Matewan examines New Left Review

In a foray onto the terrain of moral philosophy that he may come to regret, Perry Anderson kicks off the January/February 2005 issue of New Left Review with a leading critique of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio - 'The Military Philosophers' as the journal's strapline has it.

The journal is now available in hard copy and will be accessible online to subscribers towards the end of this week.

While Habermas and Bobbio are damned for inconsistency (why support intervention in the Balkans but not Iraq?) it is Rawls who is Anderson's real target.

Anderson writes: "It had been an error of 'A theory of Justice', [Rawls] explained, to suggest that a capitalist welfare state could be a just social order. The Difference Principle was compatible with only two general models of society: a property-owning democracy or liberal socialism... Such thoughts are foreign to 'Political Liberalism'. They outline, of course, only the range of ideal shapes that a just society might assume. What of actually existing ones? Rawls' answer is startling. After observing that favourable material circumstances are not enough to assure the existence of a constitutional regime, which requires a political will to maintain it, he suddenly - in utter contrast to anything he had ever written before - remarks: 'Germany between 1870 and 1945 is an example of a country where reasonably favourable conditions existed - economic, technological and no lack of resources, an educated citizenry and more - but where the political will for a democratic regime was altogether lacking. One might say the same of the United States today, if one decides our constitutional regime is democratic in form only.'”

Anderson continues: “The strained conditional - as if the nature of the American political system was a matter for decision rather than of truth - barely hides the bitterness of the judgement. This is the society Rawls once intimated was nearly just, and whose institutions he could describe as the 'pride of a democratic people'. In one terse footnote, the entire bland universe of an overlapping consensus capsizes." - Anderson, 'Arms and Rights', NLR 31, pp37-38

Is Anderson reading too much into one footnote? And is it a coincidence that NLR have deployed their leading theoretician at a time when the charge widely levelled against writings of the lesser lights amongst the NLR crowd (Susan Watkins, Tariq Ali) is that crass, amoral anti-imperialism has caused the left to lose its bearings leading to a deepening rift between the decent left and the pseudo-left?

The charge must be hurting them more than they want to admit."