ABSTRACT
It is widely recognized that the attempted revival by John Rawls and Robert Nozick of the contractarian tradition in political thought occurs at a propitious juncture in the history of ideas. In their writings, according to a popular view, political philosophy (recently pronounced dead) emerges from the neglect into which it had fallen as a result of the dominance of the linguistic schools and of positivism. Anarchy, State and Utopia and A Theory of Justice are viewed, then, as books in which the perennial questions of political philosophy are treated constructively and with all the sophistication achieved in other branches of philosophy. As against this widespread view, I claim these are works of salvage and reconstruction, applied to the liberal tradition, whose need of repair is notorious. My argument will be that whatever has value in these writings is obscured if we accept their authors’ avowals that they exemplify the fruitfulness of the contractarian method. I shall contend that the contractarian credentials of the theories of Rawls and Nozick are dubious, and that such force as their arguments possess has other sources. In the course of my argument it will become clear why I regard the revival of interest in the contractarian approach as unfortunate. It will also become evident why I do not regard its attempted revitalization as fortuitous. Rather, it may be seen (though I cannot here show this) as an ideological manoeuvre, inevitably unsuccessful, undertaken in response to the current crisis of liberal society.
