A critique of Rawls
Rawls asks, “(h)ow is it possible - or is it – for those of faith, as well as the nonreligious (secular), to endorse a constitutional regime even when their comprehensive doctrines may not prosper under it, and indeed may decline?” (The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, pp. 150-151, emphasis added). In fact the example he gives on the same page (p. 151 n46) suggests fundamental transformation, indeed a self-annihilation beyond any recognition might be what is required in some cases. Why should a doctrine accept its own self-demolition and give way to constitutional democracy? According to Rawls:
Here the answer lies in the religious or nonreligious doctrine’s understanding and accepting that, except by endorsing a reasonable constitutional democracy, there is no other way fairly to ensure the liberty of its adherents consistent with the equal liberties of other reasonable free and equal citizens. In endorsing a constitutional democratic regime, a religious doctrine may say that such are the limits God set to our liberty; a nonreligious doctrine will express otherwise. But in either case, these doctrines formulate in different ways how liberty of conscience and the principle of toleration can cohere with equal justice for all citizens in a reasonable democratic society. Thus, the principle of toleration and liberty of conscience must have an essential place in any constitutional democratic conception. They lay down the fundamental basis to be accepted by all citizens as fair and regulative of the rivalry between doctrines (The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, pp. 151-152, emphasis provided).
This is an extremely important passage. If we take Rawls’ claims about the non ad hoc character of the reasonable overlapping consensus seriously, we can only interpret this passage as saying that the principle of equal liberty, principle of conscience and principle of tolerance are the core moral constituent of all comprehensive religious and non religious doctrines [even if these principles are supported by different comprehensive doctrines on different grounds (ibid.: 152)]. Unless we interpret Rawls thus, there is no other way to understand his claim that constitutional democracy is the only way to preserve the equal liberty of all. Unless a comprehensive doctrine claims liberty as its core ideal why would this (preservation of equal liberty) be a problem for it ? [Kymlicka rightly presses this point in his criticism of Rawls (Liberalism, Community, and Culture, chapter 4 )]. Thus Rawls’ account assumes equal liberty and tolerance etc. as core constituents of all doctrines worthy of consideration in constitutional regimes. This assumption is Rawls’ starting point, a part of his conception of the 'facts' of life in democratic regimes. This assumption is a part of the meaning of the overlapping consensus. It also makes clear what does Rawls mean by reasonable in the first place. Reasonableness turns out to be acceptance of this core morality of liberty and nothing else [despite Rawls definition of it in terms of his wide reflective equilibrium (John Rawls (1995) “Reply to Habermas” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. xcii, no. 4: 132-180, herer p.141)]. As Rawls writes, “Political liberalism never denies or questions (comprehensive doctrines) in any way, so long as they are politically reasonable” (ibid; p. 136).
However if my understanding of Rawls is not totally off the mark, it seems that though Rawls raised a courageous radical question of why a comprehensive doctrine would accept its decline and possible self-demolition in order to join constitutional democracy his answer is not courageous at all. In fact his answer is totally circular. He seems to me to be saying here that a comprehensive doctrine adopts a reasonable attitude because it is already reasonable or at least it contains reasonableness as its core, even though it might not be aware of it (The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 152).
One of the main purposes of Rawls in Political Liberalism is to show the internal coherence of liberal constitutional democracy under the conditions of reasonable pluralism (Political Liberalism, p. xli). The whole argument depends on the validity of Rawls’ distinction between comprehensive doctrines and political conceptions. The essential distinction between comprehensive doctrine, and political conceptions as mentioned earlier, lies in their range of applicability (Political Liberalism, p. 13). A comprehensive doctrine is comprehensive precisely because its range of applicability does not allow any exception. Now for a comprehensive doctrine to become reasonable it is necessary that it cede the region of the political to something else. The question is whether in that process the comprehensive doctrine would still remain comprehensive? Thus it is important that Rawls raises the question, why should a comprehensive doctrine be ready to concede part of its authority to something else in the first place, even when it may result in the decline of such a doctrine.
Rawls may argue that in ceding its authority to the political, a comprehensive doctrine does it for its own internal reason. Political liberalism represents the core morality which is the outcome of the best teachings of different comprehensive doctrines. It represents a reasonable consensus that can be seen by different comprehensive doctrines in this view as fulfilling the best of their own teachings. However it is one thing to make this claim and another thing to testify to the validity of this claim [Moreover Rawls(Political Liberalism, p. 65)concedes that there can still be comprehensive doctrines within a democratic order that do not accept liberal political conceptions in the first place].
More important in shedding light on this issue is Rawls’ question rather than his answer. Rawls’ question is enlightening because it brings forth a quandary. It is hard to believe that a comprehensive doctrine would easily cede its authority even when it is faced with a possible decline. As we saw above Rawls answer is very vague and ambiguous. After giving this vague answer Rawls writes a long note demonstrating how a comprehensive doctrine would be transformed into a reasonable are and hence would become compatible with political liberalism for right reasons.
Rawls begins his note(The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 151 n46) with the following words: “An example of how a religion may do this (turn itself into a reasonable doctrine even at the expense of its possible decline) is the following” (comments in parenthesis mine). Citing the work of an author of Sudanese origin, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Rawls writes that the Islamic interpretation of Sharia law can be divided into the Mecca and Medina period. According to Rawls An-Na’im claims that superior Mecca teachings were rejected in favour of more practical Medina teachings which were more viable in the historical conditions prevailing in seventh century Arabia. Now the historical situation has changed and it is possible to return to the Mecca period (as if the Mecca period did not have its historical limits!). But what is the reason for returning to the Mecca period? According to Rawls “An-Na’im believes that Muslims should follow the earlier Mecca period in interpreting Shari’a. So interpreted, he says that Shari’a supports constitutional democracy”. It seems that it is constitutional democracy which is not limited by any historical situationist shortcomings. It is constitutional democracy which gives the Mecca period its presumed superiority. It is here that Rawls quotes a key passage from An-Na’im which I shall reproduce follow:
The Qur’an does not mention constitutionalism, but human rational thinking and experience have shown that constitutionalism, is necessary for realizing the just and good society prescribed by the Qur’an. An Islamic justification and support for constitutionalism is important and relevant for Muslims. Non-Muslims may have their own secular or other justifications. As long as all agreed on the principles and specific rules of constitutionalism, including complete equality and non-discrimination on grounds of gender or religion, each may have his or her own reasons for coming to that agreement(Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law, p. 100).
More important than An-Na’im’s passage is Rawl’s following comments on it. Rawls writes commenting on the passage, “This is a perfect example of overlapping consensus” (emphasis added). If this is a perfect example of overlapping consensus it tells us more than anything else about Rawls’ political liberalism. I have no interest whatsoever in An-Na’im’s caricature of Islam which seems to me to be another example of intellectual dishonesty and mental servitude. What I am interested in, however, is how this sheds light on what I have been trying to ask about Rawls’ notion of comprehensive doctrines and its relation to political conceptions.
What the example makes clear is that political liberalism does not only limit comprehensive doctrines it totally reconfigures them. In the process of making Islam reasonable, Islam turns into something, which is unrecognisable in historical terms. Political liberalism (constitutional democracy) turns out to be “necessary for realising the just and good society prescribed by the Qur’an”. Political liberalism is not content with only the ceding of ground to it but more than that it requires reconfiguration of comprehensive doctrines. It approaches them from behind and limits them and this limitation involves drastic reconfiguration.* But if a political conception is so totalising then it turns out to be a comprehensive doctrine in its own right.
If this explanation is correct Rawls’ comprehensive doctrines turn out not to be comprehensive at all. They need something beyond them to realise themselves. On the other hand his political liberalism turns out to be more than political. It is the condition of the possibility of comprehensive doctrines and defining their reasonableness. In this sense it is not very different from Habermas’ conception of the conditions of the possibility of communication the doctrine Rawls says is comprehensive (Although the difference may still be in how they justify their respective positions). If my account above is correct even in its schematic form I think Rawls’ attempt to prove the coherence of liberal democracy fails.** It of course does not prove that liberal democracy is an incoherent conception but that Rawls’ justification of it in Political Liberalismis essentially incoherent.
Rawls’ account in Political Liberalism is to a significant extent based on his views on religious wars in Europe. He seems to be saying that liberal democratic order is the outcome of a realisation that became concretised out of the weariness of the people of Europe towards religious wars. According to this reading the people of Europe realised after religious wars that they cannot convert each other to a single view however much they may try and so they decided to live with each other peacefully and liberal democratic order is the rational expression of this realisation.
However this is too simplistic a genealogy of the emergence of constitutional democracy and I think cannot be sustained by historical data (see Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy : Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World). Rawls in accord with the “standard narratives of the rise of the liberal state presents the state as peacemaker, arising out of the "Wars of Religion" to keep peace among violent religious factions”. However as William T Cavanaugh shows in his brilliant contribution “these wars were necessitated by the modern state's need to domesticate the Church and thereby achieve unrivalled sovereignty over its subjects.” (A Fire Strong Enough To Consume the House:"The Wars Of Religion And the Rise Of the State").
Moreover these religious wars Rawls is talking about are from a period in which Europe was already making its forays into modernity and religious wars were already a result of modernity rather than simply being its cause. Rawls for example does not consider and take into account what Habermas has analysed in great detail i.e. the rationalisation of life world. The phenomenon of ‘death of God’ and waning of religious belief has been the central elements of Europe’s long voyage to liberal democracy.
Rawls claims in Political Liberalism that "In the society of the Middle Ages, more or less united in affirming the Catholic faith, the Inquisition was not an accident; its suppression of heresy was needed to preserve that shared religious belief"(p. 37).
I am very sceptical about this claim for conceptual reasons. Medieval societies by their very structure were the antithesis of the controlled societies of industrial and post-industrial periods (see Nations and Nationalism). Rawls’ general claim that “continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power” (Political Liberalism, p. 37) seems to me to be based on a series of factual errors. It is not possible for me to go into their details here but a few remarks are due.
Firstly Rawls’ claim that a society holding comprehensive view would be necessarily oppressive is not seconded by historical data. We know of many societies that believed in comprehensive worldviews and still were benevolent societies in a most exemplary sense (see for example any good history of Islamic societies in the Medieval period).
Secondly, Rawls invokes the phantom of war in a most undifferentiating way in order to suite his argument. For example at the end of his new introduction to Political Liberalism he writes, “The wars of this century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be governed by power and coercion alone” (p. lxii). Rawls invokes the imaginary of wars and chaos throughout his argument to prove that insistence on one single comprehensive doctrine must lead to wars and coercion. But this account is extremely simplistic to the extent that it does not even bother to make an important distinction between the specificity of a doctrine and its comprehensivity. It is for this reason that Rawls does not ask the obvious question whether the nature of a particular doctrine or its comprehnsivity as such makes it oppressive.
Thirdly and most important Rawls’ account fails on the most obvious factual grounds. He presupposes that liberal democratic order eliminates wars and oppression. Rawls’ account must ignore wars and unprecedented persecution and mass murders and totalising oppression that is part and parcel of liberal democratic societies specially American society which form the background of Rawls’ account. It is amazing that Rawls does not say a word on continuous American oppression at home and abroad. It is worth while to add that this oppression can not be explained away simply by pointing to the ‘shortcomings’ of America as inevitable distance between reality and ideals (for example see Burton Dreben (2003) “On Rawls and Political Liberalism” in Cambridge Companion to Rawls, p. 38 and Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America for such a position). It is mass murders and genocides which has made American constitutional democracy possible. If Rawls’ presumption about constitutional democracies is contrary to facts then it would be a fatal blow to his arguments.
Michael Mann has argued that there is a necessary relationship between liberal democracy and genocide [M Mann (1999) “The Dark Side of Democracy” New Left Review 1:255: pp. 18-45]. Liberal democracies commit ideologically legitimated genocide (Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq) argues Mann. The greater the commitment to homogenise comprehensive doctrines through the acceptance of liberal norms as universal norm and the consequent (equal) trivialisation of comprehensive doctrines, the greater the temptation to murder those who refuse to accept these norms. This “other” has to be coerced or induced to assimilate i.e. to submit to the sovereignty of liberal order. Submission to liberalism is a necessary condition for survival in constitutional democratic order. Liberalism does not advocate peaceful coexistence. Races such as the Red Indian and states such as Islamic Afghanistan, which do not submit to the sovereignty of liberalism, have to be exterminated. The edifice of liberal America was built on the corpses of the Red Indians and the preservation of global liberal order requires the mass slaughter of the Afghans and Iraqis. Mann is conscious of liberalism’s compulsive commitment to exterminate “outsiders” when he discusses the behaviour of settler communities in eighteenth century North America – “the greater the democracy among the perpetuators the greater the genocide (ibid; p. 26). The (liberal) rule of “we the people” thus necessarily requires the elimination of the other. That is why “ethnic cleansing, murder, deporting, genocide was central to the liberal modernity of the New World “(ibid; p. 27). Several authors have also demonstrated the oppressive and totalising nature of American society (see False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, pp. 99-132). It is just not possible that Rawls can carry on with his argumentation without explicitly dealing with these facts.
Finally Rawls’ argument is logically ambiguous. One the one hand he seems to argue that it is not possible to agree on one single comprehensive doctrine because of the nature of free reason and due to the nature of free institutions. This is what he seems to be saying when he claims that reasonable pluralism is the fact of life in modern societies. On the other hand he seems to be saying that this is a general fact and it has no specific relation to modern societies. Therefore he assumes that even in the societies of the Middle Ages adherence to one single comprehensive view could not have been maintained except through oppression and use of force. Now these are two different arguments and cannot go very far together. Rawls’ account tacitly reaps the benefit of this ambiguity.
If the first line of argument is correct then Rawls cannot put the emphasis he lays on the nature of life in the Middle Ages and on religious wars since obviously those were the periods in which free human institutions and free reason did not exist. To claim otherwise Rawls would have to refer to a comprehensive doctrine which he does not want to do. For example he would have to say that freedom is somehow in human nature or something like this, which obviously would require invoking some sort of comprehensive doctrine. If on the other hand Rawls is arguing along the second line then he would have to prove that it is somehow in the nature of comprehensive doctrines that make them oppressive. Obviously Rawls has not made any such argument in his published work. His argument has been based on the existence of what he calls reasonable pluralism which presupposes the existence of free reason and free institution along with comprehensive doctrines which are already conditioned by free reason and hence are reasonable. It seems to me that invocation of religious wars and inquisition in the Middle Ages has nothing to do with Rawls’ argument. However the imagery is very important not only to divert attention from liberal oppression but also to install fear in populations and intellectuals about the prospects of the revival of religion.
Islamic movements have normally conceived liberal democracy as compatible with their own comprehensive framework. Even those who reject it instinctively are unable to explain what is wrong with democracy especially constitutional democracy. Rawls’ account of political liberalism gives us an initial opportunity to correct this error.
Liberalism treats constitutional democracy as the most rational position reached by human social and political progress. It considers liberal constitutional democracy as the very meaning of reasonableness. It is unreasonable to reject liberalism argues Rawls.
Liberalism (both in its conservative and progressive forms) pretends that it gives opportunity to every religion to be free in shaping the private and public life of its adherents without any interference. The only condition liberalism puts on religion is that it accepts the notion of equal freedom for others and cede the arena of the political to the secular. However as we have seen accepting liberalism involves more than this (here and here). It involves a radical reconfiguration of religious worldviews. In Rawls’ liberal society Muslims are not allowed to follow the religion of their Imams, they are only allowed to follow the Islam of somebody like An-Na’im (see here) who is more concerned whether Islam and Muslims comply with American constitutional order than with the Will of Allah!
Liberals pretend that they are tolerant but in fact there is extreme intolerance working at the core of the liberal doctrine. Rawls’ commentator and colleague Dreben puts it clearly and incisively:
What Rawls is saying is that there is in a constitutional liberal democracy a tradition of thought which it is our job to explore and see whether it can be made coherent and consistent. . . We are not arguing for such a society. We take for granted that today only a fool would not want to live in such a society . . . If one cannot see the benefits of living in a liberal constitutional democracy, if one does not see the virtue of that ideal, then I do not know how to convince him. To be perfectly blunt, sometimes I am asked, when I go around speaking for Rawls, What do you say to an Adolf Hitler? The answer is [nothing.] You shoot him. You do not try to reason with him. Reason has no bearing on this question. So I do not want to discuss it (Dreben in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, pp. 328-329, italics in the original).
This is an honest interpretation of the core of what Rawls contends. Rawls starts with constitutional democracy as a fact of reason and he also takes reasonable pluralism as the fact of reason. He argues his case from there. Through this method he excludes any argument with what is beyond constitutional democracy. What is not liberal or what is not compatible with liberalism is by definition unreasonable. There is an extreme intolerance at the core of liberalism which is manifested in its search to reshape everything or at least limit everything according to its own image. This should give those from the Islamic movements who are dazzled by liberalism some lessons about the true nature of constitutional democracy.
Apart from that it is clear that even if liberalism provides Islam with a place ‘under the sun’ on the condition that Islam should accept liberal notions of political autonomy and equality it is unacceptable. It is unacceptable because Allah’s Will cannot be divided or limited. As the Glorious Quran makes it clear: “O ye who believe! Enter into Islam all inclusively; And follow not the foot steps of the Evil One; For he is to you an avowed enemy” (Al-Quran, 2: 208). Muslims cannot cede part of Islam’s authority to liberalism without compromising this fundamental injunction of Allah. Islam is not about finding a place under the sun. It is the last message of the Lord of all which cannot be changed or compromised for any contingent reasons.
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*Habermas realises this when he writes, “Each religion is originally a “worldview” or, as Rawls puts it, a “comprehensive doctrine,” in the sense that it lays claim to the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. A religion that has become just one among several confessions must abandon this claim to comprehensively shape life. Under the conditions of pluralism the life of the religious community must differentiate itself from the life of the larger political community. A prevailing religion loses its political impact on society at large if the political order no longer obeys the religious ethos” (Jürgen Habermas “Intolerance and Discrimination” International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2003: pp. 2-12, here, p. 6).
** It is interesting to note that due to instinctive realisation of this internal contradiction of his account Rawls introduces a term partial comprehensive doctrine (see Political Liberalism, pp. 13 and 175) but the term comprehensive doctrine is contradiction in itself and does not seem to me very promising at all.
Here the answer lies in the religious or nonreligious doctrine’s understanding and accepting that, except by endorsing a reasonable constitutional democracy, there is no other way fairly to ensure the liberty of its adherents consistent with the equal liberties of other reasonable free and equal citizens. In endorsing a constitutional democratic regime, a religious doctrine may say that such are the limits God set to our liberty; a nonreligious doctrine will express otherwise. But in either case, these doctrines formulate in different ways how liberty of conscience and the principle of toleration can cohere with equal justice for all citizens in a reasonable democratic society. Thus, the principle of toleration and liberty of conscience must have an essential place in any constitutional democratic conception. They lay down the fundamental basis to be accepted by all citizens as fair and regulative of the rivalry between doctrines (The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, pp. 151-152, emphasis provided).
This is an extremely important passage. If we take Rawls’ claims about the non ad hoc character of the reasonable overlapping consensus seriously, we can only interpret this passage as saying that the principle of equal liberty, principle of conscience and principle of tolerance are the core moral constituent of all comprehensive religious and non religious doctrines [even if these principles are supported by different comprehensive doctrines on different grounds (ibid.: 152)]. Unless we interpret Rawls thus, there is no other way to understand his claim that constitutional democracy is the only way to preserve the equal liberty of all. Unless a comprehensive doctrine claims liberty as its core ideal why would this (preservation of equal liberty) be a problem for it ? [Kymlicka rightly presses this point in his criticism of Rawls (Liberalism, Community, and Culture, chapter 4 )]. Thus Rawls’ account assumes equal liberty and tolerance etc. as core constituents of all doctrines worthy of consideration in constitutional regimes. This assumption is Rawls’ starting point, a part of his conception of the 'facts' of life in democratic regimes. This assumption is a part of the meaning of the overlapping consensus. It also makes clear what does Rawls mean by reasonable in the first place. Reasonableness turns out to be acceptance of this core morality of liberty and nothing else [despite Rawls definition of it in terms of his wide reflective equilibrium (John Rawls (1995) “Reply to Habermas” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. xcii, no. 4: 132-180, herer p.141)]. As Rawls writes, “Political liberalism never denies or questions (comprehensive doctrines) in any way, so long as they are politically reasonable” (ibid; p. 136).
However if my understanding of Rawls is not totally off the mark, it seems that though Rawls raised a courageous radical question of why a comprehensive doctrine would accept its decline and possible self-demolition in order to join constitutional democracy his answer is not courageous at all. In fact his answer is totally circular. He seems to me to be saying here that a comprehensive doctrine adopts a reasonable attitude because it is already reasonable or at least it contains reasonableness as its core, even though it might not be aware of it (The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 152).
One of the main purposes of Rawls in Political Liberalism is to show the internal coherence of liberal constitutional democracy under the conditions of reasonable pluralism (Political Liberalism, p. xli). The whole argument depends on the validity of Rawls’ distinction between comprehensive doctrines and political conceptions. The essential distinction between comprehensive doctrine, and political conceptions as mentioned earlier, lies in their range of applicability (Political Liberalism, p. 13). A comprehensive doctrine is comprehensive precisely because its range of applicability does not allow any exception. Now for a comprehensive doctrine to become reasonable it is necessary that it cede the region of the political to something else. The question is whether in that process the comprehensive doctrine would still remain comprehensive? Thus it is important that Rawls raises the question, why should a comprehensive doctrine be ready to concede part of its authority to something else in the first place, even when it may result in the decline of such a doctrine.
Rawls may argue that in ceding its authority to the political, a comprehensive doctrine does it for its own internal reason. Political liberalism represents the core morality which is the outcome of the best teachings of different comprehensive doctrines. It represents a reasonable consensus that can be seen by different comprehensive doctrines in this view as fulfilling the best of their own teachings. However it is one thing to make this claim and another thing to testify to the validity of this claim [Moreover Rawls(Political Liberalism, p. 65)concedes that there can still be comprehensive doctrines within a democratic order that do not accept liberal political conceptions in the first place].
More important in shedding light on this issue is Rawls’ question rather than his answer. Rawls’ question is enlightening because it brings forth a quandary. It is hard to believe that a comprehensive doctrine would easily cede its authority even when it is faced with a possible decline. As we saw above Rawls answer is very vague and ambiguous. After giving this vague answer Rawls writes a long note demonstrating how a comprehensive doctrine would be transformed into a reasonable are and hence would become compatible with political liberalism for right reasons.
Rawls begins his note(The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 151 n46) with the following words: “An example of how a religion may do this (turn itself into a reasonable doctrine even at the expense of its possible decline) is the following” (comments in parenthesis mine). Citing the work of an author of Sudanese origin, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Rawls writes that the Islamic interpretation of Sharia law can be divided into the Mecca and Medina period. According to Rawls An-Na’im claims that superior Mecca teachings were rejected in favour of more practical Medina teachings which were more viable in the historical conditions prevailing in seventh century Arabia. Now the historical situation has changed and it is possible to return to the Mecca period (as if the Mecca period did not have its historical limits!). But what is the reason for returning to the Mecca period? According to Rawls “An-Na’im believes that Muslims should follow the earlier Mecca period in interpreting Shari’a. So interpreted, he says that Shari’a supports constitutional democracy”. It seems that it is constitutional democracy which is not limited by any historical situationist shortcomings. It is constitutional democracy which gives the Mecca period its presumed superiority. It is here that Rawls quotes a key passage from An-Na’im which I shall reproduce follow:
The Qur’an does not mention constitutionalism, but human rational thinking and experience have shown that constitutionalism, is necessary for realizing the just and good society prescribed by the Qur’an. An Islamic justification and support for constitutionalism is important and relevant for Muslims. Non-Muslims may have their own secular or other justifications. As long as all agreed on the principles and specific rules of constitutionalism, including complete equality and non-discrimination on grounds of gender or religion, each may have his or her own reasons for coming to that agreement(Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law, p. 100).
More important than An-Na’im’s passage is Rawl’s following comments on it. Rawls writes commenting on the passage, “This is a perfect example of overlapping consensus” (emphasis added). If this is a perfect example of overlapping consensus it tells us more than anything else about Rawls’ political liberalism. I have no interest whatsoever in An-Na’im’s caricature of Islam which seems to me to be another example of intellectual dishonesty and mental servitude. What I am interested in, however, is how this sheds light on what I have been trying to ask about Rawls’ notion of comprehensive doctrines and its relation to political conceptions.
What the example makes clear is that political liberalism does not only limit comprehensive doctrines it totally reconfigures them. In the process of making Islam reasonable, Islam turns into something, which is unrecognisable in historical terms. Political liberalism (constitutional democracy) turns out to be “necessary for realising the just and good society prescribed by the Qur’an”. Political liberalism is not content with only the ceding of ground to it but more than that it requires reconfiguration of comprehensive doctrines. It approaches them from behind and limits them and this limitation involves drastic reconfiguration.* But if a political conception is so totalising then it turns out to be a comprehensive doctrine in its own right.
If this explanation is correct Rawls’ comprehensive doctrines turn out not to be comprehensive at all. They need something beyond them to realise themselves. On the other hand his political liberalism turns out to be more than political. It is the condition of the possibility of comprehensive doctrines and defining their reasonableness. In this sense it is not very different from Habermas’ conception of the conditions of the possibility of communication the doctrine Rawls says is comprehensive (Although the difference may still be in how they justify their respective positions). If my account above is correct even in its schematic form I think Rawls’ attempt to prove the coherence of liberal democracy fails.** It of course does not prove that liberal democracy is an incoherent conception but that Rawls’ justification of it in Political Liberalismis essentially incoherent.
Rawls’ account in Political Liberalism is to a significant extent based on his views on religious wars in Europe. He seems to be saying that liberal democratic order is the outcome of a realisation that became concretised out of the weariness of the people of Europe towards religious wars. According to this reading the people of Europe realised after religious wars that they cannot convert each other to a single view however much they may try and so they decided to live with each other peacefully and liberal democratic order is the rational expression of this realisation.
However this is too simplistic a genealogy of the emergence of constitutional democracy and I think cannot be sustained by historical data (see Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy : Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World). Rawls in accord with the “standard narratives of the rise of the liberal state presents the state as peacemaker, arising out of the "Wars of Religion" to keep peace among violent religious factions”. However as William T Cavanaugh shows in his brilliant contribution “these wars were necessitated by the modern state's need to domesticate the Church and thereby achieve unrivalled sovereignty over its subjects.” (A Fire Strong Enough To Consume the House:"The Wars Of Religion And the Rise Of the State").
Moreover these religious wars Rawls is talking about are from a period in which Europe was already making its forays into modernity and religious wars were already a result of modernity rather than simply being its cause. Rawls for example does not consider and take into account what Habermas has analysed in great detail i.e. the rationalisation of life world. The phenomenon of ‘death of God’ and waning of religious belief has been the central elements of Europe’s long voyage to liberal democracy.
Rawls claims in Political Liberalism that "In the society of the Middle Ages, more or less united in affirming the Catholic faith, the Inquisition was not an accident; its suppression of heresy was needed to preserve that shared religious belief"(p. 37).
I am very sceptical about this claim for conceptual reasons. Medieval societies by their very structure were the antithesis of the controlled societies of industrial and post-industrial periods (see Nations and Nationalism). Rawls’ general claim that “continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power” (Political Liberalism, p. 37) seems to me to be based on a series of factual errors. It is not possible for me to go into their details here but a few remarks are due.
Firstly Rawls’ claim that a society holding comprehensive view would be necessarily oppressive is not seconded by historical data. We know of many societies that believed in comprehensive worldviews and still were benevolent societies in a most exemplary sense (see for example any good history of Islamic societies in the Medieval period).
Secondly, Rawls invokes the phantom of war in a most undifferentiating way in order to suite his argument. For example at the end of his new introduction to Political Liberalism he writes, “The wars of this century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be governed by power and coercion alone” (p. lxii). Rawls invokes the imaginary of wars and chaos throughout his argument to prove that insistence on one single comprehensive doctrine must lead to wars and coercion. But this account is extremely simplistic to the extent that it does not even bother to make an important distinction between the specificity of a doctrine and its comprehensivity. It is for this reason that Rawls does not ask the obvious question whether the nature of a particular doctrine or its comprehnsivity as such makes it oppressive.
Thirdly and most important Rawls’ account fails on the most obvious factual grounds. He presupposes that liberal democratic order eliminates wars and oppression. Rawls’ account must ignore wars and unprecedented persecution and mass murders and totalising oppression that is part and parcel of liberal democratic societies specially American society which form the background of Rawls’ account. It is amazing that Rawls does not say a word on continuous American oppression at home and abroad. It is worth while to add that this oppression can not be explained away simply by pointing to the ‘shortcomings’ of America as inevitable distance between reality and ideals (for example see Burton Dreben (2003) “On Rawls and Political Liberalism” in Cambridge Companion to Rawls, p. 38 and Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America for such a position). It is mass murders and genocides which has made American constitutional democracy possible. If Rawls’ presumption about constitutional democracies is contrary to facts then it would be a fatal blow to his arguments.
Michael Mann has argued that there is a necessary relationship between liberal democracy and genocide [M Mann (1999) “The Dark Side of Democracy” New Left Review 1:255: pp. 18-45]. Liberal democracies commit ideologically legitimated genocide (Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq) argues Mann. The greater the commitment to homogenise comprehensive doctrines through the acceptance of liberal norms as universal norm and the consequent (equal) trivialisation of comprehensive doctrines, the greater the temptation to murder those who refuse to accept these norms. This “other” has to be coerced or induced to assimilate i.e. to submit to the sovereignty of liberal order. Submission to liberalism is a necessary condition for survival in constitutional democratic order. Liberalism does not advocate peaceful coexistence. Races such as the Red Indian and states such as Islamic Afghanistan, which do not submit to the sovereignty of liberalism, have to be exterminated. The edifice of liberal America was built on the corpses of the Red Indians and the preservation of global liberal order requires the mass slaughter of the Afghans and Iraqis. Mann is conscious of liberalism’s compulsive commitment to exterminate “outsiders” when he discusses the behaviour of settler communities in eighteenth century North America – “the greater the democracy among the perpetuators the greater the genocide (ibid; p. 26). The (liberal) rule of “we the people” thus necessarily requires the elimination of the other. That is why “ethnic cleansing, murder, deporting, genocide was central to the liberal modernity of the New World “(ibid; p. 27). Several authors have also demonstrated the oppressive and totalising nature of American society (see False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, pp. 99-132). It is just not possible that Rawls can carry on with his argumentation without explicitly dealing with these facts.
Finally Rawls’ argument is logically ambiguous. One the one hand he seems to argue that it is not possible to agree on one single comprehensive doctrine because of the nature of free reason and due to the nature of free institutions. This is what he seems to be saying when he claims that reasonable pluralism is the fact of life in modern societies. On the other hand he seems to be saying that this is a general fact and it has no specific relation to modern societies. Therefore he assumes that even in the societies of the Middle Ages adherence to one single comprehensive view could not have been maintained except through oppression and use of force. Now these are two different arguments and cannot go very far together. Rawls’ account tacitly reaps the benefit of this ambiguity.
If the first line of argument is correct then Rawls cannot put the emphasis he lays on the nature of life in the Middle Ages and on religious wars since obviously those were the periods in which free human institutions and free reason did not exist. To claim otherwise Rawls would have to refer to a comprehensive doctrine which he does not want to do. For example he would have to say that freedom is somehow in human nature or something like this, which obviously would require invoking some sort of comprehensive doctrine. If on the other hand Rawls is arguing along the second line then he would have to prove that it is somehow in the nature of comprehensive doctrines that make them oppressive. Obviously Rawls has not made any such argument in his published work. His argument has been based on the existence of what he calls reasonable pluralism which presupposes the existence of free reason and free institution along with comprehensive doctrines which are already conditioned by free reason and hence are reasonable. It seems to me that invocation of religious wars and inquisition in the Middle Ages has nothing to do with Rawls’ argument. However the imagery is very important not only to divert attention from liberal oppression but also to install fear in populations and intellectuals about the prospects of the revival of religion.
Islamic movements have normally conceived liberal democracy as compatible with their own comprehensive framework. Even those who reject it instinctively are unable to explain what is wrong with democracy especially constitutional democracy. Rawls’ account of political liberalism gives us an initial opportunity to correct this error.
Liberalism treats constitutional democracy as the most rational position reached by human social and political progress. It considers liberal constitutional democracy as the very meaning of reasonableness. It is unreasonable to reject liberalism argues Rawls.
Liberalism (both in its conservative and progressive forms) pretends that it gives opportunity to every religion to be free in shaping the private and public life of its adherents without any interference. The only condition liberalism puts on religion is that it accepts the notion of equal freedom for others and cede the arena of the political to the secular. However as we have seen accepting liberalism involves more than this (here and here). It involves a radical reconfiguration of religious worldviews. In Rawls’ liberal society Muslims are not allowed to follow the religion of their Imams, they are only allowed to follow the Islam of somebody like An-Na’im (see here) who is more concerned whether Islam and Muslims comply with American constitutional order than with the Will of Allah!
Liberals pretend that they are tolerant but in fact there is extreme intolerance working at the core of the liberal doctrine. Rawls’ commentator and colleague Dreben puts it clearly and incisively:
What Rawls is saying is that there is in a constitutional liberal democracy a tradition of thought which it is our job to explore and see whether it can be made coherent and consistent. . . We are not arguing for such a society. We take for granted that today only a fool would not want to live in such a society . . . If one cannot see the benefits of living in a liberal constitutional democracy, if one does not see the virtue of that ideal, then I do not know how to convince him. To be perfectly blunt, sometimes I am asked, when I go around speaking for Rawls, What do you say to an Adolf Hitler? The answer is [nothing.] You shoot him. You do not try to reason with him. Reason has no bearing on this question. So I do not want to discuss it (Dreben in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, pp. 328-329, italics in the original).
This is an honest interpretation of the core of what Rawls contends. Rawls starts with constitutional democracy as a fact of reason and he also takes reasonable pluralism as the fact of reason. He argues his case from there. Through this method he excludes any argument with what is beyond constitutional democracy. What is not liberal or what is not compatible with liberalism is by definition unreasonable. There is an extreme intolerance at the core of liberalism which is manifested in its search to reshape everything or at least limit everything according to its own image. This should give those from the Islamic movements who are dazzled by liberalism some lessons about the true nature of constitutional democracy.
Apart from that it is clear that even if liberalism provides Islam with a place ‘under the sun’ on the condition that Islam should accept liberal notions of political autonomy and equality it is unacceptable. It is unacceptable because Allah’s Will cannot be divided or limited. As the Glorious Quran makes it clear: “O ye who believe! Enter into Islam all inclusively; And follow not the foot steps of the Evil One; For he is to you an avowed enemy” (Al-Quran, 2: 208). Muslims cannot cede part of Islam’s authority to liberalism without compromising this fundamental injunction of Allah. Islam is not about finding a place under the sun. It is the last message of the Lord of all which cannot be changed or compromised for any contingent reasons.
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*Habermas realises this when he writes, “Each religion is originally a “worldview” or, as Rawls puts it, a “comprehensive doctrine,” in the sense that it lays claim to the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. A religion that has become just one among several confessions must abandon this claim to comprehensively shape life. Under the conditions of pluralism the life of the religious community must differentiate itself from the life of the larger political community. A prevailing religion loses its political impact on society at large if the political order no longer obeys the religious ethos” (Jürgen Habermas “Intolerance and Discrimination” International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2003: pp. 2-12, here, p. 6).
** It is interesting to note that due to instinctive realisation of this internal contradiction of his account Rawls introduces a term partial comprehensive doctrine (see Political Liberalism, pp. 13 and 175) but the term comprehensive doctrine is contradiction in itself and does not seem to me very promising at all.
posted by Alghazalians at 1:34 PM
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