In mid-century Princeton, graduation was attended by an unusual tradition: the beer suit. Frustrated with the dry-cleaning costs after end-of-term revelry, graduating classes decided to design and produce unlined canvas suits specifically for the celebrations, printing on them an emblem of the graduating year. In spring 1941, they chose a cartoon tiger—Princeton's mascot—sitting atop a globe in a soldier's helmet. On the globe was a depiction of Adolf Hitler's face and mustache, and in his hair was the unmistakable profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt's broad grin, looming sinisterly over the world. The tiger's tail curled into a “3,” referring to the beginning of FDR's unprecedented third term, and a fuse sprouted from the side of the globe.Footnote 1 The graduating class, however, was not alone in believing that the world was ready to explode thanks to the joint influence of Hitler and Roosevelt. Over the previous two years—a period that saw the outbreak of war in Europe, the fall of France, a presidential election, the United States’ first ever peacetime draft, and the declaration of an “unlimited national emergency”—university publications had filled with expressions of anxiety about the future of democracy and Western civilization. To many of Princeton's deeply Republican and isolationist students, Roosevelt appeared a warmonger who sought to use the emergency to enlarge his own power.
Among the many contributions to this outpouring was an article by John Rawls, then a twenty-year-old sophomore, entitled “Spengler's Prophecy Realized.” Published in the June 1941 issue of Princeton's oldest and most prestigious student journal, the Nassau Literary Magazine, Rawls joined with his classmates in predicting a Roosevelt dictatorship. But what was more, Rawls claimed that this collapse of democracy was the inevitable consequence of the rise of science.Footnote 2 Drawing on the reactionary historical theory of the German writer Oswald Spengler, he argued that science destroyed the traditions which provided the foundations of Western civilization, and created new tools—newspapers, radio, motion pictures, the administrative state—which would-be dictators could use to transform peoples into “pawns on a chessboard.”Footnote 3 Rawls predicted that Hitler and Roosevelt—new “caesars”—would usher in an age of war in which the culture of the West would be destroyed forever.
Rawls's paper is an undisciplined expression of anxieties and preoccupations. It is vague and confused but also rich and suggestive. To make sense of the paper, I situate it in relation to live debates at Princeton about the fate of democracy in an increasingly scientific world, and in relation to Rawls's religious conversion the following year. In the first section, I show that in preparation for the war Rawls's professors urged a renewed faith in democracy as an expression of the fundamental rationality of human nature. They aimed to counter a pervasive worldview they often called “naturalism,” which insisted on studying both human nature and democracy on scientific, value-free terms, and allegedly encouraged skepticism about their rationality. In the second, I give an account of Oswald Spengler's thought and recover the so-far neglected context in which Rawls likely encountered it: the conservative intellectual milieu of the Lit. The third section turns to Rawls's paper, arguing that it mobilized Spengler's thought to reject the democratic faith urged on him by his professors. Rawls claimed that science led inevitably to a nihilism which undermined the basis of democracy and condemned the West to an “inhuman Destiny” in which power displaced truth, and that democracy was nothing more than the domination of the masses by propaganda. In the final section, I turn to Rawls's 1942 senior thesis, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, and read it as a response to Rawls's earlier despair about the survival of democracy.Footnote 4 Rawls articulated a theological anthropology which both provided a permanent basis for value and made open, non-manipulative communication the cornerstone of the community into which Christians were called by God. “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” I therefore claim, was not a mere occasional comment on current affairs, as Andrius Gališanka—the only commentator to notice the essay so far—has suggested.Footnote 5 Instead, it sheds crucial light on the politics of Rawls's conversion and the emergence of his project of theodicy.
The Rawls we see in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” is deeply unfamiliar. On the one hand, America's most celebrated expositor of a redistributive liberal state appears in 1941 as an emphatic, even paranoid, critic of it, seeing in the New Deal only the progress of Roosevelt's dictatorial ambitions. On the other, Rawls the sometime Christian personalist adopted a fully naturalized, secular worldview in which community was impossible. In the conclusion, therefore, I set the compressed foreground of a young man's spiritual drama against the background of Rawls's later thought and his place in the history of twentieth-century ideas.
“Come, let us reason together”
On 17 September 1939, Princeton's president, Harold W. Dodds, welcomed Rawls's class at the beginning of their freshman year with a speech. His question was whether American universities were hastening the collapse of democracy. Had they “actively contributed to the undermining of our civilization”? Dodds conjured—and substantially agreed with—an unnamed set of critics who charged that excessive concentration on “mechanistic science” had “subject[ed] the free spirit of man to the domination of natural forces or his own irrational nature” and led to a “subversive pessimism” about democracy. While resisting the sharpest criticisms, Dodds admitted that the curriculum had been too narrow and affirmed the need to restore faith in democracy by returning to the study of the values that underpinned the American form of government. He began Rawls's time at Princeton by announcing a renewed emphasis on the humanities and calling for the university to “rededicate itself to its historic mission of … making democracy work.”Footnote 6 In doing so, Dodds was participating in a nationwide discourse which stressed the significance of humanistic education in the defense of democracy. Its role was to defend the conception of human beings as free and rational agents from the skepticism of “mechanistic science.”
The critics Dodds conjured were almost certainly Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, who had become the “storm center of American academic life” by the late 1930s, thanks to their polemics against a scientific worldview they called “naturalism,” “positivism” or “anti-rationalism.”Footnote 7 Typified by John Dewey and the empirical social sciences—and constituting an intellectual fifth column in America—naturalism seemed to its critics to deny the existence of an absolute moral law, the possibility of reasoning about values, and the distinctive qualities of reason or “the human spirit” which marked humanity off from the rest of nature.Footnote 8 It was guilty not only of moral “nihilism” but also of denying the possibility of rational democratic discourse. Because of this, Adler was to declare in September 1940 that “democracy has much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers than from the nihilism of Hitler.”Footnote 9 Hutchins and Adler were neo-Thomists, influenced by Jacques Maritain and the European antimaterialist discourses brought to light by Samuel Moyn, for instance.Footnote 10 But in applying these influences in an American controversy about democracy and scientific education, they initiated a discourse which attracted intellectuals of all stripes. The characteristic point of agreement was that educators needed to resist the pernicious influence of Dewey and reassert, in a humanistic curriculum, the existence of an unchanging, rational human nature. Only thus could educators defend what they increasingly called their “democratic faith.”Footnote 11
While liberal Protestant attacks on “naturalism” at Princeton have been noted by P. MacKenzie Bok as a context for Rawls's use of the term in his 1942 honors thesis, no attempt has thus far been made to situate these interventions within the wider discourse about science and democratic theory.Footnote 12 As Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter have recently shown, however, Princeton played a central role in the development of a new humanistic curriculum which responded to these anxieties. A group of professors—including several of Rawls's future teachers—began to meet regularly from the early 1930s to discuss the naturalist threat to democracy. In 1936, they founded the first humanities program in the United States, which they understood to have an explicitly moral purpose, defending democracy and “human values” against the scientific outlook.Footnote 13 George Thomas's 1940 inaugural lecture at Princeton—which Bok cites as the primary influence upon Rawls's use of “naturalism”—emerged from this wider context.Footnote 14 Thomas sought to use the creation of humanity in the image of God to defend the “Greek and eighteenth century view of man as a rational being,” which he took to be “an indispensable aspect of the democratic theory.”Footnote 15 Strikingly for a Protestant theologian, Thomas even followed Hutchins and Adler in comparing modern American society unfavorably with the intellectual order of medieval Christendom.Footnote 16 When several of Rawls's professors—billing themselves as “the Princeton Group”—presented a joint manifesto on “The Spiritual Basis of Democracy” in 1941, Dewey could confidently cite it as evidence for the popularity of antinaturalism beyond its core constituency of neo-Thomists.Footnote 17
Rawls's first sustained exposure to this problematic came in his very first philosophy course, “Elements of Ethics,” taught in fall 1940 by his future PhD supervisor, Walter T. Stace.Footnote 18 Although it was intended as an introduction to moral philosophy, Stace instead delivered a series of lectures on the philosophical stakes of the war, which became the basis of the book he completed the following year, The Destiny of Western Man. In lectures with titles like “The Ethics of Will and Power: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,” and “The Ethics of Reason and Moderation: Plato and the Greeks,” Stace cast the war as a clash between the “rationalism” of “Western” or “democratic civilization” and the “anti-rationalist” scientific nihilism of “totalitarian civilization.” Stace—a former British colonial administrator who frequently advocated for American intervention in the war—encouraged his students to see that America's “cherished way of life” was gravely threatened by events in Europe.Footnote 19 While making little use of the term “naturalism,” Stace developed an argument with the same structure. Importantly for the arguments Rawls would later make, Stace connected these discourses not only with the war, but also with the history of philosophy and with a square focus on human nature and reason's place in it.Footnote 20
According to Stace, Western civilization had been “founded” by Plato and Christ upon the recognition that human beings were rational and capable of subjecting their appetites to the demands of reflection.Footnote 21 “Totalitarian civilization,” on the other hand, followed Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in elevating the “will”—that is, desire, impulse, and instinct—above reason. Whether they “willed” mere hedonic satisfaction, as in Schopenhauer's case, or domination, as in Nietzsche's, reason must remain silent, confined to the strictly instrumental role of determining efficient means. To Stace, the totalitarian saw human beings as nothing more than animals; the impulses that drove them may be altered by social conditioning, but not by reasoning.Footnote 22 Though Stace was an empiricist in the model of Russell and Moore, he blamed totalitarianism on the overflow of scientific “anti-rationalism” from its legitimate, theoretical, province to the realms of morals and psychology.Footnote 23 This tendency, he claimed, was carried furthest in America by the “perverse and stupid” philosophy of Dewey, which, Stace thought, was “in essence allied with precisely those forces of unreason which today repudiate democracy.”Footnote 24
Democracy, Stace claimed, was “the final expression of the ethos of Western civilization,” resting on absolute moral principles available to reason, and committed to resolving disagreements “not by passion, or brute will, or force, but by reason alone.”Footnote 25 Stace emphatically rejected any account of democracy as rule “by appeals to emotion, prejudice, interest, and even by unworthy tricks and lies.”Footnote 26 Such accounts elevated will over reason and so misconstrued the guiding ideals of democracy, making it “an easy victim of fascist criticism, according to which it is nothing but a battleground of contending egoisms.”Footnote 27 While the totalitarian claimed that moral reasoning was a mere cover for will, and that all rule was necessarily by “compulsion,” Stace stressed the close relationship between reason and democratic deliberation, reflected in an injunction he quoted from the Book of Isaiah: “Come let us reason together, saith the Lord.”Footnote 28 For Stace, reason was the defining feature of human nature, which provided a permanent ground for the possibility and desirability of democracy. While totalitarianism could not return humanity to the “animal level,” the widespread “despair of reason” which Stace saw “in the most up-to-date intellectual circles” could weaken the resolve of a democratic people.Footnote 29 Stace, like his colleagues, viewed his wartime pedagogical task as remedying “this deep defeatism in regard to our values.” “We can, in the deep places of our own spirits,” he wrote, “justify the faith which is in us. We can replace our blind allegiance by reasoned understanding. And by doing this we increase our spiritual strength.”Footnote 30
The Nassau Literary Magazine
When Rawls intervened in these debates six months later, he rejected Stace's faith, drawing instead on the reactionary prognosis of Oswald Spengler and declaring the death of democracy and Western civilization to be foreordained. Spengler made his name with The Decline of the West (1918–22), a sprawling, two-volume study of world history. Civilizations, Spengler claimed, were organisms, each of which possessed its own distinctive character or “soul.” Outside civilizations, human beings were mere animals, moved by appetite and instinct; within them, however, their thought and feeling were molded by tradition and the individual was integrated into a larger social whole. Each civilization proceeded through the same stages of growth and decay over the course of its thousand-year lifespan and, on this basis, Spengler predicted the future of the West.Footnote 31 In striking contrast to Rawls's professors, Spengler's outlook was fundamentally relativistic: every aspect of a civilization—religion, politics, morals, even mathematics—had its value and meaning only relative to its time and place in a particular life cycle.Footnote 32
The “Western” or “Faustian” soul, Spengler claimed, was distinguished by its overwhelming will to power, expressed, for instance, in Gothic cathedrals, maritime empire, and, most of all, Western technologies. In its medieval youth until the Enlightenment, it expressed this will coherently in a thriving tradition—especially but not exclusively the tradition of Gothic Christianity—which imbued its members with an intuitive worldview and motivating set of values. In Spengler's view, science and reason—the whole activity of conscious, abstract thought—alienated inhabitants of the modern West from the primordial rhythm of “race,” “blood,” or “instinct”; that is, the traditions that stirred civilizations to greatness and gave form to their human material.Footnote 33 Because of this, modernity was beset by anomie and overcome by nihilism, materialism, and individualism, as the traditions which instantiated the Faustian will to power dissolved. The undisciplined appetites were let loose, and the atomized society of the West was held together only “mechanically” by law, force, or economic exchange.Footnote 34 The will to power, however, continued to find expression in “technics” or “the machine,” by which Spengler referred not just to modern implements, but to means–ends rationality as an abstract historical force. In the final stage of Western history, Spengler held, this force would transform the West into a vast machine which would dwarf and consume its human material.Footnote 35 His vision of history was both conservative and tragic: only tradition and instinct could provide a sound basis for Western culture and modern rationality, but these were necessarily undermined—from the Enlightenment onwards—by the flourishing of that very culture.Footnote 36 Decline is thus best read as a rebuke to the orthodox German historiography of progress. Every step in the development of human reason is a step towards—and finally over—a precipice; the perfection of human reason brings not peace but the destruction of a distinctively human life altogether.Footnote 37
Spengler was most famous, however, for describing the final crisis of the Western world. Democracy, to Spengler, was the paradigmatic political expression of the West's late civilizational malaise. It was justified by abstract rational principles and the rejection of hierarchy, but in practice amounted to little more than the rule of money, as oligarchs and party leaders made use of the press to extend their power over the unthinking crowd and the governments it elected. The high-minded slogans of democrats, he thought, only concealed a regime of empty materialism and cynical manipulation.Footnote 38 Indeed, democracy represented the capitulation of politics—the domain of power and strength—to “uninstinctive and meddlesome” rationality and the mechanical realm of production and exchange.Footnote 39
Spengler foresaw the rise of “caesars”—Nietzschean supermen still animated by the dying will to power—who would take advantage of modern technology and rational social organization to restore the supremacy of “blood” over “money” and “mind.” These virtuoso politicians would see that “the people is nothing but an object and the ideal nothing but a means,” but they would exploit the weakness of democracy for a grander purpose than personal enrichment.Footnote 40 They could not reverse cultural decline and restore a pre-rational society of instinct and tradition, but for a brief time their personal will to power would exert a “race-forming” influence as a pale imitation of the dead tradition, creating new values and transforming whole nations into instruments of their will as they sought global domination.Footnote 41 A series of increasingly destructive wars between the caesars would destroy the West sometime around the year 2200, but Spengler looked forward to the coming age of mechanized dictatorship nevertheless: caesarism and empire would be the final glorious expression of the Faustian will to power.Footnote 42
Decline was an intellectual sensation in the wake of the First World War. It circulated widely among the German middle class, helped to galvanize the “Conservative Revolution,” and drew responses from many of the Weimar Republic's leading intellectuals.Footnote 43 When translated into English from 1926, it repeated its success and gained widespread coverage in the American popular press: a 1934 review of his work in Time began, “When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen.”Footnote 44 From the mid-1930s, however, Spengler fell from favor in the United States—taken for a prophet of Nazism, despite his own break with the regime.Footnote 45 By the end of the decade, he had become little more than a synecdoche for reactionary cultural pessimism and the glorification of power and unreason.Footnote 46 At Princeton, however, Rawls encountered one of Spengler's most enthusiastic American readers, the modernist poet and literary critic Allen Tate, who served between 1939 and 1942 as faculty adviser to the Nassau Literary Magazine.
Tate is primarily remembered today for his role in two movements. The first was “southern Agrarianism,” which sought to defend the “traditional society” of the Old South against the encroachments of liberalism, science, and modernity.Footnote 47 The second was the New Criticism, a school of literary criticism—led in the United States by former Agrarians—which argued that texts need to be understood in virtue of their formal properties rather than their context or authorial intent.Footnote 48 For Tate, both movements were ways of resisting the mechanical outlook of the modern world, and while it is difficult to discern precisely the nature and extent of Tate's debt to Spengler, Tate developed his cultural criticism in dialogue with Spengler's thought.Footnote 49 In his reviews of Spengler, he largely accepted his predictions, and even claimed that Spengler had restored philosophy to a position of intellectual authority it had not occupied since the Reformation.Footnote 50 Like Spengler, Tate held that the Western mind tended towards a “self-destroying naturalism” which undermined tradition and transformed human beings into objects or animals.Footnote 51 The progress of Western thought reduced society to a spiritless mechanism lacking a “specifically human role” and populated only by “economic slaves.”Footnote 52 Tate likewise shared Spengler's antipathy towards democracy, writing from Princeton to a friend to express his hope that America would remain neutral and Germany would succeed in extinguishing “democracy (i.e., laissez faire capitalism)” in Europe.Footnote 53 Most importantly for our purposes, Tate continued to recommend and discuss Spengler into at least the early 1940s.Footnote 54
In the Lit's 1942 centenary issue, one of the student editors, David Peaslee, wrote a retrospective on the period since Tate's arrival, noting that an informal course taught by Tate had shaped the sensibility of the magazine, which was dominated “by men under [his] tutelage.”Footnote 55 Under “Mr. Tate's influence” a new sense of purpose had arisen at the magazine, which now sought to participate in “the momentous struggle of an enfeebled culture to withhold the ravages of a cancerous science that presses now for our very lives.”Footnote 56 It is likely that Tate discussed Spengler at his informal meetings. As the magazine filled with discussions of his wife's latest novel, volumes of poetry by his friends, and essays on early New Critical symposiums, a review appeared of a new volume of selections from Decline.Footnote 57 More importantly, while Peaslee did not mention Spengler by name, he virtually quoted from Decline when characterizing the cultural situation to which the Lit responded. He outlined the destructive scientific tendency of the Western mind, for instance, through an idiosyncratic discussion of perpetual-motion devices paraphrased directly from Spengler's final chapter. And immediately before discussing Tate, Peaslee offered Spengler's most famous prediction: “Science, once the savior, promised now destruction of civilization and man himself in a staccato series of devastating wars.”Footnote 58 Mark Jancovich has argued that the Agrarians conceived of their move into academic literary criticism as an attempt to find an institutional setting for their social critique—Tate's cultivation of a circle of protégés at the Lit appears continuous with this project.Footnote 59
A full portrait of the Lit cannot be given in the space available, nor can Rawls's place at the journal be established beyond all doubt. Rawls's essay, however, fit into this intellectual milieu and was counted by Peaslee among the essays that most clearly showed the Lit's common project.Footnote 60 The magazine has not so far been considered as a context for Rawls's early thought, even by those historians who have discussed the papers he published there.Footnote 61 Doing so, however, reveals a context sharply at odds with the democratic faith of his professors, and the established story of Rawls's early thought. Spengler and Tate shared in widespread concerns about the effects of science on Western civilization but claimed that science and reason undermined the unreflective social tradition that prevented the West from descending into chaos. In its absence, the people of the West blindly pursued their appetites; reason ushered in a world governed, ultimately, by force.Footnote 62 Democracy, on this account, was a symptom of decline, soon to transform into caesarism. As we shall see in the next two sections, Rawls's earliest thought was shaped by the meeting of these two intellectual currents.
“Spengler's Prophecy Realized”
Near the beginning of his 1941 essay, Rawls asserted that Spengler's prophecy was “not theory but fact which by its very actualization defies criticism.”Footnote 63 He followed Spengler's predictions closely, but he sought to stress above all that democracy had become a regime of manipulation and propaganda. His essay sought to unmask democratic deliberation and even philosophical speech as weapons in the hands of the caesars, used to dominate and reshape the masses in pursuit of global supremacy.
Before turning to these themes, however, it is worth noting that Rawls's essay was immediately prompted by recent events in American politics and, indeed, was written as a critique of Roosevelt. “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” took up themes from contemporary anti-Roosevelt polemic, which cast the president as a dictator in the making. As evidence of Roosevelt's intentions, for instance, Rawls made frequent reference to the “court-packing” plan of 1937, the alleged attempt to “purge” the Democratic Party in the 1938 primaries, and Roosevelt's precedent-defying third term.Footnote 64 Rawls, moreover, seemed to borrow from James Burnham's Managerial Revolution, casting the New Deal as an attempt to purchase votes and transfer power into the hands state bureaucrats, as already witnessed in Germany and the Soviet Union.Footnote 65 Such views would have been familiar to Rawls at Princeton, where over 80 percent of students supported Roosevelt's opponent, Wendell Willkie, in 1940, and pro-Willkie students argued that a third term for Roosevelt would “mark the end of the principles of democracy and people's government.”Footnote 66
In his fireside chat of 27 May 1941—less than two weeks before Rawls's essay was published—Roosevelt declared an “unlimited national emergency” in response to the Nazi threat.Footnote 67 Even before his announcement, Roosevelt's Princetonian critics suspected that the war would be used as a pretext for transferring additional powers to the executive.Footnote 68 Roosevelt's declaration, therefore, prompted a small controversy at the university. The Princetonian—where Rawls worked as a reporter—published an editorial explaining that while the largely isolationist paper had previously disagreed with interventionists “as to the best means” for preserving American democracy, all Americans must now support the decision that had been made.Footnote 69 As the headline read, “The Debate Is Over.”Footnote 70 Two students—both of whom then served on the editorial staff of the Princetonian and the Lit—objected in the letters section a few days later. Roosevelt, they retorted, “wants a blank check,” and his fireside chat was not a sincere argument but “part of a program to … insure national support for whatever decisions will be made by the expert advisers and himself in the near future.”Footnote 71 Rawls's essay seems to have been prompted by this controversy, fixing on the phrase “national emergency” as a tool which makes “a so-called free people … giv[e] up their freedom to become exploited pawns in a new war.”Footnote 72 But Rawls's proximate anxieties about the Roosevelt administration—about unaccountable managers, an overmighty executive, and the marginalization of Congress—combined with the background of Stace's lectures on the philosophical stakes of the war to lead him to further-reaching reflections on science and democracy.
That Rawls had these broader aims in mind is clear from the first sentence of his paper: “The influence of science is paramount in the world today.”Footnote 73 Rawls did not hold, with his professors, that science was mistakenly thought to undermine the rational foundations of democracy, but that it had already uprooted the tradition of the West, leaving behind an anomic moral wasteland. To illustrate this, Rawls gave a long quotation from Bertrand Russell, describing the world as “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” in which human life was both purposeless and impermanent, “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.”Footnote 74 Rawls claimed that the progress of scientific knowledge, not just its misinterpretation, revealed that human life rested upon “a foundation of despair.” So, like Spengler, Rawls construed the history of the West as a tragedy: “Our strivings, our power and our triumphs have lead [sic] to this. The beauty of the universe becomes the hideous mockery of an inhuman Destiny.”Footnote 75
Rawls followed this with an obscure discussion of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, best interpreted as an intervention in ongoing debates about the relationship between science and human nature—debates which, as we have seen, were already conducted in these terms. He described two tendencies that characterized the Western world after the destruction of tradition. The preponderant response was to “give ourselves over to nihilism, the ever-absorbing Mephistopheles, who has for us the only answer—the delight of pleasure.”Footnote 76 Here Rawls described an egoistic hedonism, which he associated with Schopenhauer, suggesting that he believed that most merely sought an outlet to “cure” their “overexpanding energies.”Footnote 77 Most importantly, Rawls associated the decadent pursuit of pleasure with the condition of modern democratic states, organized, he said, to promote a “negative freedom” which allowed unfettered “licentiousness.” In such states, “individualism breaks forth in all its license” and politics becomes a realm in which parties pursue only self-interest, “the state be damned.”Footnote 78 Eventually, this nihilism generated “its own negation”—the Nietzschean “superman” who would move beyond the pursuit of comforts and pleasures, and attempt to remake the world and its inhabitants by force.Footnote 79 Domination was the “logical intent” of the Faustian energies, sought by “the new elite, those controllers of the machine”: Hitler, Roosevelt, and their administrators. This negation was both a revolt against the meaninglessness of modernity and an attempt to overturn negative democratic freedom and remake the West in the image of the caesars. Rawls, finally, ended this discussion by introducing Spengler and contending that the victory of the new elite “is itself a nihilism … after which we shall enter the final period of exhaustive expression.”Footnote 80 Nietzsche's supermen give way to Spengler's decline, and the revolt against the nihilism ends with the destruction of Western civilization.
By opening his paper with this dialectical back-and-forth between nihilism and domination, Rawls both encapsulated the dynamic he saw at work at the end of Western history and implied that these were the only modes of expression available for the Faustian energies. Conspicuous by its absence was any role for moral reflection. Though he was exposed to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Stace's lectures, he mobilized them to reject Stace's view, arguing that, in his time at least, human beings could not be governed by reason, but only by force. At the end of Western history, Rawls sought to unmask democracy as—in Stace's words—“nothing but a battleground of contending egoisms,” in which reason and morality were impotent.Footnote 81 The progress of abstract rationality undermined the background of tradition against which alone a rational moral life was possible.
Rawls focused on showing that under the surface of reason and open discussion, democracy was in fact a regime of propaganda and manipulation which led directly and inevitably to caesarism. The technologies of the modern mass media—“the press, radio, and motion-pictures”—were held by Rawls to eviscerate the critical faculties and make resistance to caesarism futile. From Spengler, Rawls quoted the contention that “democracy has by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of the people.”Footnote 82 In the same passage, Spengler went on to contrast “the book-world, with its profusion of stand-points that compelled thought to select and criticize,” with a modern public, transfixed by a single newspaper which “spellbinds the intellect from morning to night” with a dazzlingly entertaining array of images, headlines, and provocations. “Under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery,” Spengler contended, “hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama.” Rawls agreed, using much the same imagery to depict a public incapacitated and overwhelmed by these technologies: “The consciousness of whole peoples, having been subjected to a barrage of pictures, newsreels, newsstories, radio broadcasts and other means of controlling and distorting information can have no conception of the truth.” The result, Rawls asserted, was that, “instinctively wishing to believe something, the public accepts propaganda—there is nothing else available for belief.” The new machines—including the political machinery of party and government propaganda departments—rendered democracy not a regime in which autonomous citizens controlled the state through collective reasoning, but one in which the “efficient control of sources of information” allowed new caesars to dominate the masses and achieve absolute power.
So pessimistic was Rawls's account of democracy that he could develop it with citations of Hitler's Mein Kampf. The passages Rawls cited emphasized that power was gained and exercised by preying on the psychological weaknesses of the masses. He quoted, for instance, the assertion that “the great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great.”Footnote 83 Adding his own gloss, Rawls wrote, “those who think are too few to count.”Footnote 84 Familiarity with Mein Kampf was not unusual—it was read by, and marketed to, Princeton students, as a means of understanding the war in Europe and the ideology of Hitler's Germany.Footnote 85 Stace cited it on several occasions.Footnote 86 Rawls's citation, however, stands out. While Rawls looked on Hitler's ascendency in Germany with terror, his citation of Mein Kampf took up Hitler's account of democracy uncritically. In 1941, Rawls saw Hitler as a virtuoso politician, articulating the insight which allowed him to seize and consolidate power: when addressing the public, truth is irrelevant; what matters is what works. His power was maintained by promising the German people wealth and power, flattering them with racial theories, and whipping them to a fury against enemies within and without. In Mein Kampf, Rawls declared, Hitler had articulated “the philosophy of propaganda.”Footnote 87
The view that Rawls groped towards in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” was that as instrumental rationality was perfected, thought was subordinated to power. He spelt this out most clearly in his account of philosophy itself as a tool for the control of the masses. The example Rawls gave at greatest length concerned the Nazi misuse of Nietzsche. While antipathy to Nietzsche has been taken as a consistent feature of Rawls's thought, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” was attentive to the difference between Nietzsche and the Nazi representation of him. Indeed, he referred to Nietzsche as “the gentlest of men,” employed to justify “the most brutal of revolutions.”Footnote 88 “It is a case,” Rawls contended, “of the great fact-men utilizing everything for their own ends; Nietzsche is merely another instrument for the education of Nazi youth. And the propaganda ministry skillfully suppresses what is in Nietzsche that does not conform to their wishes.” Nietzsche was invoked as an authority in discourses which aimed not at truth but at making the German people into a more perfect “instrument” for Hitler's use. “Ideas for them are only a means for power,” Rawls claimed; “truth is a side issue.”Footnote 89
This comment was applied only to the Nazis in the first instance, but Rawls was drawing a more general point from Spengler about the role of ideas in politics. Spengler asserted that theories were tools, which worked not by rigorous proofs—which the public could not follow in any case—but by the “sacramental hypostasis in their keywords.” “Freedom, justice, humanity, progress” are simply slogans to be judged on the response they provoke from the crowd. Thus Spengler asserted that “documents like the Contrat Social and the Communist Manifesto are engines of highest power in the hands of forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses.”Footnote 90 A theory is a tool, and “whether these doctrines are ‘true’ or ‘false’ is … a question without meaning for political history.” Careful refutation belongs only “to the realm of academic dissertation.”Footnote 91
Rawls did not develop his own account of how propaganda worked, but his discussion of democratic philosophy clearly recalled these passages. He claimed, for instance, that the democratic period has seen the “theorizing of all minds,” but that “thought gradually becomes regulated [relegated] to academic circles; philosophy is only classroom philosophy.”Footnote 92 Justifications of democracy—such as those offered in Stace's lectures—were merely “stereotyped phrases.” When he turned to American attempts to refute Nazism, Rawls thought “the Nazis must laugh.” They knew that their “theories” were “pure propaganda” but “in our glib denunciation of the Germans,” Rawls claimed, “we, too, are victims of the press.”Footnote 93 Rawls's point here, as in his discussion of propaganda in general, is that once science has undermined the tradition which organically moved the people of the West—and brought about new technologies for the control of information—reason, truth, and morality no longer play any significant role in history. “The intellect loses control over the deed,” and power determines what passes for truth; as he put it, in a dictum he quoted twice from Spengler, “what the press wills is true.”Footnote 94 The effects of science were summed up in the only sentence in his own voice that Rawls saw fit to italicize: “Science, which aimed at the goal of truth, succeeds only in perfecting the instrument by which all truth is destroyed.”Footnote 95
Though he never set out to articulate his own political views or advocate any particular course of action, the Rawls glimpsed in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” is strikingly at odds with the established accounts of his early thought. Thomas Pogge has contended that Rawls never associated with isolationists at Princeton, but this essay both places Rawls among isolationist students and shows him accepting their account of Roosevelt as a would-be dictator seeking to enter the war to enlarge his own power. Though he stopped short of advocating isolationism in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” this is not surprising in an essay which supposes that American entry into the war was a foregone conclusion.Footnote 96 Likewise, Rawls has often been cast as a defender of the New Deal state, with Anne Kornhauser, for instance, interpreting his mature project as an attempt to systematize and underpin the “moral order” that Roosevelt announced in his January 1941 State of the Union address.Footnote 97 Yet here—only months later and despite Roosevelt's explicit commitment to “freedom from want”—Rawls depicted the New Deal simply as a means for purchasing votes and manipulating public discourse, undermining the very possibility of collective, democratic deliberation. “Federal or state monetary and labor programs,” he asserted in an apparent reference to the American administrative state, were only a means of keeping “the body busy and the stomach full,” and the growing apparatus of the state was interpreted primarily as a means of managerial control.Footnote 98 Finally, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” reveals that Rawls's earliest skepticism about the state had its roots in prewar conservatism, rather than—as on Katrina Forrester's account—in postwar liberalism.Footnote 99 Indeed, the essay substantially reads as an unmasking of liberal democratic shibboleths.
Notwithstanding Rawls's apparent contempt for the democratic public and his endorsement of tradition as the only source of social stability, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” is not a rejection of democracy itself. Indeed, it is not clear that Rawls consistently read Spengler as a critic of democracy at all, for he referred to caesarism and war as the “fears of Spengler,” rather than his great hopes.Footnote 100 Instead, Rawls used Spengler to illustrate his view that democratic ideals were not realizable under modern conditions. The text reads as a lament for democracy, seeming to look back longingly on an unspecified time when democracy was not a mere charade.Footnote 101 Rawls ended by turning to this point directly and addressing those who “find this picture too pessimistic for our common hope of a bright future.” These optimists were “guilty,” Rawls charged, “of what the poet [Robinson] Jeffers has written: ‘Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, not truth …’.”Footnote 102 This quote aptly summarized the account of human nature Rawls adopted in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” but its force lay in the accusation of wishful thinking. Those who, like his professors, hoped to save democracy were led not by a desire for truth, but by mere animal drives—in this case, it seems, for psychological comfort. As Roosevelt's power grew and Nazism spread across Europe, Rawls denied the truth of their comforting pieties: faith in democracy was not warranted.
“Spiritual suicide”
The senior thesis that Rawls finished a year and a half later, Sin and Faith, reads as an emphatic reversal of perspective. While Rawls continued to see war and spiritual “death” as the outcome of a naturalistic view of humanity, he no longer viewed naturalism as the inevitable product of modernity. Instead, he redescribed it as a long-standing theological error, and offered in its place a theological anthropology which made an all-embracing ethical and spiritual community possible. Rather than telling a story of inevitable decline, Rawls called now for a religious revival. The contrast between these two views, moreover, sheds light on Rawls's conversion, allowing us to move beyond speculation and see more clearly the political stakes of Rawls's personal journey from despair to faith. Rawls's thesis emerges as an attempt to vindicate the possibility of democratic social relations, finally joining his professors in their project of increasing the “spiritual strength” of the West.
Rawls introduced Sin and Faith as “a strong protest against a certain scheme of thought … called naturalism.”Footnote 103 In introducing this term for the first time in his work, he knowingly departed from the meanings attached to it by most contemporary writers. Rather than focusing on science, materialism, or hedonism, Rawls outlined a theory of “relations.” “Naturalism,” he wrote, “is the universe in which all relations are natural and in which spiritual life is reduced to the level of desire and appetition.” As he develops the view in more detail it becomes clear that he takes naturalism to be the view on which all relations formed by human agents towards other things are based fundamentally on appetites, conceiving of all other relata—including other human beings and even God—as objects to be, for instance, used, possessed, controlled, discarded, or avoided at will.Footnote 104 This amounts, as Paul Weithman has emphasized, to an account of human nature.Footnote 105 In framing his thesis as a critique of a view of human beings as essentially appetitive isolated individuals, transforming the world into mere objects, he recalled the discourse on naturalism so prominent at Princeton. Indeed, in claiming that that the naturalistic subject was ultimately motivated only by the “expected state of relief” from desire upon acquiring their object, his view bears a striking resemblance to his own earlier Schopenhauerian account of the masses attempting vainly to “cure” their “overexpanding energies.”Footnote 106
Against naturalism, Rawls posited the possibility of “personal relations.” As persons—possessed of “personality” or “spirit”—human beings were capable not only of appetites, but also of relations of love, hate, envy, jealousy, pride, and so forth.Footnote 107 These relations necessarily obtained between persons, and involved non-appetitive motivations—the desire, for instance, to help or hurt someone, to be admired or to punish.Footnote 108 The personality was the aspect of humanity which bore the image of God, and in virtue of which God called on humanity to establish personal relationships of “community,” with Him and with all other persons. These were relations of love—ideally encompassing all persons—in which all would be moved not by egoistic desires, but by the moral imperatives that spontaneously arose from the recognition of other persons as their equals.Footnote 109 “Love,” Rawls wrote, “is an intense and full personal contact” in which “the very center of the spirit” is revealed to the other.Footnote 110 The establishment of community “completes man's nature” and, indeed, fulfills the purpose of creation.Footnote 111
Anything that tended to destroy community, Rawls called sin. For the most part Rawls considered two forms of sin: egoism and egotism. Egoism consisted in treating all relations as natural relations, and therefore treating “other people as so many objects to be used as instruments for [one's] own appetitional satisfaction.”Footnote 112 Egotism, on the other hand, involved the personal or communal aspect of the sinner and acknowledged the personality of others. It sought, however, not to establish relations of love, but to dominate and abuse the other to glorify the egotist himself. Egotism was equated with pride and original sin by Rawls, and it was this self-worship that led sinners to use others as mere objects. Importantly, Rawls associated egoism with the hollow materialism of capitalism and socialism, and egotism with the Nazi revolt against it.Footnote 113 To overcome the crisis of Western civilization, then, would require answering God's call to enter community, in which the personal aspect of human nature would find its proper expression.
Despite redefining naturalism—focusing no longer on science, but on personality, community, and sin—Rawls retained much of the structure of the critique of naturalism he had encountered in Stace's lectures and elsewhere. Above all, he took the contrast between an appetitive and a spiritual conception of human nature to be central to the crisis which faced Western civilization. But Rawls's act of redefinition allowed him to broaden his critique: the error he targeted was traced back to Plato, and its influence could be found in the work of theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, who relied too heavily on ancient Greek categories. Indeed, much of Sin and Faith is taken up with rejecting misunderstandings of the Christian faith, especially those which represented God as a proper object of human desire.Footnote 114 Most strikingly of all, Rawls rejected accounts of salvation as conformity to natural law, describing this as an egotistical attempt to merit salvation through works.Footnote 115 By focusing on the human desire for God or the possibility of earning salvation, Rawls held that much theology neglected community entirely. In doing so, it too had invited a descent into sin and was partly responsible for the spiritual crisis that precipitated Nazism and war. Through this redefinition, then, Rawls centered the establishment of community as the only solution to the crisis of the West.
Rawls's disavowal of Spengler was made explicit when he introduced a third form of sin: despair. “Despair,” Rawls wrote, “seeks to escape from community into nothingness. It is a sin which is caused by the result of sin … a further sin committed once egotistic and egoistic sin has disrupted community.” In a footnote he added that “the signs [of despair] can be seen in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler.”Footnote 116 Rawls's use of “despair” throughout the text is ambiguous and apparently inconsistent, but in this discussion he took his cue from Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard defined despair as the rejection of God, the attempt to find salvation apart from, or even in rebellion against, Him.Footnote 117 In Rawls's account, this became the turning away from God's call and the denial of the possibility of community, embodied in Schopenhauer's pessimism as much as in Nietzsche's exhortations to find salvation in power. Spengler's antidemocratic fatalism—his acceptance, even celebration, of a mechanical world presided over by egotistic strongmen—marked a final step in the West's alienation from God.
It is worth pausing here to note how the categories of sin structured Rawls's understanding of the crisis facing the world, and especially how they altered his understanding of Nazism. On Rawls's view, capitalism and communism alike were naturalistic doctrines, which reduced human beings to merely economic agents.Footnote 118 Nazism constituted a despairing “revolt” against “egoistic aloneness”; it recognized the human need for personal relations, but sought to satisfy these with the egotism of the “closed group.”Footnote 119 Rawls saw the phenomenon of closed groups repeating in the history of the West—in the Catholic Church, renaissance humanism, and even college clubs—but in all cases the principle was the same: membership of an exclusive group provided a sense of prideful superiority to the members.Footnote 120 In Nazism, the criterion of membership was biological and this “iron-bound” exclusion permitted unrestrained egotism. Nazism is no longer given the quasi-sociological explanation of “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” in which propaganda machines manipulate the unthinking masses, instead it is cast as a spiritual problem, a sinful revolt against a materialistic world in which only the appetites were satisfied.Footnote 121 Thus, Rawls asserted, “Nazism is profound, but profound in the sense that the devil is profound. It is conscious of spirituality, but it knows only the spirituality of egotism which leads to destruction. Therefore the Nazi method of salvation is in the end self-destruction, since it bases itself upon sin which leads to aloneness and annihilation.”Footnote 122
Neither Spengler nor despair constitute major topics in the body of the text, but in articulating an account of human nature which made community not only possible, but the very purpose of creation, Rawls's thesis as a whole rejected despair and tried to show that the only solution to the crisis of Western civilization was the reestablishment of community. In his final discussion of sin, Rawls once again traced the path from naturalism to egotistic violence. As in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” he claimed that persons feel “lost, alone, out of place” in a world of “atoms,” “impulses,” and “automatic drives,” turning to hedonistic excess, and eventually to “power, force, will, rage, creative frenzy.” In both works, then, Rawls held that naturalism tends toward spiritual “death” and a politics of domination. In “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” he resigned himself to this fate, which he regarded as the necessary outcome of modern skepticism and technological development.Footnote 123 Sin and Faith, however, acknowledged that “our world is a world of sin,” but asserted that to accept that “the world will always be this way”—that is, to despair and deny the possibility of community—is “to commit spiritual suicide.”Footnote 124 With naturalism reinterpreted as a spiritual problem, it could be given a spiritual solution. Thus, turning the page after Rawls's account of “death,” the reader is confronted with his account of faith, by which humanity is “brought back to life to form a community.”Footnote 125 If persons could come to see that they are capable of relations of givenness and fellowship, and could open themselves to God's call to enter such relations, the world of sin could be transformed into a community united in love and faith. Read together, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” and Sin and Faith sketch out the dilemma faced by Western civilization: it could either accept naturalism and face an inhuman destiny of violence and despair, or reject naturalism, return to God, and realize a community in which human nature would be completed.Footnote 126
In using Spengler to set out this dilemma, Rawls followed Emil Brunner, the neo-Orthodox theologian he acknowledged as his most significant influence.Footnote 127 In Man in Revolt, which Rawls read closely, Brunner interpreted Decline as an account of the disaster wrought by anthropocentric humanism.Footnote 128 Having set human reason up as the measure of all things and denying dependence upon God, the West had destroyed the “specifically human” aspect of its culture that resided in its religious tradition. Virtually quoting Spengler, he asserted that modern man has thus “become the slave of his own machine.”Footnote 129 Brunner too drew on Kierkegaard in this connection, depicting the West as a culture in despair, and Spengler as the chronicler of its crisis.Footnote 130 As he put it on the very first page of his earlier book, The Theology of Crisis—another source of Rawls's—“The famous book of Oswald Spengler, ‘The Decline of the West,’ has called to our attention … that the disintegrating tendencies of our modern world have led us to a decisive point where the issue can be only one of two things: either new life or death.”Footnote 131 Though Spengler played little role in Rawls's thesis, he would have encountered in Brunner's writings a theology which presented itself as a solution to the crisis of Western civilization as diagnosed by Spengler.
“For repentance to emerge,” Kierkegaard wrote, “a person must first despair with a vengeance, despair to the full, so that the life of spirit can break through from the ground up.”Footnote 132 Rawls had indeed despaired to the full, and he seems to have thought of his own conversion in these familiar terms, describing an intense “dialectic of contrast” between the aloneness of the sinner and the saving love of God during the conversion experience.Footnote 133 It is worth clarifying my use of “conversion” with reference to Rawls, as he might be thought to have only shifted from a conventional Episcopalianism to a more committed variety of the same.Footnote 134 For Rawls, however, denominational change was not definitive of conversion. Conversion was a personal encounter with God, in which He “penetrates into and shatters man's aloneness, thereby restoring him and calling him back to community.”Footnote 135 Rawls strongly implied throughout his section on the conversion experience that he was speaking about his own conversion, contrasting, for instance, the sudden conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus with “others of us [who] are converted over a much longer space of time.”Footnote 136
The conversion experience was, in Rawls's view, the “womb of Christian theology,” suggesting that his theology grew out of the contrast between his earlier despair about the possibility of democracy under modern conditions and the prospect of community offered by faith. Rawls now heeded the call of his professors to “recover and reaffirm the spiritual conception of man,” with a polemic against naturalism which would have been clearly legible in its context as a defense of democracy.Footnote 137 “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” claimed that the rational or spiritual aspects of human nature were irrelevant in a world dominated by “high-technics and power.”Footnote 138 Sin and Faith took human nature to contain within it the permanent possibility of moral action, and a form of motivation which could militate against the rule of desire and move one to resist caesarism. Rather than reason, it was the human capacity to answer God's call to community which made possible a future in which “right relations” were restored and persons no longer sought to use one another to satisfy their greed or vainglory.Footnote 139 Rawls's conversion was not merely another move in an argument, finally providing a compelling response to Spengler.Footnote 140 But with this context restored, Rawls's theology—sometimes held to lack a “sense of the political”—can be seen as an attempted vindication of democracy.Footnote 141 His conversion, then, responded to and resolved his earlier despair about modern democratic politics.
That Rawls's theology amounted to a defense of democracy is not a completely novel view.Footnote 142 But what the contrast with “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” reveals is the significance of “communication” in his theology. In Sin and Faith, Rawls stressed that open communication between persons—aimed not at using or manipulating the other, but at genuine self-revelation—was at the heart of the community into which we were called by God. Faith, as he defined it, is an “openness,” to God and to others.Footnote 143 Communication could, of course, be perverted by egotism, and lies, Rawls said, were the prime example of this: “Speech is something for community. A lie is so damnable because it abuses the use of signs.”Footnote 144 Language—and indeed faces and bodies—were given to humanity by God for the purpose of establishing community through communication. Lies misuse these outward signs to manipulate and mislead for some ulterior purpose. In “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” Rawls had depicted all forms of speech—including philosophical speech and democratic discourse—as tools of power aimed at manipulating the masses, making them “tools,” “instruments,” or “pawns.” The caesars produced arguments, ideals, and principles in order to seize power, and their abuse of language ended eventually in the violent destruction of the world. When end of the world appeared in Sin and Faith, however, it was transformed into a Christian eschatology: “Creation moves towards that great day,” he said, when “men will be open to one another, looking up to God in rejoicing and thanksgiving.”Footnote 145 Though Rawls does not discuss propaganda at length, he held that when community was restored to the world, manipulation would be banished.Footnote 146
I have so far avoided the well-established lens of Rawls's later project of “theodicy” or “reasonable faith,” but it is helpful to recall that discussion in accounting for Rawls's conversion. Paul Weithman has emphasized that the religious aspect of Rawls's mature work consisted in his attempt to present the world as a whole such that it is worthy of devotion.Footnote 147 While “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” lacked this aspect, it addressed the same question, asking whether the world could be thought good. Before his conversion, Rawls could only see the world as worthy of revulsion. Rawls saw democracy reduced to cynical manipulation and consumed by the violent passions of the crowd, and he predicted that it must end in death. On Weithman's reading of Rawls's later project, we would find ourselves alienated, contemptuous of our fellows, and resigned to injustice if we believed that the world and human nature were hostile to the realization of our ideals.Footnote 148 So indeed Rawls appeared in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized.”
To see that our ideal is realizable, however, presents us with “the vocation of realizing that ideal.”Footnote 149 Thus, in his thesis, Rawls claimed that the elect are “to gather together with His aid all those who still remain behind, and are to help bring the totality of the creation before Him.” They are called, that is, to reestablish community.Footnote 150 On this reading, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized” is not a piece of juvenilia that sheds no light on Rawls's later thought, as Andrius Gališanka has suggested.Footnote 151 Instead, it reveals the starting point from which Rawls embarked on his project of defending a democratic society, and the tensions which first generated his project of theodicy. Contrary to the assumption that this project emerged in response to the war and the Holocaust, it was motivated initially by the threat he believed the administrative state posed to democracy. Sin and Faith was not an attempt to redeem the administrative state—Rawls remained silent on institutional questions and his moral critique of capitalists stopped short of endorsing state intervention in the economy.Footnote 152 He endeavored instead to show the possibility—even in apparently inhospitable historical conditions—of an all-embracing moral community characterized by open communication and genuine self-revelation. Contrary to Eric Nelson's depiction of the young Rawls as a committed anti-Pelagian who denied that human action could overcome sin, Rawls argued that—with the assistance of Grace—human beings could establish a this-worldly community.Footnote 153 In doing so, Rawls surmounted his earlier despair and joined with his professors in defending a democratic faith.
Propaganda and the task of philosophy
In the year that Rawls published “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” Theodor Adorno, then based in New York, published an essay on the same topic, warning that “the forgotten Spengler takes his revenge by threatening to be right.”Footnote 154 Adorno and Rawls focused on, and quoted from, many of the same passages in Decline. Spengler, Adorno claimed, “has spilled … the secrets of culture as Hitler has those of propaganda,” and revealed how the “expropriation of human consciousness through the centralized means of public communication” creates a world in which “men have become mere objects.”Footnote 155 Adorno held that one need accept neither Spengler's metaphysics of “life” nor his historical determinism to see that it would be “weak and sentimental” in his wake to reassert the “official optimism” that culture was a sphere of humane values sheltered from the effects of power.Footnote 156 Instead, Adorno thought we must keep our eyes fixed on domination, and find “our only hope that destiny and force shall not have the last word” in “those, according to Spengler, whom history is going to thrust aside and annihilate.” The forces set free by decay personify the “negativity” which “promises … to break the spell of culture and to make an end to the horror of pre-history.”Footnote 157 Philosophy, that is, should be critical—it should draw attention to our objective alienation from our social world and it should identify and resist those forces which seek to reconcile us to it.Footnote 158
Rawls's project of liberal theodicy is a very different response to Spenglerian fatalism—seeking to show the standing possibility of a positive ideal. In light of the apparent absence of substantial engagement with the problems of power, propaganda, and political manipulation in Rawls's mature work, however, his reconciliatory project cannot easily escape the suspicion of some readers that it is a “weak and sentimental” turning away from the problems of real politics.Footnote 159 It is especially important to emphasize here that Rawls does not just attempt to reconcile us to human nature, as on Weithman's reading, but to “calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history”—a task he pursued by developing an ideal out of the institutions, practices, and norms of liberal societies and showing how it might succeed.Footnote 160 Rawls himself worried that justice as fairness could have an ideological function if it tried to reconcile persons to “an unjust and unworthy status quo,” though he left open the questions whether it does this and how it might.Footnote 161 It might be thought that Rawls, having shown to his satisfaction the existence of a possible ideal, had assuaged his anxiety and saw no further need to descend into real politics. This impression is made more, not less, acute by the fact that the problems of mass politics in a secular, liberal society had loomed so large in the mind of the young Rawls—it is as though, finding little cause for hope in the violent reality of modern politics, he sought a safe harbor. As Benjamin L. McKean has put it, drawing a similar contrast with Adorno, “the aim of ideal theory is palliative.”Footnote 162
I want to end by suggesting another possibility: that Rawls translated his concerns about propaganda into his metaethical work and his account of philosophy's task. He seemed to do exactly this in his doctoral thesis, in which he motivated his account of moral reasoning with a comment that—in light of “Spengler's Prophecy Realized”—seems almost autobiographical: “in the face of … institutionally supported propaganda machines, men are likely to doubt not only the efficacy of reasonable principles, but their existence.”Footnote 163 Over the next twenty years, Rawls consistently framed his methodological thought in opposition to C. L. Stevenson, a noncognitivist who argued that the moralist was no different from the propagandist, as ethical talk consisted largely in “persuasive definition”—that is, the exercise of influence by annexing one's preferred cognitive content to an emotively charged term.Footnote 164 The methodological project on which he labored until at least A Theory of Justice can be read as an attempt to show that ethical talk is “not ideology or conditioning—not class interests or neg[ative] association.”Footnote 165 Against the view that the sense of justice is simply “a compulsive psychological mechanism cleverly installed by those in authority,” Rawls tried to show that moral convictions could be autonomously formed—indeed, they could “give expression to one's nature.”Footnote 166
By an intriguing verbal accident, we find Rawls discussing “the end of the world” in this context too. “[I] look forward to the time when all (unanalyzed) ethical talk ceases … with the end of the world, moral preaching evanesces, along with poverty + ignorance.”Footnote 167 It is a mark of how thoroughly his views had changed that he used this language not to refer to a totalitarian apocalypse, but—even after his loss of faith—to the establishment of an ethical community at the eschaton. While a full analysis of these themes in Rawls's mature work is a task for another time, Rawls's thought seems to be animated throughout by the threat posed by power to moral autonomy. Despite turning away in his published work from any effort to analyze “propaganda machines” and techniques, Rawls envisioned a future in which the philosophical work of analysis would render moral language transparent, and so bring into harmony the exercise of moral pressure and the autonomy of those on whom it was applied. This is a neglected aspect of Rawls's work, but especially now, as interest in the political philosophy of language grows, it is worth turning back to this moment in history of political thought, when Rawls and Adorno's interests overlapped, and studying how each negotiated the problems they faced.Footnote 168 Whether we finally accept his view or not, we may learn more about our discipline—its history and potential—from Rawls's vision of philosophy as an aid to liberation.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors and readers at Modern Intellectual History for their responses, and to the participants at the Oxford Work in Progress in Political Theory seminar in January 2022, especially Emily Dyson and Charlie Richards, for valuable comments and much-needed encouragement. I would also like to thank the archivists at Harvard and Princeton Universities, as well as Kate Yoon for her assistance in accessing Rawls's papers. I am grateful to Amia Srinivasan and Teresa Bejan for feedback, and especially to Sophie Smith for reading innumerable drafts, for seeing the interest and stakes of this article early on, and for helping to guide me through the process of drafting and publishing. I owe a great debt, too, to Sian Bayley for her care and generosity as I wrote this article.
