MATTHEW SCHERERreflect on the matter at hand, values, principles, and standards are so formulated and
arranged that they are freely recognized as ones we do, or should, accept.... Our feeling
coerced is perhaps our being surprised at the consequences of those principles and stan-
dards, at the implications of our free recognition.’’^49 Or perhaps it is the result of a power-
ful circuit of resonant thought and feeling being established between various values,
principles, standards, images, emotions, identifications, aspirations, and arguments Rawls
has brought into circulation. All the while Rawls is arguing for a moral and political order
based upon the normative force of reason, a force derived from the individual feelings of
guilt and shame one feels on account of one’s actions in the face of this reason, he relies
on putting something like this force into play to make his argument, or to make one
listen long enough for him to make his argument, while his readers are held captive on
pain of inchoate feelings that may only later come to be called guilt or shame. Indeed, he
seems to assume that the disposition to have those feelings is already in place, working
on and through the reader before the principles that would give them their name, their
moral form, and their political authorization. In short, the reader is drawn to accept the
very terms under discussion by the circulation of thought between multiple layers of the
discussion itself, by way of a discourse that touches argument, feelings, and norms of
conversational propriety at once, creating an internal circulation among them.
At his most provocative, Rawls is engaged in a sophisticated and rhetorically nuanced
effort to foster the conditions of agreement needed to carry the convictions his arguments
are supposed to support. For Rawls’s argument, everything depends upon his reader being
inclinedjust so. And for a rhetorical analysis of this argument, everything depends on
coming to understand how a reader is encouraged to become so inclined. Though it can
be forcefully argued that Rawls’s project fails as a diagnosis of our political condition and
that it amounts to an unappealing account of what our politics should be, neither of these
descriptions captures what Rawls is doing most effectively. And neither claim engages the
modalities through which faith in his project is established and maintained. On the con-
trary, such critiques of Rawls, in arguing that he displaces politics or otherwise denies its
importance, glide over the immense and, to judge from the broad, sympathetic reception
of his work, effective effort he makes to convert his readers: such critiques take his strong
performance to be a weak description, mistaking the character of a saint for that of a fool.
The Second Basis of Rawls’s Sainthood
I would like to conclude by suggesting a second, related basis for the claim that Rawls was
a saint. Along with the production of miraculous works, another central criterion of
sainthood is that the story of a saint’s life teaches something that cannot be taught in any
other way. As one reference work puts the matter, ‘‘the designation of a man or a woman
as a ‘saint’ is the judgment by the Christian community of the day, both in its local and
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