Personhood Usurped. Rawls And The Mistification Of The State

Personhood Usurped:
The Law of Peoples or the Mystification of the Liberal State
Emiliano Ruiz Parra
University College London


I. Introduction
Charles W. Mills wrote that John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is built on a theoretical framework that mystifies both the past and the present[1]. In this paper, I will demonstrate how such mystification enables Rawls to idealize thecontemporary liberal state, granting it a moral nature similar to personhood, and thus, shielding it from any potentially profound reformative action. I will develop a methodological critique. First, I will defend an empirical and non-ideal theoretical approach to criticizing Rawls, using Rawls’s own claims on history, politics and economics. My aim will be to show how Rawls, in order to buttresshis idealization of the liberal state, undertakes an inversion of facts and principles through presenting ideals as historical realities. My claim is that Rawls turns ought into is: The aspiration is told as if it were historical fact while real facts are obscured, dismissed or ignored. Mills critiques the Rawlsian process of sanitizing history from its legacies of exploitation, white supremacy,imperialism and gender oppression. I seek to analyse the methodological process through which such sanitation is carried out.
Secondly, I will address Rawls’s claim that corporate agents have a moral nature, or how actual states can become ideal peoples through a political exercise of reason. I propose that a peoples’s moral nature is not just an extension of an individual’s moral attribute, butrather a bestowal of personhood upon a specific breed of liberal states. I will argue that such a move is methodologically wrong and morally unacceptable because it dissolves the individual into the collective, undermining pluralism and individual autonomy, and makes the liberal state seem purely consensual. A second consequence not less important is that the liberal state looks as if stands at afinal process of historical development, morally perfect and thus free of the need to be reformed or rethought.
Thirdly, I will claim that Rawls puts forward a post-American global order. Rawls’s realistic utopia, though committed to defending the current liberal state and its hegemony over other alternatives, did not attempt to justify the United States and its role of global superpower. In myreading, this is not because Rawls dislikes the international environment under American domination, but because the United States troubles the whole empirical justification for democratic peace: not just due to its imperialist foreign policy, but also for its corrupted internal politics that Rawls takes on only tangentially but with disapproval. Rawls’s models for liberal peoples are the WesternEuropean liberal states, and his realistic utopia depicts a multilateral global order in which liberal states have the moral justifications to keep threats at bay, but do not extend their radius of domination. In that respect, the Law of Peoples sets a normative end to imperialism and suggests instead a weak domination of a liberal club of states.
Finally, I sketch general guidelines to be takeninto consideration in a normative account of global justice. If Rawls’s ideal theory distorts our grasp of the world and thus hampers our ability to change or reform it, an alternative theory should start with a commitment to comprehend the existing unjust global order. This does not mean a purely descriptive sociology or “physics of society” but a dialectical approach towards understanding whatthe world is and what it potentially can be, as Milciades Peña says. Here Rawls’s mystification of the liberal state must be altogether repudiated. Conversely, the moral egalitarianism that liberalism recognizes as one of its keystone values, should be adopted as an agenda of political change and a call for an “all purpose means” egalitarianism: personhood can only be achieved when all humans...