Marxism versus the realistic utopia of John Rawls

Abstract

With calculated excess, the British philosopher G. A. Cohen has recently written that John Rawls' Theory of Justice1 deserves to be considered, along with Plato's Republic and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, as one of the fundamental works of political philosophy. .2 The main reason given for including it in this triad is that, in Hegelian terms, the thinker's theory of Harvard represents the point at which the politics of the North American liberal left and European social democracy achieve self-awareness. Beyond the validity of this statement, the place given to Rawls by one of the most sophisticated Marxist philosophers of our day illustrates the impact of Rawlsian thought on socialism and historical materialism in particular. We do not propose here to carry out an exhaustive review of the contributions of Cohen and other leftist thinkers to the debate with liberal egalitarianism; We seek, instead, to develop some reflections on why the work of A bourgeois philosopher has achieved so much influence over a good part of the socialist tradition, especially among intellectuals who – despite other profound dissidence – share the need to recover the ethical content of Marxism and do not avoid, for dogmatic or tactical reasons, the challenge of polemize with the finest of contemporary bourgeois thought. It is not, of course, about proposing a return to a pre-scientific utopianism, but rather about balancing the explanatory dimension and the (repressed and/or denied) ethical-normative dimension of socialism.