Submitted by Blain Neufeld, May 16, 2007 09:21

While Steven Smith criticises Rawls's (perhaps inevitable) tendency to view the works of the great political philosophers ‘through the lenses of his own moral preoccupations', Smith appears to do precisely the same in his own presentation of the nature of the history of political philosophy. While many important political philosophers were indeed 'untimely' in the views that they advocated, Rawls's own approach is not without important precedent. More precisely, Rawls's approach to political philosophy -- which, roughly, attempts to criticise, reconstruct, and further develop the political ideas and values found in the our historically developed political culture -- is roughly the same approach to political philosophy pursued by such important thinkers as Aristotle and Hegel (in addition to Hume). Rawls himself, in ‘Justice as Fairness: A Restatement' (2001), describes his project as broadly ‘Hegelian' in nature, that is, an attempt to discover and elaborate the ‘rational' in existing political culture and practice. It is also worth noting that Smith is quite incorrect in portraying Rawls's theory of justice as providing a ‘rationalisation' or defence of the welfare state, given that Rawls himself explicitly rejected such a view. Instead, in Aristotelian fashion, Rawls thought that his theory of justice yielded a ‘property-owning democracy' that differed significantly from existing welfare states.

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