SAINT JOHNTherefore, Rousseau concludes: ‘‘This [paradox] is what has always forced the fathers
of nations to have recourse to the intervention of heaven and to attribute their own
wisdom to the Gods; so that the people, subjected to the laws of the State as to those of
nature, and recognizing the same power in the formation of man and of the City, might
obey and bear with docility the yoke of public felicity.’’^33 Only through the appeal to
heaven, then, can spirit and reason come to obey what is made to appear as a law of
nature, just as it is only through a ‘‘purely civil profession of faith’’ that ‘‘the sentiments
of sociability without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject’’ can
be maintained.^34 Rousseau reasserts, then, the centrality of myth and miracle to the prob-
lem of political founding: specifically, he affirms the necessity of a discourse that exceeds
reason and law, that appeals to powers beyond the scope of these faculties, beyond the
proper functions of reason and law.
Where God’s place has been so elegantly suppressed in Kant’s critical system that
contemporary Kantian liberals can proceed as though he were never there, he strides
unavoidably to the foreground in Rousseau’s work. The theological basis of the civil order,
which is so clear in Rousseau’sSocial Contract, is renegotiated but preserved throughout
Rawls’s work. Whatever else changes betweenA Theory of JusticeandPolitical Liberalism,
the negotiation of Rousseau’s paradox persists in the procedure ofreflective equilibrium,
where an adequate ‘‘sense of justice’’ must be present in advance for an individual to
adopt the ‘‘principles of justice,’’ as well as in the procedure of Kantian, or constitutional,
constructionas it is undertaken by a society inPolitical Liberalism.What has gone unno-
ticed is the persistence not only of the paradox, but of its theological negotiation, as well:
rather than placing his ‘‘wisdom’’ in the mouth of gods, through an array of textual
procedures, and through the agency of those who have been drawn to follow him and
enshrine him as such, Rawls is made to accede to the position of a ‘‘saintly as well as
wise’’ interlocutor capable of stirring the needed conviction without express recourse to
gods.
In its new form, the problem goes something like this. On the one hand, Rawls’s
logical demonstrations aren’t sufficient to compel a reader to change his or her principles,
certainly not if he or she does not accept the norms operative in the demonstration. As
Rawls himself might have put it, ‘‘principles of justice’’ cannot direct one’s conduct if the
corresponding ‘‘sense of justice’’ is not in place, or, perhaps more directly, there’s no way
of reasoning with the unreasonable. On the other hand, it certainly cannot be maintained
that Rawls has—or, at least, when he launched his product, that hehad—at his disposal an
institutional apparatus sufficient to inculcate such a sense of justice through disciplinary
practices alone. In other words, while it’s not satisfying to say that he’s made his point
through propositional reasoning, it’s not satisfying, either, to say that he’s had his way
through literal force. As Rousseau so carefully put the point, what is required is an appeal
to ‘‘another order of authority.’’ In what follows, I will call this, alternately, the saintly
measure, the rhetorical form, and the micropolitical circulation of his doctrine and will
PAGE 351351.................16224$ CH18 10-13-06 12:35:47 PS