Lectures on the History

of Political Philosophy

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

john r awls

Lectures on the History

of Political Philosophy

Edited by

Samuel Freeman

t h e b e l k n a p p r e s s o f

h a r v a r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2008.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rawls, John, 1921–2002.

Lectures on the history of political philosophy / John Rawls ; edited by Samuel Freeman. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-02492-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-674-03063-3 (pbk.)

1. Political science—Philosophy—History. I. Freeman, Samuel Richard. II. Title. JA71.R297 2007

320.01—dc22 2006050934

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

To my students

— Jo h n R aw l s

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Contents

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Contents

l e c t u r e s o n m i l l

l e c t u r e s o n m a r x

a p p e n d i x e s

Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Editor’s Foreword

T h e s e l e c t u r e s derive from John Rawls’s written lectures and notes for a course in Modern Political Philosophy (Philosophy 171) that he taught at Harvard University from the mid-1960s until his retirement in 1995. In the late 1960s and 1970s Rawls would teach his own theory of justice, justice as fairness, in conjunction with other contemporary and historical works. For example, in 1971 he taught, in addition to A Theory of Justice, works by Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Berlin, and Hart. Later in the 1970s and early 1980s this course consisted entirely of lectures on most of the major historical political philosophers in this volume. In 1983, the last year he taught historical figures alone without A Theory of Justice, Rawls lectured on Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Marx. In earlier years Sidgwick would often be discussed (1976, 1979, 1981), as would Rousseau, but in that case Hobbes and/or Marx would not be discussed. In 1984 Rawls again taught parts of A Theory of Justice in conjunction with Locke, Hume, Mill, Kant, and Marx. Soon thereafter he dropped Kant and Hume from his political philosophy course, and added the lectures on Rousseau. During this period he wrote final versions of the lectures presented here on Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx, along with the lectures that were published in 2000 as Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. (This explains the occasional comparisons with justice as fairness found in the present lectures.) Since they were regularly taught during the last ten to twelve years of Rawls’s teaching career, the lectures in this volume on Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx are the most finished and complete. Rawls typed them into computer files and adjusted and refined them over the years, until 1994. As a result, they required very little editing.

Somewhat less finished are the earlier lectures on Hobbes and Hume from 1983. They do not appear to have been written out as a continuous and complete set of lectures (with the exception of most of the first Hume

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lecture). The Hobbes and Hume lectures presented here were mainly derived from transcriptions of recording tapes of Rawls’s lectures for that term, which have been supplemented by Rawls’s handwritten lecture notes and class handouts.1 Rawls typically provided students with summaries that outlined the main points in his lectures. Prior to the early 1980s (when he started typing his lectures on a word processor), these handouts were handwritten in a very fine script which, when typed out, filled more than two single-spaced pages. These handouts have been used to supplement the lectures on Hobbes and Hume, and they also provide most of the content of the first two Sidgwick lectures in the Appendix.

One great benefit of these lectures is that they reveal how Rawls conceived of the history of the social contract tradition, and suggest how he saw his own work in relation to that of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, and to some degree Hobbes as well. Rawls also discusses and responds to Hume’s utilitarian reaction to Locke’s social contract doctrine, including Hume’s argument that the social contract is superficial and an “unnecessary shuffle” (Rawls), an argument that established a pattern of criticism that continues down to the present day. Another substantial benefit of this volume is Rawls’s discussion of J. S. Mill’s liberalism. It suggests many parallels between his own and Mill’s views, including not just the palpable similarities between Mill’s principle of liberty and Rawls’s first principle of justice, but also the less tangible parallels between Mill’s political economy and Rawls’s account of distributive justice and property-owning democracy.

The Marx lectures evolved perhaps more than others over the years. In the early 1980s Rawls endorsed the position (held by Allen Wood, among others) that Marx did not have a conception of justice but rather regarded justice as an ideological concept necessary to sustain the exploitation of the working class. He revises that position in the lectures included here, under the influence of G. A. Cohen and others. Rawls’s interpretation of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value seeks to separate its outmoded economics from what he regards as its main aim. He construes it as a powerful response to the Marginal Productivity Theory of Just Distribution and other classical

1. The editor served as one of Rawls’s graduate teaching assistants (along with Andrews Reath) in the spring term of 1983, and recorded the Hobbes and Hume lectures transcribed here. The lectures on Locke, Mill, and Marx were also recorded in 1983. These tapes, as well as tapes of Rawls’s 1984 lectures, have been preserved in digital format and deposited in the Rawls Archives at Widener Library, Harvard University.

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Editor’s Foreword

liberal and right-wing libertarian conceptions which regard pure ownership as making a tangible contribution to production. (See Marx, Lecture II.)

Rawls’s lectures on Bishop Joseph Butler and Henry Sidgwick were not left as finished as the other lectures in this volume. Nonetheless, he agreed to their publication shortly before he died in November 2002, and they have been included in the Appendix to this volume. Rawls taught Sidgwick for a number of years (including 1976, 1979, and 1981) in his political philosophy course, along with Hume and J. S. Mill, to give students an idea of the works of (what he regarded as) the three major utilitarian philosophers. He saw Sidgwick as the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition that began with Bentham. He also regarded Sidgwick’s comparative method in The Methods of Ethics as providing a pattern for moral philosophy to emulate. The first two Sidgwick lectures included here were for the most part taken from the handwritten notes that Rawls duplicated and handed out to students. He used these handouts as his lecture notes, and then elaborated upon them orally when delivering the lectures. For this reason, the first two Sidgwick lectures cannot be considered by any means complete lectures. The third lecture on Sidgwick (1975) goes over some of the same material as in the brief discussion of utilitarianism in Sidgwick, Lecture II, but discusses in much more detail the assumptions and implications of the classical utilitarian position. There is a good deal of material on utilitarianism in this lecture and in the brief fourth lecture (1976) that is not available in any of Rawls’s other published discussions of utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,”2 or elsewhere.

The five lectures on Butler were among Rawls’s handwritten papers. These lectures were used in Rawls’s course on the history of moral philosophy in the spring of 1982, when he also taught Kant and Hume. Rawls thought that Butler provided the major non-utilitarian response to Hobbes by an English philosopher. He also regarded Butler as among the major figures in modern moral philosophy. Among Rawls’s handwritten notes to himself (not incorporated into the lectures themselves) is the following: “Important Points in Butler: (Hobbes and Butler, the two great sources of modern moral philosophy: Hobbes as posing the problem—the writer to refute. Butler supplied a deep answer to Hobbes).” In addition, Rawls found

2. See John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 17.

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some connection between Kant’s and Butler’s doctrine of conscience, and this perhaps provided Rawls with grounds for believing that Kant’s non-nat- uralistic, non-intuitionistic account of morality was not peculiar to German Idealist philosophy.3 Finally, the Butler lectures are suggestive of the central role that the idea of a “reasonable moral psychology” had in Rawls’s conception of moral and political philosophy. (There are parallels in the lectures on Mill and Rousseau too.) One of the main ideas behind Rawls’s work is that justice and morality are not contrary to human nature, but rather are part of our nature and indeed are, or at least can be, essential to the human good. (See A Theory of Justice, chapter 8, “The Sense of Justice,” and chapter 9, “The Good of Justice.”) It is noteworthy that Rawls’s discussion of Butler’s reconciliation of moral virtue and “self-love” parallels Rawls’s own argument for the congruence of the Right and the Good.

Rawls left among his papers a short piece called “Some Remarks About My Teaching” (1993), which discusses his lectures on political philosophy. Relevant portions of it are as follows:4

For the most part I taught moral and political philosophy, doing a course in each one every year over the years. . . . I came gradually to focus more and more on political and social philosophy, and I came to talk about parts of justice as fairness, so-called, in tandem with earlier people who had written on the subject, beginning with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and occasionally Kant, although Kant was very difficult to work into that course. I included at times Hume and Bentham, J. S. Mill and Sidgwick. However, usually Kant’s moral philosophy was

3. Thanks to Joshua Cohen for this suggestion. It is confirmed by notes that Rawls made to himself. Among the references to Kant in Rawls’s notes on Butler are the following two entries:

(4) Egoism contra Hobbes: Butler holds moral projects as much a part of the self as other parts of the self: our natural desires, etc. Kant deepens this by connecting ML [Moral Law] with the self as R+R [Rational and Reasonable]. . . .

(9) Connect this up with Kant; including his notion of reasonable faith.

4. A somewhat similar version of Rawls’s account of his teaching is excerpted in the Editor’s Foreword to the companion volume, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xvi–xviii. That account derives from Rawls’s published remarks on his teaching as found in John Rawls, “Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence,” in Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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taken up in a separate course along with other writers, who changed from time to time, but often it covered Hume and Leibniz as examples of strikingly different doctrines which Kant certainly knew something about. Other writers occasionally considered were Clarke and Bishop Butler and other British 18th century people, such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Sometimes I used Moore and Ross, Broad and Stevenson, as modern examples.

In talking about these people I always tried to do two things especially. One thing was to pose their philosophical problems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and political philosophy then was. So I tried to discern what they thought their main problems were. I often cited the remark of Collingwood in his An Autobiography, to the effect that the history of political philosophy is not that of a series of answers to the same question but of a series of answers to different questions, or, as he actually put it, it is “the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it.”5 This remark is not quite right, but it tells us to look for a writer’s point of view on the political world at that time in order to see how political philosophy develops over time and why. I saw each writer contributing to the development of doctrines supporting democratic thought, and this included Marx, whom I always discussed in the political philosophy course.

Another thing I tried to do was to present each writer’s thought in what I took to be its strongest form. I took to heart Mill’s remark in his review of [Alfred] Sedgwick: “A doctrine is not judged at all until it is judged in its best form” (CW: X, p. 52). So I tried to do just that. Yet I didn’t say, not intentionally anyway, what to my mind they should have said, but what they did say, supported by what I viewed as the most reasonable interpretation of their text. The text had to be known and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form. Leaving aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending. If I departed from it—no harm in that—I had to say so. Lecturing that way, I believed that a writer’s views became stronger and more convincing, and would be for students a more worthy object of study.

Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for ex-

5. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 62.

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ample, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the student’s time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they [the philosophers] saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised; or wouldn’t arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or hadn’t read.

In doing this I followed what Kant says in the First Critique at B866. He says that Philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science and nowhere exists in concreto. So how can we recognize and learn it? “. . . we cannot learn philosophy, for where is it, who is in possession of it, and how shall we recognize it? We can only learn to philosophize, that is, to exercise the talent of reason, in accordance with universal principles, on certain actually existing attempts at philosophy, always, however, reserving the right of reason to investigate, to confirm, or to reject these principles at their very sources.” So we learn moral and political philosophy, and indeed any other part of philosophy by studying the exemplars—those noted figures who have made cherished at- tempts—and we try to learn from them, and if we are lucky to find a way to go beyond them. My task was to explain Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, or Hume, Leibniz, and Kant as clearly and forcefully as I could, always attending carefully to what they actually said.

The result was that I was loath to raise objections to the exem- plars—that’s too easy and misses what is essential—though it was important to point out objections that those coming later in the same tradition sought to correct, or to point to views those in another tradition thought were mistaken. (I think here of the social contract view and utilitarianism as two traditions.) Otherwise philosophical thought can’t progress and it would be mysterious why later writers made the criticisms they did.

In the case of Locke, for example, I remarked on the fact that his view allowed for a kind of political inequality we would not accept— inequality in basic rights of voting—and that Rousseau had tried to overcome this, and I discussed how he had done so. Yet I would emphasize that Locke in his liberalism was ahead of his time and opposed royal absolutism. He didn’t flinch from danger and was loyal to his

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friend Lord Shaftesbury, following him even in taking part, it seems, in the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II in the summer of 1683. He fled for his life to Holland and barely escaped execution. Locke had the courage to put his head where his mouth was, perhaps the only one of the great figures to take such enormous risks.

None of these lectures were written with the intention that they would be published. Indeed Rawls said, in discussing Kant in the paragraph that immediately follows his remarks about Locke quoted above: “The last version of the [Kant] lectures (1991) is no doubt better than earlier ones but I couldn’t bear to have it published as it stands (as some have urged). It doesn’t begin to do Kant justice on those questions, or to measure up to what others can now do.” As this sentence indicates, Rawls resisted the publication of his lectures for years. It was only after he was prevailed upon to publish his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (edited by Barbara Herman and published by Harvard University Press in 2000), and that volume was substantially complete, that he agreed to allow his lectures on the history of political philosophy to be published as well.

Finally, in the conclusion to Rawls’s “Some Remarks About My Teaching,” he said (and what he says of Kant here, he, in all his modesty, also would have said of the philosophers in this volume):

Yet, as I have said, I have never felt satisfied with the understanding I could gain of Kant’s overall conception. This leaves a certain unhappiness and I am reminded of a story about John Marin, a great American watercolorist along with Homer and Sargent. Marin’s paintings, which most of you must have seen, are a kind of figurative expressionism. In the late forties he was highly regarded as perhaps our leading artist, or among the few. Looking at his watercolors one can tell what they are of: say, a skyscraper in New York City, the Taos mountains of New Mexico, or the schooners and harbors of Maine. For eight years in the 1920s Marin went to Stonington, Maine, to paint; and Ruth Fine, who wrote a splendid book on Marin, tells of going there to see if she could find anyone who had known him then. She finally found a lobsterman who said, “Eeah, eeah, we all knew him. He went out painting in his little boat day after day, week after week, summer after summer. And you know, poor fellah, he tried so hard, but he never did get it right.”

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Editor’s Foreword

That always said it exactly for me, after all this time: “Never did get it right.”6

Mardy Rawls did much of the work in editing these lectures, and without her help and advice I could not have completed them. Particularly from 1995 (after Jack’s first stroke), Mardy assumed an invaluable role in bringing to fruition many projects. She read each of these lectures carefully and worked arduously to clarify and point out sentences that could be misconstrued. Before Jack asked me in 2000 to undertake the editing of this volume, Mardy had already more or less completed the editing of the lectures on Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx. Jack went over these lectures carefully and gave his approval. Anne Rawls transcribed (in 2001) from the recording tapes the 1983 lectures on Hobbes and Hume. Mardy then put them into readable form, whereupon I made further revisions and additions taken from Rawls’s typed and handwritten notes and handouts. The lectures on Sidgwick and Butler were typed up from Rawls’s handwritten lecture notes. I made additions to the first Sidgwick lecture, relying upon other notes on Sidgwick in Rawls’s lecture files. In general, any editorial emendations in these lectures involve the repositioning of paragraphs and sentences written by Rawls himself.

I am grateful to Mark Navin for deciphering and typing the handwritten lecture notes on Sidgwick and Butler, and also for entering the editing corrections made to the Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx lectures. I am also especially grateful to Kate Moran, who typed up handwritten lecture notes on Hobbes and Hume, checked carefully the quotations by all philosophers, and prepared the manuscript for final submission. Matt Lister, Thomas Ricketts, and Kok Chor Tan helped in a number of ways as well. Thanks to Warren Goldfarb and Andy Reath for helpful advice regarding Rawls’s syllabi. T. M. Scanlon and especially Joshua Cohen gave me much helpful advice on editing the lectures, regarding what to include and what to leave unpublished, and I am most grateful to them both.

Finally, I am, once again, grateful to my wife, Annette Lareau-Freeman, for her sage counsel and constant support in helping me bring the publication of these important documents to fruition.

S a m u e l Fr e e m a n

6. [Note by Mardy Rawls: Thinking of the many times Jack told that story to his classes, we chose Marin’s painting, “Deer Isle, Islets,” for the cover of Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.]

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