Karl Marx shares the materialist assumptions of the more optimistic forms of pre-Kantian modern liberalism. He lists these in The Holy Family. They are: “the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education [i.e., the malleability of human nature], the decisive importance of industry [i.e., the labor theory of value], the justification of enjoyment [i.e., hedonism],” along with empiricism. Hobbes and Locke would demur on the allegation of natural goodness and intellectual equality, although not on egalitarianism generally, but they endorse all the other items. And, as the example of some of the philosophes shows, liberalism comes in a sunny, human-perfectibility form as well as its drizzly, British Isles one. The British liberals, with Marx, also make “enlightened interest” the “principle of all morality”; they demur, however, on the claim of natural human sociality (although another good ‘liberal,’ Thomas Jefferson, would not).

Marxism shares with modern liberalism the overall pattern of the modern philosophic project, particularly as seen in Bacon. Marx himself acknowledges this. Bacon is “the real ancestor” of “English materialism and all modern experimental science.” His disciple Hobbes makes “power and freedom” identical (The Holy Family; see also Capital III. 7). Enlightenment is part of this pattern, or project. Marx sees himself as carrying forward the Enlightenment task, to “unmask human self-alienation.” As do most of the principal modern philosophers, Marx regards human beings as self-created, creating through their own labor, aimed at the conquest of nature. The struggle with nature, seen in “the labor process,” is “the necessary condition for affecting exchange of matter between men and nature; it is the everlasting, nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase” (Capital III. 7).

Marx shares the egalitarianism of earlier moderns. With respect to the character of human wants, the lures which impel men to strive against outer nature, it “makes no difference” whether wants “spring from the stomach or from fantasy” (Capital I. 7). This equalization of human wants, in such sharp contrast with, for example, Aristotelian hierarchy, is identifical to the arguments seen in Smith and Mandeville (that “honest, clear-headed man” [Capital VII. 25]). The same goes for Marx’s labor theory of value, which is already in Locke: All kinds of labor are equal, a point, Marx claims, that Aristotle ‘fails’ to see.

Progress, in this view, consists of the progressive appropriation of the matter of outer nature for the purposes of inner nature–to be sure, no less material than outer nature, but organized humanly. The progress from the state of nature to civil society and eventually, after centuries of despotism, to political democracy has the same general direction as Marxist dialectic.

This said, there is modernity and then there is modernity; modernity comes in a several (often mutually rivaling) varieties. The results of Marxism in practice—by Marxism’s own standards, the crucial test—cannot allow anyone to leave things at comparisons. The contrasts between Marxian and ‘liberal’ regimes have been noticeable, even after Marxian regimes ‘liberalize.’

While Marx applauds the philosophic work of modern materialism so far, he also criticizes it, along with the political regimes it has spawned. Marx allows that the Enlightenment has unmasked human self-alienation in its “holy forms,” crushing the ‘infamy’ that is religion, but it has actually fostered alienation in its “unholy forms,” possessive individualism and capitalism. (See “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.”)  Locke is the best of all previous materialists, but his materialism centers on the individual, objectivist, remaining at best civil-social. Marxian materialism, centers on “sensuous human activity,” praxis; comprehensively social, it includes politics (Theses on Feurbach). Liberals start with the state of nature, but in real history the individual comes last, and is a social product (Critique of Political Economy, Introduction). The modern, liberal state is merely “an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state.” Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, too, thinking of the middle class. Liberals did not say it. Marx complains that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. (See “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State.”)

Like other moderns who are not liberals, Marx wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world. The Communist Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ or spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. The liberal regimes don’t go far enough, offering only formal, political, epiphenomenal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based upon the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations. Money externalizes a social practice, labor, such that the laborer looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about; human means are aimed at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a decidedly unholy world-spirit, ever changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, ‘dialectical’ move in human history, which is the story of the self-creation of human beings through labor. Self-creation makes man the free and universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his collective, not merely individualistic will. Freedom is power. “The principle of politics is will.”

Marx’s celebration of sociality over individuality causes him to sound rather like Aristotle, or any modern pope, on the topic of usury (Capital II. 4). Capital is even worse; describing it, Marx invokes Bram Stoker-like images of gothic horror: “Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Capital II. 4). And so Marx sharply departs from liberalism not only by proposing a variant form of the labor theory of value but in his application of that theory. With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and therefore potentially far more powerful. The universal suffrage wrought by liberalism is not panacea, but it “possessed the incomparably higher” (if quite unintended) “merit of unchaining the class struggle,” of bringing “the real people” (as distinguished from the middle class alone) onstage for the first time (Class Struggles in France). The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, announced first in 1848 (the first shot in a world war of classes) will soon be at hand (Critique of the Gotha Program). Increasingly conscious of its own power and of the ways of power, the international proletariat will expropriate the expropriators of the products of its labor, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—an instrument of class domination.

Looking at the most liberal of the liberal regimes, that of the United States, Marx insists that merely political emancipation seen there will not do, even for settling the problem of religious conflict. To abolish religion entirely—part of the radical Enlightenment project—and thus to find a final solution to the problem of religious differences, one must also abolish private property, that is, “the right of self-interest” and the division of labor. Only when labor unifies in a far more profound unity than any seen in the federalism of the ‘United’ States, will the State transcend particular religions to become “a universality” (“On the Jewish Question”). The maintenance of the civil society of private individuals seen in liberal religious toleration, which means continued toleration of religion, means men still treat each other as means. Marx instead wants the advent of “species being,” the extension of conscious life that distinguishes the human species from other animal species (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) to replace liberal “security” (as per Hobbes and Locke), that “guarantee of egoism” to continued preservation of itself. “The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing those elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism” (“On the Jewish Question”). ‘Judaism’ is Marx’s synecdoche for the money society of liberalism, whose devotees worship money as value-giver. But this god is false, “the alienated essence of man’s labor and life.”

This critique of liberalism, as Marx makes clear in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is a ‘materialized’ form of Hegelian dialectic, “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and productive principle,” seen in the historical alternation of “alienation and transcendence.” It is Marx’s neo-Hegelianism that accounts for both his similarity to, and his divergence from, modern liberal philosophers. Hegel of course subsumes all previous philosophic doctrines into his own system on the basis of his omnivorous, all-synthesizing dialectical ‘Absolute Spirit,’ the self-mastery of which consummates a vast process of which Bacon’s ‘conquest of nature’ afforded an early glimmering. The Baconian, Hobbesian, Lockean, French-philosophe, and even Kantian elements of Marx (the latter seen in his indignation of the use of human beings as means, not ends), make sense in terms of this Hegelian character of his thought.

Why then has Marxism in practice resulted in so much tyranny, with the further result that Marxism itself has been largely discredited? Hegel and Marx are among those who have attempted to lift liberalism from its deliberate occupation of the low but solid ground. What makes liberalism so difficult to lift?

Another anti-liberal philosopher, Nietzsche, famously predicts that national war, not class war, will characterize the future of the world, because the will to power will endure. But Marx says much the same thing about power, if his comments on labor as Baconian conquest are remembered; yet Nietzsche got the form that the will to power would take correct, as Marx did not. Marx rejects Nietzsche’s prediction in advance with the rhetorical question, “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot has been invented?” Marx fails to see that the answer is ‘yes.’

The thumotic man, the warrior spirit, remains alive in the modern world, both as a physical warrior and as a mind-warrior. Marx himself is one of the latter, explicitly linking philosophy to the project of changing the world, not just understanding it. He fails to see that political men think the same way, and they have armies at their disposal. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, weakly grasps politics, which he dismisses as epiphenomenal. Modern liberalism gives less scope for politics than the ancients did, splitting it off from civil society and therefore from economic life, but the milder politics that resulted did not dismiss political men as anachronisms, limiting their revulsion to tyrants (whom Aristotle doesn’t classify as genuinely political men at all). Tyrannical souls will rage against the liberal regimes, adopting such thumotic ideologies as Communism and its structural twin, Fascism, but they have been outnumbered and, so far, outgunned by the productive power of the bourgeois order. Marx does not anticipate that his philosophy and the rhetoric he deploys to advance it will attract the kind of men very likely to oppose liberalism too thumotically, too unintelligently.

The excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx himself one sees an intense conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict which, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos. Marx too-hastily eschews all natural-right philosophy in his angry critiques of a particular kind of natural right, modern liberal natural right. This lack of a moderating standard of conduct led to a series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose but their chains. On the contrary, millions lost their lives or were fastened in chains. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class the way religionists often think of themselves, and as Hegel thought of himself: as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class destined to carry humanity to glory. But whereas religionists teach the God-bearing nation that God is the heaviest burden, the strictest lawgiver, the gravest imposer of responsibilities, Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, rather than laws untouched by what human beings think or do. What realism? What law?

Marx writes, “All mythology subdues, controls, and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and you need institutions so arranged as to check him from doing as he will if, in a fit of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, he inclines to violate that standard. More thumotic, and less genuinely scientific than it knows, Marxism fails on both counts, in theory and in practice. Liberalism does not, always.

 

Paul Rabinow: The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 

Nancy Fraser: “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” Praxis International. Volume 1 (1981).

 

Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Bernstein, and Nancy Fraser criticize Foucault for excessive ‘negativity,’ for failing to provide some criterion for his critique of modernity. I shall consider Fraser’s objections—aphorizing my way along, lest some Foucaultian accuse me of concocting a totalizing discourse.

1. Fraser summarizes Foucault’s description of the modern ‘power/knowledge regime’: local, continuous, productive, “capillary,” exhaustive. The modern regime is godlike but fully human, the mighty Leviathan without the monarch. Everything in it has been ‘leviathanized’ or politicized, made into a ruly practice.

2. “The liberal framework understands power as emanating from the sovereign and imposing itself upon the subjects. It tries to define a power-free zone of rights, the penetration of which is illegitimate” (Fraser, 26). Yes, with the following refinement: liberalism sees as clearly as Foucault that power can be socially persuasive. Popular sovereignty undergirds modern liberalism but, as Foucault sees (along with John Marshall, Tocqueville, many others) popular sovereignty can be tyrannical. Pre-historicist liberals solve this problem by pointing to natural rights, which then receive legal protection from, and political support from, popular sovereignty. hence the care liberals take in defining limits even to “capillary” power; Leviathan’s blood must be judiciously channeled—confined to the right capillaries.

3. Historicist thought denies natural right. ‘Natural right,’ according to historicists, is an historical construct like any other belief. Foucault is in the line of thinkers who want to look at what happens when you jettison the God of the Bible and the god of the philosophers.

4. Fraser describes Foucault as “normatively confused” (Fraser, 31). Foucault fails to differentiate clearly among different kinds of power (cf. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 7). Why is ‘domination’—capillary or other—bad? With no moral theory, with no way to distinguish good and bad regimes, good from bad policies, Foucault cannot tell the difference between a Salvadorean torture cell and a bureaucratic welfare state. (Similarly, Heidegger could not distinguish between the Soviet Union and the United States.) Foucault fails to relieve the potential nihilism—or, at best, the final silence—of Heidegger’s radical historicism.

5. Foucault might reply: Even as Nietzsche whispers to conservatives that their task is impossible because  historical flux permits no lasting conservation, so I, Foucault, whisper to progressives: There is no norm to get confused about. The moment you erect one, genealogy will demolish it. Otherwise, you will totalize human life, whether gently like liberals and social democrats or ham-handedly like Leninists. History is war. It has no meaning. Dare to fight!

6. Why do I resist such totalization? (Foucault continues). Because my fatum is freedom. The slogan of the modernity, of the Enlightenment, is ‘Dare to know!’ Modernity is “the will to ‘heroize’ the present” (Foucault 40) by transforming it via the most rigorous rationalism, opposed to slack superstition. In philosophy this leads to the full-blown rationalist historicism of Hegel and his followers. In practice it yields the thousand tyrannizing microtechnologies of modern rationalism. “How can the growth of capabilities”—individual and collective—”be disconnected from the identification of power relations?” (Foucault 48). He answers, ‘By opposing sacrifice to the axis of knowledge, parody to the axis of power, and dissociation to the axis of association. Marx wanted to ‘concretize’ Hegel, but was insufficiently radical: still too ‘dialectical,’ too ‘scientific,’ too rationalistic. A true praxis-critique of modernity will unleash Dionysus, engage in creative destruction, that joyful evidence of the irrepressible power of human beings who oppose life-energy to the dead hand of structure. The philosophers of the future will heed the Nietzschean command not to know yourself but to be yourself.

7. To which Fraser might reply: But Monsieur Foucault, you charming and vigorous bounder, you tell me ‘how.’ You even tell me ‘Why not.’ But you still do not tell me ‘Why.’

8. Why? Because the world is motley, like Nietzsche’s fool. The stable identities of the Enlightenment are impossible to sustain. Human beings are radically formless, pure energy; they will not, ‘finally,’ conform to even the most cleverly-designed structures because they cannot. “It can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom…. Liberty is a practice.” (Foucault 285). To say so is neither to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ Enlightenment. To say so is rather to find the only genuine enactment of the modern heroizing impulse. Freedom is the only non-totalizing universal, precisely because it is always heroic, always empty of structuralizing-tyrannizing-bourgeoisifying content—unlike equality and fraternity, to take two notable examples.

9. But does this gallant invitation to sip wine with Sartre at a sidewalk café really get us beyond the humanist horizon? (Fraser asks). Does not the critique of domination depend, for its effect, indeed its power, upon the reader’s modernist sensibility—her care for human rights, compassion for the unfortunate, the whole Enlightenment pantheon of virtues?

10. Yes, but only initially. I am out to transform the reader. To do so, I must start with what the reader is: a modern. I will appeal to ‘human rights’ to bringer her in, but soon I shall use the Enlightenment against itself by my genealogical demonstration of the microcruelties of the compassion industry. The modern world has no moral excuse for itself, yet. “How can the modern world, in which ethics is divorced from religion, acquire an ethical status?” (Foucault 343)  Not by returning to religion. Not by returning to pre-modern rationalism. Not by following Kant, either. Kant had reintroduced ethics as an applied form of procedural normativity, as “the universal subject” guided by the categorical imperative. He tried to formalize, to legalize freedom. Ruly-all-too-ruly.

Instead, can we develop a sensual Kantianism, an “ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take account of the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something which can be integrated in our pleasure, without reference either to law, to marriage…?” (Foucault 346)  Finding limits here involves physical transgression, experimentation with science, living on the margins of pain and pleasure, death and life; finally, it involves dying in bliss, the reward of pure negativity-of-the-body.

11. But, Fraser objects, what is this ‘body-talk’? If the body talks, what can it say? Is this not simply “bizarre” and “jejune”? (Fraser 62-63). It may make sense (at least in California) to pay someone to be a “Professor of the History of Consciousness,” but what would anyone pay for an unconscious professor? The “muckraking, Socratic Foucault” (65) has been fruitful, but can one really be the Socratic midwife via Dionysus, via Nietzsche, that resolute anti-Socratic? If you say that Nietzsche is to Hegel as Plato should  have been to Socrates—that Diogenes the Cynic, that “Socrates gone mad,” is the superior philosopher—will masturbating in the marketplace really revolutionize the marketplace? Or will it merely become another freak show for the consumers to gawk at? Granted, the attempt to absolutize equality risks tyranny. But does the attempt to absolutize freedom not merely end in some new fatality? Can there be an unruly practice? (Even, maybe especially, of the body—which, even if thoroughly engraveable, is far from infinitely malleable.)

12. Foucault could only reply, “Amor fati.” Could not Fraser then ask, once more, ‘Why?’ She is right: this lovers’ quarrel can never end in pleasure for both dialogic partners. Foucault can defend himself, but only at the cost of failing in his effort at seduction.

13. Further, Fraser might say (pressing her advantage), how can there be a Nietzschean democrat? Why will the will to power not result in a strict order of rank, some new version of the Laws of Manu imposed by the philosophers of the future?

14. Because Nietzsche is dead, along with God and man, in one respect. As I, Foucault, learned to my embarrassment with the Maoists and the ayatollites, the megacruelties of strong men now only vulgarize, destroy without creating, reduce men to last men as surely as liberal microtechnologies do. A renewed will to power must truly pervade everyone, but in resistance to the current power-grid.

15. A war of all against all? What is this preoccupation with ‘power’? Genealogical research will locate this term in Hobbes, that disciple of Bacon, the technosystematizer of Machiavelli. Where is the freedom?

16. Once again, I use the term ‘power’ to bring the moderns in. They will come out postmoderns, having a revised sense of power. The new power will resist  on the ‘micro’ level—the only level at which we can defeat liberalism’s confinement. Tocqueville of boudoir and bathhouse, I, Foucault, want to defeat liberalism’s confinement because I seek power not in some magnificent new tyranny but in the only way it can be had in democratic modernity: not in decadent liberalism, not in bourgeois libertarianism, but in radical libertinism. If, as Aristotle says, the principles of democracy are equality and liberty, then Taylor and Rawls can pick up the egalitarian strand whereas I pick up the libertarian, but really libertine strand (cf. Aristotle, Politics V. ix. 1310a1). Comprehensively, though never systematically, I negate the ‘positive,’ all-pervading spirit of egalitarian self-tyrannizing.

17. Nietzsche with the superman subtracted? (Fraser muses). I am reminded of a Nietzschean critique: “One no longer becomes poor or rich; both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.” Have you not produced a photographic negative of the Last Man, Michel?

18. I’m sure I have, but only because the shameless toad who has written this dialogue gives you all the best lines, and makes me a mere shadow of my former self!

19. Now, now, in a Nietzschean, ressentiment is not becoming. Amor fati!

 

 

John Rawls: Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Elizabeth H. Wolgast: “The Demands of Public Reason.” Columbia Law Review. Volume 94, Number 6 (October 1994), 1936-1949.

 

John Rawls distinguishes public discourse—in which the only legitimate appeals are to be consonant with the overlapping consensus of what’s held to be reasonable—from private discourse—discussion among family members, friends, and other groups that do not represent the public at large. Private discourse may rightly include appeals to ultimate ends and comprehensive doctrines not shared by the general public. Public-discourse appeals, by contrast, must be stated in rational terms, terms by nature open to public inspection in the sense that they presuppose no special revelation or exclusive knowledge. Democratic discourse must be rigorously exoteric.

In her lucid critique, Elizabeth H. Wolgast raises a concern that Rawls also sees. Does democratic public discourse as Rawls defines it not yield a sort of forced Averroism? The “demands of public reason” seem to require an unnatural or even hypocritical separation of “the values leading to one’s position from the public argument given for them. How, one asks, can a person’s responsibilities as a citizen require this?” (1939)

It’s clear, I take it, that it is often prudent to argue in the manner Rawls commends. If I am a Hindu and you are an evangelical Christian, I cannot persuade you to ban meat eating by appealing to the doctrine of reincarnation. I will need to say something consistent with your principles as well as mine. Vegetarianism will solve many public health problems (I might argue); it will end much cruel treatment of animals; it will help to save the ozone layer from dangerous bovine omissions. Et cetera. Wolgast concedes this point: “Rawls’s proposal does reflect the real world of public debate,” in which “a wise citizen often will refrain from invoking parochial religious and moral values… in order to maintain communication with and even persuade someone who holds different views” (1948). But neither Rawls nor Wolgast can rest content with prudence. Rawls wants a ‘freestanding’ political argument that has the same legal features as Kantian morality and politics (without the need publicly to invoke Kantian morality and politics). Wolgast seems morally and politically dissatisfied with Rawlsian liberalism, claiming that without moral integrity the public sphere will break down, undermining the stability of the overlapping consensus of rational public discourse. Toleration of opposing views is at most a feature of democratic praxis, but it can have no rational foundation in a theoretical sense.

I shall focus on Wolgast’s concerns about “personal integrity in debate” (1941). She asserts that “the representative who recasts his objections to conform to public reason… argues with less than maximum force” (1943). That is, the integrity of the argument is compromised inasmuch as the speaker cannot fully integrate all of his objections into one coherent statement. She also asserts that such a representative “speaks disingenuously”; his personal integrity is also compromised (1943). I shall argue that Rawls’s argument can be defended from this two-pronged criticism on principled as well as on the above-mentioned prudential grounds, without conceding that prudence itself stands as a central moral virtue in politics.

Wolgast gives the example of a Congressman who is a Christian Scientist. Under the Rawlsian regime he is stymied from objecting to a public inoculation program on religious grounds. He must argue not that inoculation is against the law of God but that inoculation violates his First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. “Framed in this cooler, more legalistic way, some of [the argument’s] power has been lost” (1943).

Not necessarily. Some of the passion has been lost but, given the fact that few people share that passion, the only persuasive power that seems lost is the inability to rally believers. Even this power has not been lost; the Congressman can rally his co-religionists in communications to them, without violating the rules of public discourse. Further, Wolgast does not show that there exists any principled civic obligation to encourage a citizen to maximize the rhetorical effectiveness of his argument. To rule out publicly unreasonable arguments does not necessarily “vitiate just the kind of open and rational atmosphere that Rawls, among others, identifies with liberal society” (1942). To the contrary, it may make such a society practicable by cooling passions and forcing each citizen to think about others outside his own group.

Wolgast also claims that “the religious argument [against inoculation] raises the First Amendment issue in its full power and necessity, refreshing one’s sense of its importance, while the other does not” (1943). Again, not necessarily. The Congressman can paint an attractive and affecting picture of life according to the precepts of Christian Science in terms consistent with the overlapping consensus. He can appeal to citizens’ sympathy for the underdog, saying, ‘Do not compel us to compromise our religion, for your religion might be the next one on the chopping block.’ The “full power and necessity” of the First Amendment lies there, else it never would have made it into the Constitution in the first place. To defend free religious exercise one need not absolutize it. Religious absolutists may drift away from modern republicanism, toward theocracy.

With respect to the integrity of the Congressman himself, Wolgast argues that a Christian Scientist who makes appeals not based on Christian-Science doctrines speaks “disingenuously” (1943). “[I]t is dishonest to misrepresent our reasons for a view” (1944); dishonesty undermines public discourse itself by concealing true intentions, harboring secret doctrines.

It would indeed be dishonest to misrepresent one’s reasons for a view. But there is no reason why a Rawlsian citizen would need to do so. An openly Christian-Science Congressman would not be misrepresenting his views at all if he argued against inoculation on public health grounds, if he sincerely believed that inoculations are medically unnecessary or harmful. Nor would he misrepresent his view if he hung his argumentative hat on the First Amendment. He could simply say: ‘I personally am opposed to inoculation first of all on religious grounds, but I recognize that most of my fellow citizens do not stand with me on those grounds. I hold that they should oppose inoculation on public-health and Constitutional grounds.’ It is precisely an instance of integrity to admit personal reasons for advocating a given policy and then to argue in terms that others can accept as well, if you also believe in those terms.

“Who,” Wolgast asks, “being persuaded to a position by his moral and religious values, would not believe that these values have the greatest persuasive power and thus greater power for change?” (1944) No one, I reply, except two types of people: those who assume that the “values” that resonate most powerfully with themselves necessarily resonate most powerfully with everyone else; and those who are convinced that such values, once stated and defended, can and will persuade most people. The first type of person makes an unreasonable assumption that will quickly yield to real-world experiential refutation, if only in the form of ending the Congressman’s career. The second type of person will not be precluded from making ‘conversion’ arguments under the Rawlsian regime, so long as he does not make them in public policy debates. In a Rawlsian republic, the Reverend Billy Graham could still bring his crusade to Madison Square Garden and a television near you. If he converted a workable majority of any political community to his views, many of these would then become part of the overlapping consensus. Rawls makes this point in Chapter 6, where he cites Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, with its invocation of Biblical themes. “Lincoln does not violate public reason as I have discussed and as it applied in his day—whether in ours is another matter—since what he says has no implications bearing on constitutional essentials or basic justice” (254). This implies that the overlapping consensus, the sphere of public reason, is open to change as demographics and private convictions shift. What was reasonable in 1865 is not necessarily reasonable in 1997. Increasing secularization—or the reverse—can occur in civil society before it is expressed in public discourse. The overlapping consensus isn’t an unchanging quasi-Platonic essence but a matter of circumstance, given the existence of the intermediate, third ‘sphere,’ civil society.

What about Wolgast’s hard case, that of the challenging the modern republican regime itself? The regime could not, on Rawlsian grounds, be challenged immediately in public discourse. But it could surely be challenged in private and civil-society discourse. If fundamentalist Islam swept through American civil society—as it could do, given the First Amendment—and in the year 2065 there came to be the same percentage of Muslims as there were Christians in 1865, why could some new Lincoln not appeal to Islamic themes in public discourse? More radically, if the citizens were by then convinced that republicanism is an unreasonable regime, given these new terms of public discourse, why could they not introduce new modes and orders, ending republicanism altogether? This would run afoul of Rawls’s neo-Kantianism, but that is a moral not a political theory. Rawlsian liberalism is thus indirectly open to change, even to its own replacement by consensual means.