John Rawls and American Pragmatism : Between Engagement and Avoidance

Daniele Botti argues that John Rawls’s philosophy is importantly connected with classical American pragmatism and that Rawls’s intellectual trajectory did not take a “pragmatic turn” in the 1980s but possibly an “un-pragmatic” one. Both claims go against conventional wisdom, and Botti corroborates them with archival research.

The textual and contextual connections between John Rawls''s intellectual figure and American pragmatism (broadly conceived) have become topics of discussion only recently. This is at least in part due to the fact that Rawls seemed to have taken a "pragmatic turn" in his intellectual trajectory—from A Theory of Justice (1971) to Political Liberalism (1993). John Rawls and American Pragmatism: Between Engagement and Avoidance intervenes in these discussions with two unconventional claims corroborated by archival research. First, Daniele Botti shows that Rawls''s thinking owes more to the American pragmatists'' views than is generally recognized. Second, and in the light of the pragmatist sources of Rawls''s thinking, Botti argues that we should reverse the common narrative about Rawls''s alleged pragmatic turn and interpret it as a quite "un-pragmatic" one. By making the case for interpreting Rawls as an American pragmatist, this book profoundly transforms not only a widely held interpretation about Rawls''s intellectual trajectory, but also our understanding of the American philosophical vicissitude in the second half of the twentieth century.