Political Liberalism and Public Reason: A Critical Notice of John Rawls, Political Liberalism

ions (taken strictly) omit or bracket certain predicates true of the matter from which they abstract. Rather the idea of closed society is an idealization that assumes predicates which are false of all existing human societies. Idealizations can of course be of great help in theory building. But they have to be handled with care. In particular, they have to handled with care in practical reasoning, whose aspiration is to fit the world (to some degree) to certain conceptions or principles. In theoretical reasoning an appeal to idealized conceptions (ideal gases, perfect vacuum) is disciplined by the fact that we seek to fit theory to the world: an idealization that is wide of the mark will reveal its failings. In practical reasoning an inappropriate idealization is not exposed to the same stringent test, and it is easy to conclude that the world rather than the idealization is at fault. In assuming an idealized, closed society as the context of political justification, Rawls takes it that the public who are the proper audience for one another's attempts at justification consists of fellow citizens, among whom there is in effect prior understanding that they form a people. That is why he can speak explicitly of citizens as sharing political identity (PL, xx), why he can designate 9In On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993) 42-82, and notes, 22030 (hereafter LP); see 44, 46. 100n Rawls on international justice see Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Rawls returned to the subject of international justice soon after the publication of Political Liberalism in his Amnesty Lecture, Law of Peoples.