The Unchallenged Dogma of Liberalism

Constitutivism is a genuinely holistic theory of government. I gave a transcendental argument against anarchism, according to which individual human identities exist only within the fabric of a political community, and I described realization of the personal and the common good as interdependent.

Having laid out constitutivism, my last step in this book will be to place it in contemporary discourse. With its holistic stance, constitutivism provides an alternative to the paradigm currently dominating political theory, which is philosophical liberalism. In this last chapter, I shall give my take on the liberal paradigm, what I see as the problems at its core, and how constitutivism differs.

This will necessitate a bit of literature review in the current section. The sections thereafter return to philosophical discussion. In these, I give a critical analysis of Rawls’ Theory of Justice, but without indulging in specialized debates.

Rawls’ theory is the intellectual background of much contemporary political discourse, including outside of academia, and one motivation behind my book is to offer an alternative. My analysis proceeds in three steps. Focusing on Rawls’ original text, I describe what motivates his philosophical construction (see section “The Pitfalls of Kantian Autonomy”). I then outline this construction and critically discuss its premises, especially his definition of rationality (see section “Rawls’ Citizens Are Utility Maximizers”). Lastly, I describe the main fault lines between Rawls’ view and mine (see section “How Constitutivism Differs”).

Constitutivism belongs to a vanishingly small set of serious alternatives to Rawlsianism. For those who are interested in the state of the field, my concern in the rest of the current section is to demonstrate how uniform political theory currently is. Readers not interested in such meta-discourse for specialists are invited to move on to the next section directly.

In contemporary political philosophy broadly construed, there are other holistic perspectives than constitutivism—at least if by “contemporary” we mean works since the late twentieth century. Important examples already mentioned include communitarianism and feminist critiques of liberal individualism.