Suffering and Justice

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno wrote:

Black shrouds cover the horizon of a state of freedom that would no longer require either repression or morality, because drives would no longer have to be expressed in destruction. It is not in their nauseating parody, sexual repression, that moral questions are succinctly posed; it is in lines such as: No man should be tortured; there should be no concentration camps -- while all of this continues in Asia and Africa and is repressed merely because, as ever, the humanity of civilization is inhumane towards the people it shamlessly brands as uncivilized. (p. 285)

Five years after Adorno wrote these words, John Rawls published his monumental A Theory of Justice. Rawls' work transformed the academic practices of economics, law, and political and moral philosophy. Since 1971, he revised and refined the picture of justice developed in TJ, with Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and an exercise in international political theory, The Law of Peoples.

It has been said (by me, actually) that A Theory of Justice is a transcendental deduction of the New Deal. (I presume that readers of this blog will not need to have that joke explained.) Although Rawls attempts (in Justice as Fairness) to distance himself from that interpretation, I suspect that much of the continuing allure of Rawls is owed to the thought that the New Deal required a transcendental deduction, and that Rawls provided it.

And yet it has largely escaped notice that the world has not become a more just place since 1971, that the explosion of "the Rawls industry" has done precisely nothing to halt or even slow the dismantling of the welfare state, that Adorno's lines are as true today as they were forty years ago, and that even fewer seem to care about that truth than did forty years ago.