TEHRAN - Professor Eric Thomas Weber believes that “Rawls brought Western philosophers’ attention back to the idea of social contract theory.”

“He (Rawls) believed that the challenges to social contract theory that had been leveled previously could be overcome,” Thomas Weber, an assistant professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, told the Mehr News Agency.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: Your new book is about John Rawls. Why Rawls’ ideas are still worthy of attention?
A: John Rawls was one of the most influential political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.
He brought Western philosophers’ attention back to the idea of social contract theory. He believed that the challenges to social contract theory that had been leveled previously could be overcome. While where is much to admire in John Rawls’s philosophy, there are three areas in which I have found troubles. The first area is in his understanding of how we come to form concepts, such as concepts of justice, which he does not address sufficiently. His philosophy does not recognize the rich contexts and complex differences that there are between the ways in which people from different cultural backgrounds come to form concepts.
The second problem I see in Rawls is that he does not develop the idea of what it means to be a person in a robust way. This is part of the legacy of social contract theory. Social contract theory imagines human beings fully formed in a condition prior to entering society, in which they deliberate about what they would want for society and to live in it, and then come to an agreement about how to live with one another. John Rawls avoids some problems of imagining fully formed human beings, but never takes into account the important differences there are between people who grow up in significantly different contexts and the challenge that raises for his notion of ideal deliberation.
This problem is evident in the fact that his theory of education and its political role is quite thin and never shows up as a matter of central importance for him. Anyone who recognizes the place of cultural difference and the complexities of how individuals for concepts knows that education must therefore play a vital role in how we think about politics. My last chapter reveals the great differences, therefore, between John Rawls’s philosophy and the philosopher John Dewey’s thought. John Dewey was the most influential philosopher of democracy and education as well as of politics in the first half of the twentieth century.
The third problem I see in Rawls’s work is that he does not answer sufficiently the challenges that have been raised for social contract theory, which John Dewey raised, for example. Social contract theory is a problematic approach to political philosophy and to the idea of how we develop, or construct, our concepts of justice and politics.
In this sense, my book is fundamentally a critique of John Rawls’s philosophy. This is important to do because of Rawls’s profound influence on the whole sphere of Western political thought. Rawls remains among the most important political philosophers today and was one of the main proponents of liberalism. Liberalism, however, has had to adapt substantially due to the challenges that people have uncovered for Rawls’s philosophy, especially concerning the place of religion in politics. I find in John Dewey’s work a more robust theory of the construction of concepts, of the place of education, and of a new form of liberalism that is not so exclusive of religion as Rawls appears to have been for politics.
It is for these reasons that I found it important to offer a critique of John Rawls’s work, which I present with resources drawn from John Dewey’s philosophy.
Q: “Philosophy: theory and practice” is the main subject of the World Philosophy Day conference slated to be held in Tehran in late November. Can this subject develop deep dialogue between western and eastern philosophers?
A: The theme, “philosophy: theory and practice” is a broad and open subject, but it implies an important point. It highlights the fact that ideas in isolation can be said to lack meaning without reference to the ways in which we apply them. Philosophy as the genuine pursuit of wisdom must be allowed freedom of thought and expression without fear of persecution. I hope that at such an event freedom and individuality are allowed fully in the engagement of philosophers from East and West. In this sense, the “theory” portion of your theme would join with the necessary “practice” of open deliberation and dialogue.
Eric Thomas Weber is assistant professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi, USA. He has published in Human Studies, Review of Policy Research, Skepsis, William James Studies, Contemporary Pragmatism, and Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He is the author of Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism (Continuum, 2010). His second book, Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy, will be published in the future.
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