MATTHEW SCHERERsche has given it to us, as the culmination, though still unwitting, of the long goodbye
European culture pays to its dead God, or (2), as Carl Schmitt has given it to us, as the
latest installment in a long line of sociological reinscriptions of the theological tradition.^20
Whatever precise determinations one settles upon, and no historian would be satisfied to
settle upon any one, both the concrete and ideational tendencies can safely be said to have
pressed political theory to articulate afresh its own foundations, thus giving birth to the
theory of the social contract. However the relation is stated, the emergence of new forms
of state power in need of justification, together with the need to secure the certainty of
human knowledge and meaning as they slipped free of tradition, conditioned modernity
and the articulation of contract theory.
But to say that Rawls’s politics responds to the pressures of the modern condition
and that this modern condition is marked by a theological order waning in the face of an
ascendant secular power says too much and too little at once. The relation between theo-
logical and secular orders of authority has been the object of continuous, delicate, and
varied treatment starting with the contract tradition’s earliest formulation in the work of
Hobbes; indeed, as recent scholarship asserts, this delicate treatment has been central to
these theories.^21 It has been clear from the outset that Rawls is most directly indebted to
Kant: he and his critics have undertaken what, by now, must be considered an exhaustive
exploration of this debt.^22 To trace the lineage back a step further, to Rousseau, will shed
more light on the theological problematic, however, as well as the peculiar political rein-
scription of this problematic performed by Rawls’s work. What is to be shown, then, is
how Rawls is continuous with Rousseau, how he inherits what is known in contemporary
political theory as the Rousseauean ‘‘paradox of politics,’’ and how his mode of negotiat-
ing this paradox is no less original than Rousseau’s, no less forceful, and no less to be
contended with.^23 It is worth noting that the contract tradition has never been silent about
this paradox and that one remarkable feature of Rawls’s work is that, far from neglecting
this political moment, he hasperformeda solution of the paradox that has elsewhere only
been indicated at a formal or theoretical level. Call this either the politics or the theology
of Rawlsian liberalism.
InThe Social Contract, Rousseau faces the problem of founding a just and enduring
polity given man’s imperfect (whether innocent or corrupt) political, cultural, and moral
state. This is Rousseau’s way of introducing his project: ‘‘I want to inquire whether there
can be a legitimate and reliable rule of administration in the civil order, taking men as
they are and laws as they can be,’’ wheretaking men as they areacknowledges that while
‘‘man is born free... everywhere he is in chains.’’^24 From the hands of God, man comes
well formed; by virtue of life in this world, he is corrupt: only by establishing the proper
order of political association can this perfection be reclaimed. In this sense, Rousseau
comes as close as a truly modern thinker can to the classical Christian problematic of
conversion or, at least, to the Augustinian form of this problematic as we are given to
witness it in hisConfessions. Rousseau departs from Augustine in imagining that the con-
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