Rawls’s Political Liberalism from an Emergentist Perspective

John Rawls’s political liberalism is supported and better understood via Michael Polanyi’s tacit and emergent structures. Rawls claims the political is “freestanding” and “neutral” relative to comprehensive moral doctrines and metaphysical assumptions. Polanyian critics of Rawls empha­size the personal nature of our political commitments and Polanyi’s metaphysical realism. They also claim tacit knowing makes Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” impossible. However, as an emergent social order, political liberalism is a joint comprehension of a plurality of competing traditions that operates as an upper-level control in a dual control system; it supports yet constrains individuals in traditions so they may mutually flourish under its umbrella. Emergent levels have their own rules of organization and hence possess a rationality that can function independently and neutrally relative to its subsidiaries and so is freestanding, as Rawls claims. Still, since this level is constituted by overlapping consensus and is not a modus vivendi, there is indeed personal commitment to political values, as Polanyi affirms. This continuity makes it difficult to disambiguate one’s comprehensive ethical understanding from one’s political understanding. But, as with counterfactual hypotheses in science, Polanyi could endorse the artifice of the veil. By occluding politically irrelevant facts we better access this shared level, and tacit convictions about political justice become explicit.