896034

book-review2019
PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719896034Political TheoryBook Review

Book Review
Political Theory
1­–5
Book Review © The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

The Habermas-Rawls Debate, by James Gordon Finlayson. New York: Columbia

University Press, 2019, 312 pp.

Reviewed by: Todd Hedrick, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, MI, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719896034

The series of essays and replies now known as the Habermas-Rawls debate
took place in 1995 and was, at the time, hotly anticipated in the world of
ideas—Rawls and Habermas were widely regarded as the leading figures in
Anglo-American and European-continental political philosophy, respec-
tively. Both were in the midst of their late career primes, having recently
completed landmark works, namely, Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993)
and Habermas’s 1992 magnum opus of legal and democratic theory,
Faktizität und Geltung (translated [1996] as Between Facts and Norms).
Moreover, their mutual affinity for neo-Kantian methods in normative the-
ory, and their shared goal of deepening and extending the democratic wel-
fare-state, made them look like potentially apt conversation partners (7).
While the exchange has not been without influence, it is nevertheless
widely perceived as something of a misfire; initially focused on a relatively
narrow set of issues, the great philosophers appear to have ended up largely
talking past one another. While not seeking to entirely dispel this impres-
sion, James Gordon Finlayson’s book, The Habermas-Rawls Debate, con-
vincingly makes the case that a great deal can be learned about the strengths
and shortcomings of these theories by grasping the sources of the authors’
mutual misapprehension, as much as from evaluating the criticisms that
landed more cleanly (10–11).
This book should quickly establish itself as the definitive account of the
debate. It is lucid and penetrating, drilling deeply into both the inner work-
ings of the theories that serve as the debate’s backdrop, as well as the par-
ries and thrusts of the exchange itself. The book manages to canvass a wide
array of issues, subissues, and secondary literature, even while it is always
right to the point, driving toward a firm conclusion concerning whatever
2 Political Theory 00(0)

disputed question is currently in its sights. Readers will not find much in
the way of tangent or equivocation in Finlayson’s writing. Although
Finlayson’s previous work is more closely affiliated with Habermas than
Rawls, I do not think anyone is liable to regard him as less than generally
evenhanded—indeed, he tends to be rather harder on Habermas than Rawls.
For anyone looking to examine what can be gleaned from this debate—or
for that matter, engaged in work that involves any comparison between the
two paradigms of political philosophy that Rawls and Habermas repre-
sent—there is really nowhere else to start.
The book’s organization is straightforward and tightly focused on the
four corners of the debate itself. After an introduction that outlines the
exchange’s basic shape and context, and surveys prevailing scholarly
opinion concerning its upshot (or lack thereof), Finlayson devotes a chap-
ter to the evolution of Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective conceptions of
justice and another to Habermas’s earlier critiques of Rawls. This is fol-
lowed by a pair of excellent chapters on Between Facts and Norms and
Political Liberalism, which furnish readers with quite a precise sense of
the aspects of those books needed in order to appreciate where the authors
were coming from in their exchange. Individual chapters then follow on
each of the three essays that comprised the exchange: Habermas’s initial
review of Political Liberalism; Rawls’s lengthy reply; and Habermas’s
follow-up, which abandons some of his initial criticisms (i.e., concerning
the original position), renews others (i.e., his sense that there is a demo-
cratic deficit in Rawls’s philosophy), and questions whether Rawls ought
to be allowed to excuse himself from philosophical controversies about the
nature of truth and rightness. Finlayson devotes a final chapter to what he
sees as the major ongoing legacy of the exchange in debates about public
reason and religion in the public sphere.
As this sketch makes apparent, Finlayson is focused much more on what
the Habermas-Rawls debate actually was rather than imagining what it could
or should have been. He sets himself to the task of settling accounts by ren-
dering summary judgments on which criticisms lodged in the back-and-forth
have merit and which do not. Readers who persist in finding the debate to
have been a dud may find this strategy laborious, but Finlayson’s approach is
invaluable for those of us who have struggled with these texts and found
ourselves wondering why it should be so difficult to set up a direct confronta-
tion between two philosophers whose work seems substantively and method-
ologically comparable. Finlayson argues that the way the authors chose to
frame their disagreements was flawed from the start (2, 155). Rawls and
Habermas understood the major point of contact between their theories in
terms of the contrasting ways they operationalize the perspective of impartial
Book Review 3

justification in order to generate morally justified norms and principles—

namely, the original position and discourse ethics. This framing failed to cap-
ture the way that both theorists had, in their later work, moved away from the
strategy of grounding political justification directly in moral theory. Moreover,
Habermas sets up a contrast that Finlayson sees as ultimately misguided;
whereas Habermas insists that his discourse ethics is essentially procedural,
requiring actual discourse among those affected by the application of a norm,
he views Rawls’s procedure of justification as “monological.” This thought
informs many, if not most, of Habermas’s bones of contention, either directly
(i.e., that Rawls supposedly subordinates democracy to a philosophically
constructed conception of justice) or indirectly (i.e., that Rawls’s justifica-
tions for justice, reasonableness, and civility are normatively ambiguous
[201–202]). The problem, as Finlayson argues, is that Habermas’s require-
ment for dialogue among all affected is, at most, aspirational, and in any
event, he smuggles morally substantive conditions for validity (e.g., the free-
dom and equality of participants in discourse) into what are allegedly proce-
dural conditions for discursive validity (182). Although Finlayson does
concede that Rawls can be justly faulted for having comparatively little to say
about democracy, generally, and how democracy ought to be institutionalized
(246), in particular, he concludes that “the claim that Habermas’s theory is
more strictly procedural than Rawls’s is not borne out” (167).
I found this line of argument compelling but not wholly persuasive. Should
we grant Finlayson’s point (which he ably argues for here and elsewhere) that
Habermas cannot sustain a “tenable distinction between monological and
weakly dialogical procedures in moral discourse,” I do not think it necessar-
ily follows that “the same goes for political discourse” (186). Habermas’s
“system of rights” from Between Facts and Norms offers a normative recon-
struction of the way the constitutional rule of law shapes democratic lawmak-
ing and public affairs, such that their outcomes can be regarded as enjoying a
presumption of rational acceptability. However, because he sees matters of
public regulation as concretely mediated through law, in which narrowly
moral questions are entwined with ethical, pragmatic, and institutional ones
that have to be sorted and weighed in an ongoing process, Habermas does not
see morality as circumscribing democratic legitimacy in the way Rawls’s
conception of justice does. Finlayson is well aware of this pretension of
Habermas’s, but doubts its cogency, emphasizing that Habermas has a suc-
cess (as opposed to an error) theory of morality and insists on a “razor-sharp”
(a phrase of Habermas’s that Finlayson quotes often) distinction between
morality and ethical conceptions of the good, and so he must see moral norms
as somehow constraining what can be taken as a legitimate outcome (90–98).
But however much Habermas does claim that there are justified moral norms
4 Political Theory 00(0)

that are distinct from any conception of the good, we need not see him as
holding that this distinction can be used to abstract substantive moral norms
from the legal, pragmatic, and ethical dimensions involved in their institu-
tionalization in a way that would clearly delineate the range of legitimate
outcomes, prior to democratic deliberations taking place. To this extent, I
give more credence than Finlayson to Habermas’s contention that Rawls, in
his role as the political philosopher, selectively works up what he takes to be
widely shared (among reasonable citizens) moral intuitions and then imposes
the product of that workup (the political conception of justice) upon actual
citizens. Although Finlayson’s chapter 6 quite lucidly draws out all of the
ways in which Rawls’s constructivism and model of reflective equilibrium
are intended to capture an ongoing process of justification undertaken by the
citizens themselves, he allows Rawls’s repeated assertion that reasonable
political values are “very great values and not easily overridden” to do a lot
of work in bridging the divide between philosophers and citizens, even
though the nature of this claim (is it factual? if not that—or not only that—
then what?) remains ambiguous.
Of course, it is not to be expected that Finlayson’s arguments will convert
partisans of all stripes, and his book is much more interesting for being so
sharply argued. Moreover, he is extraordinarily skilled at showing his work,
such that readers who find that they disagree with him about this or that are
always superbly well-equipped to trace their disagreement to its nub of con-
tention. Along those lines, let me close by noting one more aspect of
Finlayson’s analysis that I take to be genuinely groundbreaking. The issue
that looms over the Habermas-Rawls debate, and, more than anything, looks
to be responsible for the impression that these two theories ended up being
ships passing in the night is Rawls’s characterization of his own theory as
merely political, avoiding philosophical controversy and metaphysical com-
mitments, so that it might serve as a “module” for public justification, in
contrast to Habermas’s, which is a comprehensive doctrine that cannot play
that role (10). This characterization has often served as a kind of Rawlsian
trump card against all manner of objections, and my own thoughts about how
to put Rawls and Habermas into some kind of productive dialogue with each
other has often met with frustration at precisely this point. Finlayson has done
more than anyone I am aware of to cast this division as both a real point of
contrast and one that can be framed in a way where the issues are tractable.
Finlayson denies that we should let stand the picture of Rawls as producing
normatively substantial conclusions out of uncontroversial premises:
“Rawls’s political liberalism makes all kinds of philosophical assumptions . .
. the method of avoidance and its rationale are themselves controversial phil-
osophical claims open to reasonable disagreement” (187). The method of
Book Review 5

avoidance is part and parcel of a value-laden conception of what political

theory should strive to contribute to society; seen from this vantage, the
“underlying methodological difference between the two theorists” concerns
“whether political theory is fundamentally part of politics or is a theoretical
discipline that has politics as its object” (207). This strikes me as exactly
right, and I wish that Finlayson had pursued this line of thought a bit further,
as the positions of both philosophers on these venerable theory-and-practice
questions could stand to be clarified, and their debate can still provide the
occasion for doing so. But as it stands, Finlayson deserves immense credit for
framing the conflict between comprehensive and political modes of theoriz-
ing with hitherto unmatched perspicuity.