Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism
In Rawls, Dewey and Constructivism, Eric Weber examines and critiques John Rawls’ epistemology and the unresolved tension – inherited from Kant – between Representationalism and Constructivism in Rawls’ work. Weber argues that, despite Rawls’ claims to be a constructivist, his unexplored Kantian influences cause several problems. In particular, Weber criticises Rawls’ failure to explain the origins of conceptions of justice, his understanding of “persons” and his revival of Social Contract Theory. Drawing on the work of John Dewey to resolve these problems, the book argues for a rigorously constructivist approach to the concept of justice and explores the practical implications of such an approach for Education.
- Publisher : Continuum Publishing
- Publication Date : 2010 hdbk, 2012 pbk
- Paperback : 176 pages
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Weber’s critique is … robust, judicious and collegial throughout… Weber has delivered a powerful [case].
Eric Thomas Weber’s excellent book raises a constructivist challenge against Rawls’s constructivism…Weber’s Deweyan critique of Rawls’s constructivist conception of justice points to the difficulty in grasping Kantian constructivism. In Rawls’s writings, the reference to Kantian constructivism is so vague as to be essentially meaningless. That is one of the implications of this very useful book.
Weber’s Rawls, Dewey and Constructivism provides a welcome addition to the Rawls literature by offering a Deweyan critique of, and alternative to, Rawlsian constructivism… In the contemporary political and economic climate, Weber’s call for strengthening the American tradition of public, humanistic education is refreshing.
Eric Weber provides a well considered and carefully crafted analysis of the work of John Rawls from a Pragmatist perspective. Chapter six alone, ‘Dewey and Rawls on Education,’ is worth the price of admission.
The insight Weber brings to his readers is that Dewey beat Rawls to the punch, and by grounding so much of his political philosophy in his philosophy of education, itself the product of a pervasive influence of evolutionary naturalism, Dewey’s practical philosophy is much more practical than Rawls’s… Weber is at his best when assessing tensions internal to Rawls’s version of constructivism, tensions that Weber thinks Deweyan constructivism, by means of his theory of education, avoids.
Weber explores how tensions between constructivism and representationalism in Rawls’ basic concepts of The Original Position and of Reflective Equilibrium bear on standards of objectivity in Rawls’ political philosophy. In response to such perceived tensions, and inspired by Dewey’s notion of inquiry, Weber sketches a more thorough-going constructivist notion of objectivity… Weber rightly stresses [that] Dewey’s ethics focuses on the moral development and educability of the self, not on freedom as ‘antecedent to moral situations … [and] to moral experience’.
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