Political Constructivism

In his 1993 Political Liberalism, John Rawls presents political constructivism as a revision of the Kantian conception originally developed in his 1980 Dewey Lectures (published as Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory), which is where the concept of constructivism enters the moral-political philosophical debate. By way of introduction, political constructivism is the view that the first principles of justice are not grounded in an independently existing order of facts or entities, but are constructed through an adequately specified procedure or device, yielding objective rather than subjective results that can be presented as freestanding from diverging and even opposed metaphysical doctrines. This view has distinctive and controversial implications regarding the method, the scope and the task of political philosophy. In this paper I present the idea of political constructivism together with some methodological implications for political philosophy. In the first section I discuss the general traits of the Rawlsian methodology of political philosophy under three headings (coherence, construction and avoidance). In the second section I conduct a detailed discussion of the idea of political constructivism in the framework of political liberalism, focusing on its requirements, its method, its conception of objectivity and its scope. In the third and final section I develop two interconnected points (the analogy of logic and political philosophy, and the idea of reconciliation), in order to make some broader considerations regarding the implications of political constructivism for political philosophy.