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John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism
Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world.
Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society. This led Cohen to the realization that, when push came to shove, he cared more about inequality than he did about exploitation, because how we relate to one another as human beings is fundamentally more important than our right to exercise ownership over every last bit of stuff that we make.
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