Rawls and Walzer on Non-Domestic Justice
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Rawls and Walzer on Non-Domestic Justice Caroline Walsh University College, Dublin, Ireland, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
This article illuminates the relationship between John Rawls’ and Michael Walzer’s accounts of non-domestic justice by tracing its connection to their domestic relationship. More precisely, it (a) places the celebrated positional shifts that characterize the latter (i.e., as is generally accepted, Rawls took a hermeneutic ‘turn’, and Walzer a universalist one) within the context of the fundamental justificatory tension between their projects which endures: reason vs trust; and then (b) juxtaposes this justificatory tension and their non-domestic political prescriptions. Such contextualization is important to the clarification of the pair’s nondomestic relationship since it enables the observation that despite this enduring justificatory tension these political prescriptions are remarkably similar. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 419–436. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300303 Keywords: Walzer; Rawls; cosmopolitanism; justice
Introduction Some commentaries on the nature of the relationship between John Rawls’ and Michael Walzer’s accounts of justice tend to concentrate on their domestic work (Mulhall and Swift, 1996).1 Insofar as these readings illuminate such aspects as the genesis of the pair’s early liberal-communitarian exchange, they are analytically useful. That said, they can be restricted in the sense that they may not simultaneously shed light on the pair’s non-domestic relationship. Of course, other commentaries do focus on the non-domestic dimension of the pair’s relationship, but some of these can tend to concentrate on the contrast between the pair’s modes of justification without also reviewing their political prescriptions (Rorty, 1998; Kelly, 2001). Yet still other commentaries keep the focus on the non-domestic, but concentrate more on points at which the pair’s political prescriptions seem to converge, while largely ignoring their justificatory relationship (Li, 2001). In short then, existing commentary on the relationship between Rawls’ and Walzer’s accounts of justice can be marked by a tendency toward analytical decoupling, wherein the domestic is decoupled from the nondomestic and modes of justification from political prescriptions.
Caroline Walsh Rawls and Walzer on Non-Domestic Justice
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Now, the obvious troubling downside of this analytical tendency is that we do not get as full a reading of Rawls’ and Walzer’s non-domestic relationship as we otherwise might should we instead resist this tendency. For it does not allow us to capture the convergence and divergence, which simultaneously characterize this relationship. Moreover, this omission can lead to confusion. For example, it might well have been presumed that the pair’s anticosmopolitanism was well established and yet, commenting on aspects of their non-domestic political prescriptions, but providing no real elaboration of their justificatory relationship, Xiaorong Li makes reference to ‘the Rawls–W
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