Throughout this reading list, a longer list of readings will be provided for those who wish either fully to read their way in to a topic, or who want to write an essay on that topic. Papers marked "*" should be read closely for the seminar.

Reading: You should start to work your way systematically through Rawls's A Theory of Justice this week. Also take a look at the papers by Dworkin and Pettit:

*Ronald Dworkin, 'Liberalism'*.

*Phillip Pettit, 'Excerpt from The Common Mind'*.

Topic: the aim of the seminar is to consolidate some of the ideas that were presented in the lecture, centrally what liberalism is and some important ideas in social philosophy that we will be drawing on. While our focus will be Rawls, for a presentation in a single paper of the essence of liberalism I have chosen the similar views of Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin's early views were influenced by Rawls's and we will see later in the course that Dworkin has significantly revised his views. Read Dworkin's paper and try to answer the following questions which we will discuss in the seminar.

First Reading: Dworkin

(1) How does Dworkin answer the sceptical charge that liberalism has no essence, but is an historically shifting set of political positions?

(2) Why cannot we see liberalism as defined by a certain kind of balance between equality and liberty?

(3) What is, in Dworkin's view, the essence of liberalism?

(4) Why is the liberal likely to accept a market economy? What is his or her motivation in doing this?

(5) What further inequalities might this lead to? How can the liberal ease their effects?

(6) Does liberalism seem to you to be a defensible political philosophy? If not, why not?

Second Reading: Pettit

Our second extract allows us to discuss the distinction between holism and atomism and collectivism and individualism in social theory. Read the excerpts from Pettit .

(7) How does Pettit explain the distinction between atomism and holism? Give an example to illustrate your understanding of the distinction.

(8) How does Pettit explain the distinction between individualism and collectivism? Give an example to illustrate your understanding of the distinction.

Reading: *Rawls, A Theory of Justice, sections 1-4, 11-17, 20-24*
N. Daniels (ed) Reading Rawls Stanford University Press - see the introduction, and read the articles by *Nagel* and Scanlon
Mulhall and Swift, pp. 3-33.

Topic: in this seminar we will analyse the central arguments of Rawls's early Theory of Justice and look in particular at how its central idea is supposed to work: that a concept of justice as fairness can be modelled by an account of first personal rational choice in a carefully specified choice situation - the "Original Position".

In the seminar we will focus closely on the Rawls excerpts and on the paper by Nagel:

First Reading: Rawls on the Derivation of the Two Principles of Justice

1 Sections 1-4 (page numbers now vary across editions) Does it seem to you that a model of prudential choice under conditions of ignorance by a single person is an appropriate model for collective choice that is just in conditions of full knowledge?

2 Describe the two principles, the sense in which they are lexically ordered, and how they express a conception of "democractic equality" (sections 11-17).

3 What are primary goods and what role do they play in Rawls's argument? (section 15).

4 Would the parties in the original position, in your view, select any of the other conceptions of justice presented in the list in section 21?

5 How does Rawls justify the device of the veil of ignorance? (section 24).

Second Reading: Thomas Nagel, 'Rawls on Justice'

1 What are Nagel's worries about the device of a contract in this context? (pp. 4-6)

2 "I do not believe that the assumptions of the original position are either weak or innocuous or uncontroversial" (p. 7). Explain.

3 "Each of us can enter the original position at any time simply by observing its rather special restrictions on arguments". Is this true? Is it compatible with the description of the parties in the original position as expressing Rawls's theory of personal identity, or is it not so compatible?

4 "The egalitarian liberalism which he [Rawls] develops and the conception of the good on which it depends are extremely persuasive, but the original position serves to model rather than justify them". Are you happy with this distinction between "modelling" and "justifying" a theory of justice?

5 Do you agree with Nagel that Rawls's substantive egalitarian vision is both (a) more attractive than Rawls's methodology and (b) more defensible than Rawls's methodology?

Reading: Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge, 1982). Read chapters 1 and 4
- 'The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self', Political Theory, (1984), pp. 81-96.
Taylor, Charles, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers Volume II, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge, 1985); read the papers 'Atomism', 'What's Wrong With Negative Liberty?' and 'The nature and scope of distributive justice'.
- 'Cross Purposes: The Liberal - Communitarian Dispute' in Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life. Reprinted in Philosophical Arguments.
Mulhall and Swift, chapters 1 and 3.

*Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, (excerpt)*.

*Amy Guttman, 'Communitarian Critics of Liberalism'*

In the seminar we will focus on the summary of the communitarian critique in Kymlicka, Liberalism and Community, and on the response on behalf of liberalism by Amy Guttman.

Topic: this week we will take a look at some of the first "communitarian" objections to Rawls's position and some of the opening responses to them.

First Reading: Amy Gutmann, 'Communitarian Critics of Liberalism'

1 How, in Gutmann's view, does the new communitarian critique of liberalism differ from the Marxist critique of the 1960's? (pp. 308-309)

2 Pp. 311-13 sets out Sandel's central criticism of Rawls and Gutmann's response to it. What is Sandel's argument and how does Gutmann reply?

3 On page 313 Gutmann concedes that Rawls's theory does depend on some metaphysical commitments, but that they are more intrinsically acceptable than those of Sandel's. Explain.

4 MacIntyre argues that liberal rights discourse has no foundations. How does Gutmann reply and do you agree?

5 What is the "tyranny of misleading dualisms"?

6 What ought the liberal to learn from the communitarian at the level of normative political policy? (pp.318-322)

Second Excerpt: Will Kymlicka, 'Liberalism and Communitarianism'

7 Page 74 explains why Taylor believes he has an objection to liberal "individualism" in politics independently of his critique of liberal theories of the self. Explain.

8 What is Taylor's objection to "neutral political concern"? On pp 76-77 Kymlicka explains the different ways in which the liberal state and the communitarian state draw on the idea of the common good. Explain the differences.

9 "Both traditions [i.e. liberalism and communitarianism] can be described as promoting a certain kind of community as their common good, but further argumentation is needed to show why the community should be a communitarian one, and why the common good should be a particular conception of the good. We need more than conceptual arguments to establish that". Assess this argument.

10 On pp 79-81 Kymlicka turns to the view that a liberal politics of neutral concern would not empirically work - that we need a pluralist culture of meaningful life choices which Taylor thinks we need a positive duty to support. What are the reactions of Dworkin and Raz to this argument?

11 On pp. 84-5 Taylor's argument that a neutralist liberalism cannot sustain legitimacy is summarised and criticised. Explain Taylor's argument.

12 The rest of Kymlicka's chapter focuses on the claim that while communitarianism may have pinpointed failings in the liberal concept of legitimacy, it has not done so in such a way as to offer a viable replacement. Do you agree that a politics of the common good would have to return not simply to past social forms, but also to the practices of exclusion of marginal groups that those societies encouraged?

 Reading: Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Basic Books, (New York, 1983).
- Interpretation and Social Criticism, Harvard University Press, (Cambridge, MA, 1987).
- *'Liberalism and the Art of Separation', Political Theory, (August, 1984), pp. 315-30.*
- *Philosophy and Democracy', Political Theory, (August, 1981), pp. 379-399.*
- '*The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', Political Theory, (February, 1990), pp. 6-23.*
Mulhall and Swift, chapter 4

Topic: Michael Walzer is usually treated as a "communitarian" but his objections to Rawls arise from a distinctive project all his own. He has an alternative methodology in the theory of justice and takes this to have implications for his account of "connected" social criticism. In the papers we will focus on he offers his highly original reflections on liberalism and community.

Excerpt One: 'Philosophy and Democracy'

{This paper discusses a tributary to the main stream of liberal/communitarian debate: Rawlsian political philosophers, exerting influence (through their law school positions) on judges in the process of judicial review of the U.S. constitution. Walzer sees them as "pulling rank" on ordinary citizens in an undemocratic way. Assess his arguments, bearing in mind two features of the U.S. system with no U.K. counterpart: a written constitution, interpreted/revised by "judicial review" and the election of judges to their office}.

1 What are the key features of what Walzer calls "heroic" detached political philosophising? (pp. 380-383).

2 Why must there be a tension between philosophy and democracy? (p. 383)

3 Why cannot Walzer's evolving contrast between popular democratic will and heroic philosophising be explained as a difference between procedural and substantive views of justice? (pp. 386-7).

4 Section V gives the nerve of Walzer's argument - is he right about how the political philosopher proceeds to draw up his or her ideal scheme for society?

5 "It is a mistake to attempt any extensive incorporation of philosophical principles into the law either by interpretation or amendment. For that is, in either case, to take them out of the political arena where they properly belong". Do you agree?

6 "Any historical community whose members shape their own institutions and laws will necessarily produce a particular and not a universal way of life". Need Rawls disagree with this?
7 Overall, does Walzer fairly represent the general philosophical orientation to ordinary political practices and principles exemplified by Rawls?

Excerpt Two: 'The Comunitarian Critique of Liberalism'

1 Walzer's first argument is that if communitarianism objects to liberal reality - a world of fragmented, alienated, asocial individual selves - it must at least accept that liberalism is the correct political option for individuals in such a reality. Can a communitarian respond to this argument?

2 Pp. 10 Walzer suggests another communitarian line of response: that our practices are communitarian, but our ideology is liberal. What is Walzer's response?

3 In what way are these first two arguments in tension with each other?

4 What aspect of contemporary social reality in America does liberalism truly describe and what cost to this aspect of American life does communitarianism articulate?

5 On pp 14-15 Walzer suggests that if we are situated selves, we are situated liberal selves, but that liberalism draws on a model of the "eternally transgressive self" that is always going to stand in need of communitarian "correction'. What do you make of this argument?

6 Walzer argues that political association is not, as liberalism represents it, voluntary association. It is a matter of open boundaries within association and resisting the social pressures on such associations of modern societies. How must the state behave in such a society? (pp. 16-17)

7 Pp 19-20 criticises Taylor's revival of civic republicanism. On what grounds?

8 Why, for Walzer, will liberalism continue and communitarianism continue as an "eternally recurring" feature of anti-liberal criticism?

Excerpt Three: 'Liberalism and the Art of Separation'

1 Pp 315-20 describes the liberal "art of separation". What is it, and is Walzer correct to rebut Marxist criticism of it?

2 "Under the aegis of the art of separation, liberty and equality go together. Indeed they invite a single definition....a modern, complex and differentiated society enjoys both freedom and equality when success in one institutional setting is not convertible into success in another". Does that seem to you to be a good definition of equality, or liberty?

3 Walzer takes workplace democracy and the co-ownership of firms by their workers to be the natural extension of liberal separation. Why? (pp320-22)

4 "The art of separation is not rooted in or warranted by individual separateness....it is rooted in and warranted by social complexity". Explain p. 325.

Reading: *Alasdair MacIntyre, 'Liberalism and Tradition'*
Alan Thomas, Routledge Encyclopaedia entry 'Alasdair MacIntyre'
Mulhall and Swift, chapter 2
*Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, section entitled 'Alasdair MacIntyre, Modernist Malgre Lui' ("in spite of himself").*

Topic: MacIntyre is certainly the "earliest" communitarian as his work greatly influenced that of Charles Taylor, who is younger than him. But his work is ironically most distant from our concerns as it is not intended as a contribution to the politics of the nation state; it is not a contribution to modern politics at all. It is a general indictment of modernity and a pessimistic account of how forms of moral life survive in small pockets of resistance in our contemporary world. In this seminar we will try and understand MacIntyre's complex relation to contemporary political discourse.

First Excerpt: Alasdair MacIntyre 'Justice as Virtue'

1 Look at MacIntyre's first example of incommensurable conceptions of justice. Are these examples cases of incommensurability or not? (pp. 244-5).

2 MacIntyre turns to the philosophical articulation of the competing positions. He makes three claims about them (p.248). The argument against Rawls is given on page 249 - what is it, and were you convinced?

3 Do contemporary theories of justice ignore desert, as MacIntyre claims?

4 What tension does MacIntyre claim exists between a conception of justice based on desert, and the view of society as a voluntary contract? (p.251)

5 In what sense was Marx "fundamentally right"? (p.253)

6 What basis does MacIntyre suggest for the legal resolution of conflict? (p.254). Is this satisfactory?

7 Why does MacIntyre reject "modern systematic politics"?

Charles Larmore: 'MacIntyre's Indictment'

8 P.25, Why, in Larmore's view, does MacIntyre misunderstand liberal individualism?

9 On page 28 Larmore argues that MacIntyre confuses two issues of "objectivity" in the case of moral principles. Explain.

10 Larmore accuses MacIntyre of foundationalism. Is this correct? (If you are interested, I venture some thoughts on this in my Encyclopaedia entry on AM).

11 Explain the difference between monism and pluralism about values.

12 Why is MacIntyre a modernist "in spite of himself"?

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