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This post is basically going to be a roundabout way to link to Hilzoy's explication of John Rawls' views on merit. Blog posts are rarely so smart. So I'm just going to put the link up near the top. See? Here it is. Hilzoy is in conversation with Bill Galston, who is trying to prove that Rawls' political philosophy is inappropriately abstract for the muddy realities of contemporary politics. Linda Hirschman has, in posts lost to the TNR archive but quoted in my archives, argued much the same thing. Underpinning these discussions is a shared belief that Rawls' political philosophy in some sense mattered to American politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. Thus, if it is found to be unsuitable for sustained electoral combat, some replacement should be sought. But I'd really like someone to defend that view. Rawls, I think it's fair to say, is widely understood to be the leading philosopher of the welfare state. As Brittanica puts it, "his work is widely interpreted as providing a philosophical foundation for egalitarian liberalism as imperfectly manifested in the modern capitalist welfare state or in a market-oriented social democracy." The periods of Democratic history that most sharply manifested welfare state ideals and considerations were the New Deal and the Great Society. The New Deal happened in the 30s. The Great Society was enacted in the 60s. Rawls first published A Theory of Justice in 1971. Suggesting that liberalism needed Rawls to agree on its basic ideological consensus seems a bit ahistorical. That's not to say the field of political philosophy didn't need Rawls to establish a basic framework for thinking about the dominant liberal approach, and nor is it to deny the value of political philosophy in general. But the flow of impact seems to have gone from politics to philosophy, rather than the other way around. To put it another way: If John Rawls had never existed, its very clear that American political philosophy would look very different. But is it actually clear that American politics would look even a little bit changed?