Higher Ignorance.

The Law of Peoples, by John Rawls (Harvard, 199 pp., $22.50)

WHY should it matter to Ameri cans that John Rawls has written a book about international relations? After all, The Law of Peoples-like Rawls's two previous books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993)-is written in the arid prose favored by analytic philosophers and thus contributes nothing to the literary edification of its readers. Moreover, unlike many useful textbooks on the subject, Rawls's book sheds little light on the history of ideas related to foreign policy. As for the depth of philosophical thought contained in the book, suffice it to say that Rawls, like too many moralists, is more concerned with telling us how the world ought to be than understanding how it is.

What, then, is to be gained from an encounter with Rawls's latest work? Above all, a glimpse into the contemporary liberal soul. For since the publication of A Theory of Justice Rawls has become the unofficial philosophical spokesman for academic liberalism. Richard Rorty might sell more books with his "pragmatic" defense of democratic egalitarianism. Ronald Dworkin might do more to publicize the liberal agenda with his high-profile essays for The New York Review of Books. But no one distills the deepest longings of liberals and transforms them into philosophical principles and proclamations like Rawls.

Surely some of the considerable reverence shown to Rawls in the academic community can be traced to the timing of the publication of his first work. A Theory of Justice appeared just as George McGovern's presidential campaign was taking shape, and the book seemed to confer philosophical legitimacy on the hopes that motivated his supporters on university campuses across the country. In over 500 densely argued pages, Rawls claimed that politics had to be conceived in fundamentally moral terms, that morality was synonymous with justice, and that justice could be equated with "fairness." As if drawing a simple inference from an enormous syllogism, Rawls concluded that politics should seek to diminish the unfairness of life-the unfairness that, for instance, leads one person to be born with advantages and opportunities that others lack. Practically speaking, this meant that liberal politics not only had to recognize individual rights to life, liberty, and property, but also to provide a generous welfare state, universal access to health care, and even (as Rawls advocates in his more recent writings) public financing of political campaigns.

McGovern's crusade proved a dismal failure at the ballot box, and liberals over the next two decades have had to resign themselves to playing an increasingly peripheral role in American politics. But Rawls convinced them that they had justice itself on their side, and this righteous self-certainty has proven enough to keep their hopes alive through the conservatism of the Reagan '80s and the unprincipled opportunism of the Clinton era.

How did Rawls ground his philosophical defense of liberal convictions? He did so by insisting that liberalism consists primarily in "being reasonable," and that reasonableness is achieved when each individual imagines himself in a pre-political "original position" in which a "veil of ignorance" hides knowledge of the goods (like wealth, talent, and status) he possesses in life. Knowing that he might very well turn out to be poor, uneducated, and the victim of circumstances beyond his control, every individual chooses to authorize a government that provides precisely those protections and benefits advocated by the most liberal wing of the Democratic party.

Now this way of arguing is notoriously circular. Rawls might have feigned disinterestedness, but it was clear to all but the most blinded partisans on the left that his thought experiment was designed to lead his readers to precisely the conclusion he had in mind from the outset. After all, no one would choose to base politics on the arbitrary assumptions of the original position unless he was already convinced that individuals ought to bracket knowledge of the goods they possess in life when making political judgments. The precondition of liberal reasonableness is, it seems, liberal reasonableness.

But to judge Rawls's work by the same standards that one would apply to the great philosophers of the Western tradition is largely to miss the point. For Rawls's philosophy exists not to lead us to timeless human truths. Rather, it exists to tell liberals that, regardless of the way the world is, it ought to be exactly the way they already believe it ought to be.

This highly politicized, sub-philosophical intention is the only thing that can explain and excuse The Law of Peoples, Rawls's grand attempt to apply his domestic political theory to the international arena. Every philosopher from Plato through Hegel recognized that the relation between states presents peculiar difficulties for morality, since states do not share common habits and customs as do citizens within particular countries. This is why many so-called "realists" have concluded that states are in a perpetual Hobbesian condition of war with each other. But Rawls is unconcerned with such considerations. Refusing to refer to "states" on the grounds that states have their own selfish interests that must be overcome, he chooses instead to speak of "Peoples," which, he claims, have a moral potential analogous to individual human beings. Rawls then simply applies to the world at large the same thought experiment that supposedly generated Democratic domestic-policy proposals in A Theory of Justice.

The result is as follows. The world is divided into two groups. First, there are liberal and non-liberal "decent" Peoples, who, imagining themselves behind the veil of ignorance in the original position, decide that they should live with the other Peoples of the world in peace and mutual respect. Then there are the non-decent Peoples of the world, some of whom behave nastily due to no fault of their own (because of poverty, accidents of history, and other misfortunes) and others ("outlaw states") who do so because their leadership is simply corrupt (in Rawls's theory, "Peoples" never choose to act indecently).

On the basis of these distinctions, Rawls claims that liberal and non- liberal decent Peoples ought never to engage in power politics when dealing with their enemies. To do so is to fail to serve as an example for would-be members of a future world-wide "Society of Peoples." Instead, liberal and decent Peoples ought to act as if such a Society existed in the present; they should thus wage wars only for defensive purposes and with utmost restraint. Likewise, they must recognize their "duty" to offer assistance to Peoples in distress.

If his readers had any doubt that his moral imperatives for foreign policy are little more than arbitrary expressions of left-liberal sentimentality, it becomes painfully obvious as soon as he begins to apply those imperatives to reality. To no one's surprise, Hitler is held up as the personification of evil, while Stalin is passed over in silence. Truman is denied the title of "statesman" because of the bombing of Hiroshima, but his resolution in standing up to Communist tyranny after World War II is never mentioned. Neither are the decidedly un- Rawlsian policies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan-policies that contributed so decisively to wrecking the experiment in inhumanity conducted by the "outlaw state" that was the Soviet Union. These silences and admonitions cannot but lead us to conclude that, for Rawls, reason and justice demanded adopting anti-anticom munism during the Cold War.

This hyper-liberal vision of international relations is what Rawls dubs, with much fanfare, a "realistic utopia." But it would be more accurate to call it a proposal for self-induced lethargy and impotence on the part of the world's democracies. Though the paradox might disturb the slumber induced by Rawlsian rationalizations, the effectual truth of things is that domestic decency must often be defended with vigilance abroad, and aggression by foreign powers matched by measures we would never tolerate within our own borders. If liberal sympathy and softness are counterproductive when dealing with criminals and the poor at home, they are downright suicidal when applied to the relations between states.

Of course, most adults recognize this as an obvious, if slightly unpalatable, fact of political life. But Rawls appears not to. Thus it is that liberalism's quest for moral purity has led its leading philosopher into a condition of childlike innocence about the ways of the world.