How can we agree to disagree?

Nationalism, India, and the political theory of political identity: Part II

The previous post looked at the core question of political theory: if we disagree on fundamental issues, how can we possibly live together? This is, in my view, the key political theoretical issue: political philosophy is a question of how we live well together; certainly we can live “together” in an abstract sense, such as occupying the same space, but if the relations between individuals is to be conducive to the public good, then we need to know what those relations should look like.

The post considered a particularly strong answer to this question, given by the jurist Carl Schmitt, in what we might call ‘radical authoritarianism’. Schmitt’s answer was, broadly, that in a moment of radical disassociation into competing groups, a strong force and power must emerge that “reorients the ‘who’ of the people that are inside and outside of the basic political unit”.

In many ways, this question goes to the heart of political theory: if moral philosophy is the question of how we live well, political philosophy is the question of how we live well together.

§ John Rawls and the Law of Peoples

To move to an entirely different tradition of political thought, and one that Schmitt would have despised, we shall now look at the liberal proceduralism of John Rawls. Thought of in some regards as the Immanuel Kant of the 20th century, Rawls was born in Maryland in 1921, one of five sons, of which only three would survive. He attended Princeton university, graduating summa cum laude in 1943, before joining the military to fight in the Pacific War; it was said that, witnessing the horror of war in the Philippines, he lost his Christian faith entirely.