Why and How Should we Read the Classics of Political Philosophy? John Rawls's Ambition to Learn from Locke

For theorists concerned with normative problems, a historical practice of political philosophy may seem worthless. By definition, the historian's interest is centered on texts which were written in the past and whose author belonged to a context much different from our. But if his context is different from our context, his philosophical problem is not our philosophical problem, and the conceptual innovations he made in order to address this problem are no longer helpful for us. Locke, for example, said nothing about climate or intergenerational justice. The most crucial issues of our could not be an issue for him. As a consequence, theorists concerned with contemporary affairs should avoid the long and worthless detour via the history of philosophy. To the objection that, for some problems, a timeless conversation with the philosophers of the past remains helpful, one could answer that this conversation is always based on an erroneous reading. The one who reads without paying attention to the strong difference of the contexts is necessary committed to some kind of projection. He reads from his point of view and projects his problems and interests on the text. As a first consequence, this projection inevitably dooms the reader to a mis-understanding of the text. Secondly, the reader's detour via the text is useless. He might think that he learns something from the text, but eventually what he sees in the text is only what he had already put in it. My contribution intends to show that in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2008) John Rawls resolves these two methodological problems, say (1) the pitfall of confinement, deriving from a strong contextualism and (2) the pitfall of projection, deriving from a lack of contextualism. Focusing on the “Lectures on Locke”, that must be considered as paradigmatic of Rawls' practice, I will show how Rawls achieves a philosophical practice of the history of political philosophy by which he learns from Locke and not only about him (I take this distinction between “learn from” and “learn about” from M. Frazer, 2010). My argument is that although Rawls considers that, to understand Locke, he has (1) to find out Locke's own problem and intention (contextualist principle) and (2) to understand Locke in its best light (principle of charity), he nevertheless questions Locke's doctrine from his own point of view, not only as an interpreter but also as a normative philosopher. Thanks to this distinctive methodology, Rawls achieves a deep understanding of Locke's doctrine that is also valuable from a normative point of view. He learns from Locke that, if we hope to reach reflective equilibrium, the social contract must be conceived as non-historical. Thanks to his philosophical practice of the history of political philosophy, Rawls thus justifies one important assumption of Justice as Fairness.