosophers were asked to respond to five important questions about their approaches to the field of the philosophy of social science. The format offers the beginning of a triangulation among "beginnings," "fundamental assumptions," and "future directions" for each of these philosophers. The questions that were provided to the philosophers are these:- How did you get interested in the philosophical aspects of the social sciences?
- Which social sciences do you consider particularly interesting or challenging from a philosophical point of view?
- How do you conceive the relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences?
- What is the most important contribution that philosophy has made to the social sciences?
- Which topics in the philosophy of social science will, and which should, receive more attention than in the past?
What I would like to see is a next step conducted by a gifted sociologist of the professions, who would attempt to map out the streams of influence and contribution that are documented within the essays in this volume. Andrew Abbott's careful analysis of the currents of thought constituting the discipline of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s is a good case in point (Chaos of Disciplines
). Another good example is William Sewell's attempt to provide a geography of the discipline of social history in the 1960s (Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation).
4 comments:
I'm reading Amartya Sen's Idea of Justice presently. Just as Marx's decision to focus on a pure and self-enclosed capitalist mode of production could be criticized for abstracting from the inequality of nation states and the structural importance of what Kenneth Pomeranz has called a new kind of colony in his most interesting book The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World, Sen criticizes Rawls for accepting the parameters of the nation-state in his construction of an idealized original position.
I am guessing that Sen found Rawls' parochialism a bit astonishing as The Theory of Justice was conceived at a time that the US was at war in Vietnam (I do recommend the documentary The Most Dangerous Man in AMerica: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers; I had the pleasure of meeting Ellsberg recently). From what I can make out, Rawls' reflections on International Justice were not expressed for two decades after the publication of The Theory of Justice. I think the relevant book here is Laws of the People.
But this parochialism built into a "Westphalian" understanding of the social contract tradition seems to be the primary reason that Sen emphasizes the moral insight to be gained from the position of an impartial spectator as conceived by Adam Smith.
Sen is also surprised by how little attention Rawls gave to Smith and economic theorists in general.
It would seem to me that Rawls' Theory of Justice served as a justification for the Great Society created via social democratic interpretation of Keynesian policies. And I wonder how Rawls responded to the Keynesian experiment going up in stagflationary ashes.
Rakesh,
Thanks for these good reflections. Thomas Pogge does a good job of taking a Rawlsian perspective on international justice issues. He comes to much more radical conclusions about international inequalities than Rawls probably would have done. I have to agree about how surprising the "parochialism" is; you could say much the same thing about Rawls's complete disregard of issues of racial inequality, in the context of the decade of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States.
But wasn't the importance given to the equal opportunity principle an indication of how seriously he took the civil rights movement? I am not decided on whether I agree with Sen's criticism, and I think I remember Robert Paul Wolff raising the question of whether the attenuation of market inequalities mandated by the difference principle is compatible with the operation of market society in the first place.
Or to put the point more practically. It would seem obvious that Employee Free Choice Act would benefit the least advantaged workers (I really recommend Steven Greenhouse's book The Big Squeeze), but the Heritage Foundation and an economist at UCLA (Ohlian?) argue that the rising real wage resulting from unionization and state-imposed collective bargaining would depress profitability and thereby future investment. That would lead to even more unemployment, which would have harsh effects on the least well-off.
In fact these "neo-liberal" economists would make an argument for depressing the real wage either by union busting or perhaps by inflation that outstrips real wage growth so that profit prospects and thereby investment would pick up (the left Keynesians such as Akerlof and Shiller argue that there are ways to raise effective demand without cutting down wages in the hopes of encouraging more real investment and that the positive effects on real investment by real wage reductions could be swamped by pessimism over an even smaller final market given the compression of wages).
Still the economists could justify the attack on these workers by saying that these policies would still benefit the least well off, viz. the unemployed.
That is, if neo-liberal economics has hegemony (and it seems to enjoy that in the Obama administration as there is no indication that Jared Bernstein has been able to move the President to champion the EFCA), I don't see how a Rawlsian can make a much of a case for redistributive social democratic policies on the basis of the difference principle.
I stumbled upon this post and wanted to know what your thoughts would be on a perspective such as Nietzsche's - that an overwhelming majority of philosophic thought is rooted in and guided by prejudices such as the common use of the subject-predicate format ("I" and "am") and the author's prior moral perspective and ulterior motives.
For example, he specifically calls out Kant (which you discuss) for being a part of this. In a case like this, the philosopher (Kant) has already formed his theory or some idea in his subconscious and all of the ornate and seemingly logical/analytical dialogue which flows from some "initial" question is guided from the start in an effort to justify his view. The motive may be self-glorification, self-humiliation, etc.
This is obviously a very over-simplified overview.
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