Political Liberalism, Western History, and the Conjectural Non-West

DOI10.1177/0090591720927802
Published date01 April 2021
Date01 April 2021
AuthorLoubna El Amine
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-170ChyR86wBAjP/input 927802PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720927802Political TheoryEl Amine
research-article2020
Article
Political Theory
2021, Vol. 49(2) 190 –214
Political Liberalism,
© The Author(s) 2020
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Western History,
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and the Conjectural
Non-West
Loubna El Amine1
Abstract
Taking its distance from classical liberalism, political liberalism seeks to
avoid controversial metaphysical assumptions by starting from institutional
features of modern polities. Political liberalism also extends the limits of
liberal toleration by envisioning societies that it considers nonliberal but
decent. This article is concerned with the relationship between these two
dimensions of political liberalism, specifically as they are instantiated in the
work of John Rawls. I show that these two dimensions are in tension with each
other. Put simply, if political liberalism is institutional, then decent societies
are impossible. Decent societies are only conceivable within the ahistorical
realm of values—a realm that Rawls sometimes slips into, even though its
avoidance is central to political liberalism’s claim of distinctiveness. Rawls’s
appeal to hypotheticals to defend his account of decent societies only serves
to mask this tension and to foreclose important avenues of inquiry about the
non-Western world. I also deploy throughout the article archival material
that evinces Rawls’ concern with ethnocentrism but also the difficulties he
faced in coming up with an adequate account of non-Western societies.
On the argument I offer here, this intractability is to be expected, since
Rawls did not recognize that the problems with his account were not purely
philosophical, but in fact, sociological, political, and historical.
Keywords
Political liberalism, John Rawls, decent societies, hypotheticals, global justice,
the non-Western world
1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Loubna El Amine, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208-0001,
USA.
Email: loubna.elamine@northwestern.edu

El Amine
191
Political liberalism, the philosophical approach introduced by John Rawls
and now adopted by various other scholars as well,1 aims to improve upon
classical liberalism in two ways. First, it seeks to avoid controversial meta-
physical and epistemological premises in political inquiry; political liberals
begin their normative thinking not from stylized faculties attributed to
abstract individuals but rather from institutional features identified as crucial
to modern polities. Second, political liberals distance themselves from classi-
cal liberalism by allowing for the possibility of legitimate but nonliberal
modes of political organization; in The Law of Peoples, Rawls writes of
“decent” societies worthy of liberal toleration.2 In this article, I show that
these two dimensions of political liberalism are in tension with one another.
The argument, in its first layer, is that when Rawls looks at decent societ-
ies, he lets go of his institutionalism. His lens for viewing non-Western soci-
eties is simply Islam as a set of beliefs. On a second level, I contend that this
inconsistency reveals a deeper tension within political liberalism—that
between what Michael Blake calls “institutional and noninstitutional the-
ory.”3 As I will show in the essay, Rawls slips from an institutional account
into ideational explanations for the emergence of Western liberal democra-
cies; while he primarily explains the importance of the Reformation in terms
of pluralism, he sometimes surreptitiously falls back on a story about
Protestantism. Even as, on the other hand, the explicit account of decent soci-
eties is ideational rather than institutional, Rawls in fact implicitly builds into
it key institutional premises, including the fact of diversity, the state form,
and (decent societies’ participation in) the global state system. Building on
this last point, I contend that, once the inconsistencies are revealed and the
primacy of the institutional account is reestablished, decent societies turn out
to be impossible, for the features Rawls tacitly attributes to them are precisely
the ones that he uses to explain why Western societies become liberal.
I also show that the impossibility of decent societies is papered over by
Rawls’s appeal to “hypotheticals” and “conjectures.” While hypotheticals in
political liberalism are supposed to be based on idealizations of existing insti-
tutions, what Rawls offers in his account of decent societies are, instead,
abstract conjectures based on ideas from another historical era. Moreover, the
conjectures shut down the conversation precisely where it is most important
to keep it open—namely, where it concerns actually understanding the non-
Western world today. In doing so, the appeal to them becomes more problem-
atic than the account of decency itself—or, as the Arabic proverb has it, the
excuse is uglier than the mistake.
None of this is to suggest that the account of decent societies in The Law
of Peoples is a facile move on Rawls’part; I deploy throughout the article
archival material that evinces his deep concern with ethnocentrism. But what

192
Political Theory 49(2)
this material also shows is that Rawls really struggled to come up with an
adequate account of non-Western societies. On the argument I offer here, this
intractability is to be expected, since Rawls did not recognize that the prob-
lems with his account were not purely philosophical, but in fact, sociological,
political, and historical.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I present Rawls’s concern with
avoiding ethnocentrism and his consequent account of decent societies.
Second, I focus on the supposed differences in the political organization of
liberal democracies and decent societies. In the third part, I tease out the his-
tory behind these differences, pondering the origins, for Rawls, of the bifur-
cation between the liberal and nonliberal worlds and revealing his uneasy
sliding between modernity and liberalism, institutions and ideas, materialist
and religious explanations, and, therefore, political conceptions and compre-
hensive doctrines. My contention here is that the institutional side of this
account cannot make sense of the differences, described in the preceding
section, in the political organization of liberal democracies and decent societ-
ies. In the following section, I develop this contention further, showing that
the inspiration for Rawls’s main example of a decent society, Kazanistan, is
indeed not institutional but ideational. Kazanistan is conceptualized on the
basis of Islamic values; it is not an idealization of an Islamic “people.” The
language of hypotheticals only serves to obscure the unjustified sliding here
from institutional to noninstitutional theory and the fact that Kazanistan is, on
Rawls’s own account, institutionally impossible.
In the concluding section, I suggest some important avenues of inquiry
about global justice foreclosed by the Rawlsian approach to imagining non-
liberal societies. Given Rawls’s stature and legacy, ultimately the worry is not
just about the roads he himself did not take but about how his way of pro-
ceeding becomes, as Katrina Forrester puts it, “a constraint on what kind of
theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined.”4
I. Decency beyond Ethnocentrism
In The Law of Peoples—first published in 1999—John Rawls advances the
category of “decent” peoples. Decent peoples are those peoples who,
although not liberal, should be tolerated by liberal ones. He lists two crite-
ria that societies should fulfill to be counted as decent.5 The first criterion
is that the society not have “aggressive aims” against other societies. The
second criterion is that the society secure basic rights for its members in
accordance with its “common good idea of justice,” that the duties it
imposes are such as to be seen by citizens as “fitting with their common
good idea of justice and . . . not . . . as mere commands imposed by force,”

El Amine
193
and that its officials sincerely believe that “the law is indeed guided by a
common good idea of justice.”6 Furthermore, Rawls argues that a “decent
consultation hierarchy,” which is “one kind of decent people” (leaving the
possibility open that there be other kinds),7 is ruled by a comprehensive
(religious or philosophical) doctrine.8 Rawls then gives an example of such
a decent consultation hierarchy, an “idealized Islamic people” that he calls
Kazanistan; I return to Kazanistan later in this essay.9
Although the judgment about whether nonliberal societies are decent or
not is made from within the “point of view of [liberal societies’] own political
conceptions,” Rawls submits that the Law of Peoples should not therefore be
considered ethnocentric.10 He argues that whether it is “ethnocentric or
merely western” turns not on its “time, place, or culture of origin” but on its
“content” and whether this content “satisfies the criterion of reciprocity.”11
Rawls is thus keen to describe decent societies in such a way as to satisfy this
criterion, providing conditions minimal enough for liberal and decent societ-
ies to be different from each other but demanding enough for them to respect
(and abstain from interfering in the internal affairs of) each other.
Although the question...

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