The Nature of Political Theory

164 The Nature of Political Theory

is a response to the fears generated by wars of religion, following the Reformation
(see Shklar 1984). For Rawls, religious wars ‘profoundly affect the requirements of a
workable conception of political justice: such a conception must allow for a diversity
of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, concep-
tions of the good affirmed by members of existing democratic societies’ (Rawls in
Strong (ed.) 1992: 96). Religious civil war therefore created the need for tolerance
and tolerance created the ground for political liberalism, where citizens are treated
in abstraction from their substantive notions of the good. For Rawls, therefore ‘the
public conception of justice should be so far as possible, independent of controver-
sial philosophical and religious doctrines...the public conception of justice is to be
political, not metaphysical’ (Rawls in Strong (ed.) 1992: 95).
In summary, Rawls’ argument is that political liberalism came about as a result
of religious and metaphysical conflict generated by events such as the Reformation.
Political liberalism is addressed, almost as a council of despair. The problem of lib-
eralism, for Rawls, is reasonable pluralism. Citizens will disagree about metaphysical
and moral issues. However, we can draw upon the ‘conditions of possibility’—that is
the implicit conventions or ‘ideal characters’ to Oakeshott—of interaction within lib-
eral democratic cultures. These provide a minimal structure of principles of practical
reason, which supply a regulative political groundwork for cooperation, in effect, an
overlapping consensus. Rawls’ vision of liberal citizenship is thus minimalist, con-
strained, protective, and negative. Like Richard Rorty and Judith Shklar, he also
envisions his own version of liberalism as one arising out of ‘fear’. The politically lib-
eral citizen, for Rawls, is thus a fearful being, aware that any substantive moral beliefs
she may have will not be carried into the public sphere, and thus seeking minimal
conditions for cooperation.
The fact that Rawls’ work is so deeply rooted in neo-Kantian thought, is certainly
not unrelated to his judgement about the nature and role of comprehensive meta-
physics and theology and thus the problem of pluralism. Rawls is, in his own terms, a
neo-Kantian constructivist, although it is a much transformed Kantianism. It embod-
ies a political constructivism, rather than a moral constructivism (Rawls 1993: 99ff.).
Rawls works with a considerably subdued, thinned down, view of reason. Rawls’ own
constructivism therefore lacks the will or ability to defend the overarching substant-
ive significance and coherence of reason. Yet, despite Rawls’ difference from Kant,
he still nonetheless works in the same generic Kantian philosophical framework. He
largely accepts the background Kantian assumptions concerning the limits to reason.
Kantians, in effect, have all tended to be deeply uneasy with metaphysics. Rawls is
but one in a long philosophical tradition. Faith and reason are always rigorously
separated. Metaphysical conflict is not something to be resolved. It is always caught
in antinomies. Forms of scientific reason come to the fore as the epitome of know-
ledge. Kantianism has thus become, for many, phenomenalism—a doctrine about
the critical limitations of knowledge to sense perception and the natural sciences.
For Hegelian-orientated writers, however, these dualisms of reason and value
or fact and value, have always been regarded with deep suspicion. Such dualisms
tried to salvage religion from the encroachments of natural science, but they did