Abstract
The series of essays and replies now known as the Habermas-Rawls debate took place in 1995 and was, at the time, hotly anticipated in the world of ideas—Rawls and Habermas were widely regarded as the leading figures in Anglo-American and European-continental political philosophy, respectively. Both were in the midst of their late career primes, having recently completed landmark works, namely, Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and Habermas’s 1992 magnum opus of legal and democratic theory, Faktizität und Geltung (translated [1996] as Between Facts and Norms). Moreover, their mutual affinity for neo-Kantian methods in normative theory, and their shared goal of deepening and extending the democratic welfare-state, made them look like potentially apt conversation partners (7). While the exchange has not been without influence, it is nevertheless widely perceived as something of a misfire; initially focused on a relatively narrow set of issues, the great philosophers appear to have ended up largely talking past one another. While not seeking to entirely dispel this impression, James Gordon Finlayson’s book, The Habermas-Rawls Debate, convincingly makes the case that a great deal can be learned about the strengths and shortcomings of these theories by grasping the sources of the authors’ mutual misapprehension, as much as from evaluating the criticisms that landed more cleanly (10–11).
This book should quickly establish itself as the definitive account of the debate. It is lucid and penetrating, drilling deeply into both the inner workings of the theories that serve as the debate’s backdrop, as well as the parries and thrusts of the exchange itself. The book manages to canvass a wide array of issues, subissues, and secondary literature, even while it is always right to the point, driving toward a firm conclusion concerning whatever disputed question is currently in its sights. Readers will not find much in the way of tangent or equivocation in Finlayson’s writing. Although Finlayson’s previous work is more closely affiliated with Habermas than Rawls, I do not think anyone is liable to regard him as less than generally evenhanded—indeed, he tends to be rather harder on Habermas than Rawls. For anyone looking to examine what can be gleaned from this debate—or for that matter, engaged in work that involves any comparison between the two paradigms of political philosophy that Rawls and Habermas represent—there is really nowhere else to start.
The book’s organization is straightforward and tightly focused on the four corners of the debate itself. After an introduction that outlines the exchange’s basic shape and context, and surveys prevailing scholarly opinion concerning its upshot (or lack thereof), Finlayson devotes a chapter to the evolution of Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective conceptions of justice and another to Habermas’s earlier critiques of Rawls. This is followed by a pair of excellent chapters on Between Facts and Norms and Political Liberalism, which furnish readers with quite a precise sense of the aspects of those books needed in order to appreciate where the authors were coming from in their exchange. Individual chapters then follow on each of the three essays that comprised the exchange: Habermas’s initial review of Political Liberalism; Rawls’s lengthy reply; and Habermas’s follow-up, which abandons some of his initial criticisms (i.e., concerning the original position), renews others (i.e., his sense that there is a democratic deficit in Rawls’s philosophy), and questions whether Rawls ought to be allowed to excuse himself from philosophical controversies about the nature of truth and rightness. Finlayson devotes a final chapter to what he sees as the major ongoing legacy of the exchange in debates about public reason and religion in the public sphere.
As this sketch makes apparent, Finlayson is focused much more on what the Habermas-Rawls debate actually was rather than imagining what it could or should have been. He sets himself to the task of settling accounts by rendering summary judgments on which criticisms lodged in the back-and-forth have merit and which do not. Readers who persist in finding the debate to have been a dud may find this strategy laborious, but Finlayson’s approach is invaluable for those of us who have struggled with these texts and found ourselves wondering why it should be so difficult to set up a direct confrontation between two philosophers whose work seems substantively and methodologically comparable. Finlayson argues that the way the authors chose to frame their disagreements was flawed from the start (2, 155). Rawls and Habermas understood the major point of contact between their theories in terms of the contrasting ways they operationalize the perspective of impartial justification in order to generate morally justified norms and principles—namely, the original position and discourse ethics. This framing failed to capture the way that both theorists had, in their later work, moved away from the strategy of grounding political justification directly in moral theory. Moreover, Habermas sets up a contrast that Finlayson sees as ultimately misguided; whereas Habermas insists that his discourse ethics is essentially procedural, requiring actual discourse among those affected by the application of a norm, he views Rawls’s procedure of justification as “monological.” This thought informs many, if not most, of Habermas’s bones of contention, either directly (i.e., that Rawls supposedly subordinates democracy to a philosophically constructed conception of justice) or indirectly (i.e., that Rawls’s justifications for justice, reasonableness, and civility are normatively ambiguous [201–202]). The problem, as Finlayson argues, is that Habermas’s requirement for dialogue among all affected is, at most, aspirational, and in any event, he smuggles morally substantive conditions for validity (e.g., the freedom and equality of participants in discourse) into what are allegedly procedural conditions for discursive validity (182). Although Finlayson does concede that Rawls can be justly faulted for having comparatively little to say about democracy, generally, and how democracy ought to be institutionalized (246), in particular, he concludes that “the claim that Habermas’s theory is more strictly procedural than Rawls’s is not borne out” (167).
I found this line of argument compelling but not wholly persuasive. Should we grant Finlayson’s point (which he ably argues for here and elsewhere) that Habermas cannot sustain a “tenable distinction between monological and weakly dialogical procedures in moral discourse,” I do not think it necessarily follows that “the same goes for political discourse” (186). Habermas’s “system of rights” from Between Facts and Norms offers a normative reconstruction of the way the constitutional rule of law shapes democratic lawmaking and public affairs, such that their outcomes can be regarded as enjoying a presumption of rational acceptability. However, because he sees matters of public regulation as concretely mediated through law, in which narrowly moral questions are entwined with ethical, pragmatic, and institutional ones that have to be sorted and weighed in an ongoing process, Habermas does not see morality as circumscribing democratic legitimacy in the way Rawls’s conception of justice does. Finlayson is well aware of this pretension of Habermas’s, but doubts its cogency, emphasizing that Habermas has a success (as opposed to an error) theory of morality and insists on a “razor-sharp” (a phrase of Habermas’s that Finlayson quotes often) distinction between morality and ethical conceptions of the good, and so he must see moral norms as somehow constraining what can be taken as a legitimate outcome (90–98). But however much Habermas does claim that there are justified moral norms that are distinct from any conception of the good, we need not see him as holding that this distinction can be used to abstract substantive moral norms from the legal, pragmatic, and ethical dimensions involved in their institutionalization in a way that would clearly delineate the range of legitimate outcomes, prior to democratic deliberations taking place. To this extent, I give more credence than Finlayson to Habermas’s contention that Rawls, in his role as the political philosopher, selectively works up what he takes to be widely shared (among reasonable citizens) moral intuitions and then imposes the product of that workup (the political conception of justice) upon actual citizens. Although Finlayson’s chapter 6 quite lucidly draws out all of the ways in which Rawls’s constructivism and model of reflective equilibrium are intended to capture an ongoing process of justification undertaken by the citizens themselves, he allows Rawls’s repeated assertion that reasonable political values are “very great values and not easily overridden” to do a lot of work in bridging the divide between philosophers and citizens, even though the nature of this claim (is it factual? if not that—or not only that—then what?) remains ambiguous.
Of course, it is not to be expected that Finlayson’s arguments will convert partisans of all stripes, and his book is much more interesting for being so sharply argued. Moreover, he is extraordinarily skilled at showing his work, such that readers who find that they disagree with him about this or that are always superbly well-equipped to trace their disagreement to its nub of contention. Along those lines, let me close by noting one more aspect of Finlayson’s analysis that I take to be genuinely groundbreaking. The issue that looms over the Habermas-Rawls debate, and, more than anything, looks to be responsible for the impression that these two theories ended up being ships passing in the night is Rawls’s characterization of his own theory as merely political, avoiding philosophical controversy and metaphysical commitments, so that it might serve as a “module” for public justification, in contrast to Habermas’s, which is a comprehensive doctrine that cannot play that role (10). This characterization has often served as a kind of Rawlsian trump card against all manner of objections, and my own thoughts about how to put Rawls and Habermas into some kind of productive dialogue with each other has often met with frustration at precisely this point. Finlayson has done more than anyone I am aware of to cast this division as both a real point of contrast and one that can be framed in a way where the issues are tractable. Finlayson denies that we should let stand the picture of Rawls as producing normatively substantial conclusions out of uncontroversial premises: “Rawls’s political liberalism makes all kinds of philosophical assumptions . . . the method of avoidance and its rationale are themselves controversial philosophical claims open to reasonable disagreement” (187). The method of avoidance is part and parcel of a value-laden conception of what political theory should strive to contribute to society; seen from this vantage, the “underlying methodological difference between the two theorists” concerns “whether political theory is fundamentally part of politics or is a theoretical discipline that has politics as its object” (207). This strikes me as exactly right, and I wish that Finlayson had pursued this line of thought a bit further, as the positions of both philosophers on these venerable theory-and-practice questions could stand to be clarified, and their debate can still provide the occasion for doing so. But as it stands, Finlayson deserves immense credit for framing the conflict between comprehensive and political modes of theorizing with hitherto unmatched perspicuity.