and Human Welfare

John Rawls has been a dominant figure over the last generation of Western social philosophy. I know of four book-length studies of his thought Barry (1973), WoIff (1977), Schaefer (1979) and Martin (1985) and two volumes of collected essays: Daniels (1975) and Blocker and Smith (1980). Journal articles on him, most since the 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice, but some going back to the 1958 paper 'Justice as Fairness', are so numerous that a survey of them would be a substantial research undertaking. I know of no contemporary in the field who has attracted this sort of attention. Of course not all of the literature is uncritical. However the critics are inevitably addressing themselves to the issues, in general, as Rawls has defined them. Disputing details with him is as eloquent an acknowledgement of his dominance as expounding and elaborating his ideas. How is one to explain the immediacy and power of his impact on social philosophy? One explanation would be in terms of the originality and persuasive force of his work. This is obviously part of the answer. His writings on social justice combine a subtlety and complexity of reasoning with a distinctive strategy for approaching the issues, which R. P. WoIff, one of his more critical commentators, describes as 'one of the loveliest ideas in the history of social and political theory' (1977, p. 16). However sheer originality has never carried a guarantee of immediate recognition. Hume's Treatise, which must be near the top of anybody's short list for the selection of the greatest philosophical work in the English language, fell dead-born from the press, as its author wryly complained, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots. Nearer to our own time Frege's work had to wait a considerable period to receive the recognition it would now be thought to deserve. Others no more obviously original, from Locke to Ayer and Wittgenstein, have had quick success in influencing the thought of their time. How is this difference to be explained? The crude form of the answer which I would want to suggest is that those who enjoy immediate recognition have told people what they are willing and ready to hear. This can be expressed in more refined form. There is a dominant ideology of a period, which meshes with the dominant interests. The most 'successful' philosophical originators, particularly in the field of social theory, work with sets of concepts and principles sympathetic to the ideology and the interests which are currently dominant, and which are, so to speak, looking for a systematic formulation and rationale. Locke's defence in his Second Treatise of Civil Government of the right to private property provides a convenient illustration. The basis of ownership, he asserts, is work: one has a right to anything with which one has 'mixed one's labour'. In isolation this would have been a startlingly revolutionary principle because, to take the case of land, most of it in Locke's Britain was owned by people who did not mix their labour with anything except foxes, while those who were most conspicuously mixing their labour with it owned virtually nothing. However Locke blunted the revolutionary point of the idea by adding a few qualifications which look, on any reasonable reading, to be in blatant conflict with it These include the qualification that ownership entails the right to dispose of property as one thinks fit, including leaving it to one's children, who then have no need to re-establish their title by their own labour. Thus qualified, the principle that property rights are based on work can apply only to a first generation, the identification of which in most places would present some difficulty. From a merely logical point of view, Locke's rationale seems indigestible. If mixing labour with material is the foundation of property rights, why is it that only the labour of a mythical first generation remains in the mixture, and in subsequent generations no degree of idleness -in the rich, and no amount of sweat and blood spilled by the poor, seem to make any difference? Such incoherence, one would think, would not impress his contemporaries. But it is precisely this lack of logical (and perhaps moral) integrity which was the secret of Locke's immediate appeal as a social theorist The contradiction was functional. A mercantile elite had emerged and was emerging into a position of growing power, which included ownership of land as well as of capital and political influence. Its members needed a nonfeudal rationale, particularly for their incursions into landholding, and in general for the somewhat more fluid class structure which was developing. Locke's central idea that property rights are based on labour provided the necessary break away from feudal thinking towards a more individualistic, private-enterprise approach to the subject On the other hand the interests of the mercantile elite would not have been served by a consistent labour-based theory of property. No property-owning and employing class could welcome a clear argument that anyone who works on property has a right to a share in it. Hence the conflicting elements, including the right to bequeath, were as important as was the central idea, for the acceptability of Locke's rationale to the dominant interests of his time. The argument was sufficiently inconsistent to allow property-owners to suppose that it provided a justification for the existing state of affairs.