Political Liberalism.

Political Liberalism, by John RawIs (Columbia, 401 pp., $29.95)

HOW is it that one can read a book of abstract political philosophy and feel reasonably certain that its author voted for Bill Clinton?

John RawIs is a noted theorist whose book A Theory of Justice is widely regarded as a modern classic-- an essay in ambitious, old-fashioned political theorizing that tackles large questions and attempts to give answers. If only there were more like it. And yet, at the end of the day, one feels there is something cramped about its generalizing, something parochial in its very universalism. It has the feel of an attempt to rationalize a status quo. It seems not to break new ground but to articulate a pre-existing consensus among a certain set of people academic liberals, in the current sense of "liberal." Philosophy, it seems to say, leads us inexorably to a great big secularist egalitarian welfare state with lots of civil liberties--the Great Society and then some. I exaggerate cruelly, but that's more or less what it comes to.

The same is true of Rawls's new book, Political Liberalism. He wants us to understand that he is using "liberalism" in a wide sense, that the word doesn't "presuppose" any particular "comprehensive" doctrine of the world or human nature. But, although he never uses such phrases as "compassion for the less fortunate" or "a decade of greed and selfishness," he winds up leaving us feeling that we are in all-too-familiar territory.

When Rawls discusses "constitutional essentials," for example, he gives such examples of "basic rights" as "the right to vote and to participate in politics, liberty of conscience, freedom of thought and association, as well as the protections of the rule of law." Notice that property rights didn't make the cut. But he adds a further "essential"; "a social minimum providing for the basic needs of all citizens." This is the idiom not of philosophy but of a Democratic platform. For Rawls it is "basic" that the state must force some to support others.

And when he speaks of "a democratically ratified constitution with a bill of rights," he clearly has in mind not just the U.S. Constitution, which he seems only vaguely familiar with, but the current corpus of Supreme Court interpretations (and distortions) of the Constitution. He speaks of the New Deal as among "the three most innovative periods of our constitutional history," apparently oblivious to the controversies that have always swirled around the extraordinary (and cynical) liberties Franklin Roosevelt took with the Constitution he was sworn to uphold. The New Deal was "innovative" in that it disregarded key provisions of the Constitution, including parts of the Bill of Rights itself (the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, for example).

Nor is this all. He sees the Supreme Court as an "exemplar of public reason." Like most liberals (current sense), he is unaware that the Court essentially went out of business during the New Deal: that it ceased to be a check on the centralization of power through legislative and executive usurpation (the role Hamilton envisioned for it in The Federalist) and became itself a co-agent of centralization, doing a lot of usurping of its own.

In saying all these things, Rawls is only reflecting the current consensus of intellectuals. Even many conservatives don't grasp what has happened to the Constitution and have come to take for granted, if only through grudging inertia, that politics is largely a predatory mass competition for what used to be private property.

But Rawls has hung out his shingle as a philosopher, so he should be expected to achieve a certain aloofness from what is parochial in the attitudes of our time. Unfortunately, he writes sentences like this: "The [Supreme Court] Justices cannot, of course, invoke their own personal morality, nor the ideals and virtues of morality generally." How would you explain the phrase "their own personal morality" to Aristotle or Locke?

The phrase is, however, a clue to the way Rawls thinks, and to the flaw in his thinking. He aims at a politics that represents an "overlapping consensus" among people of widely differing "comprehensive" views of the world and human nature. But, as I understand him, he thinks his own liberalism is already, somehow, a compromise between itself and the competition. In effect, he thinks he is splitting the difference by ruling in his own favor. That's liberalism, all right.

One word in this book keeps haunting me: the mysterious pronoun "we." I have often wondered what impels people (including me) to use it, except in cases (a family, a baseball team) where its antecedent is clearly defined. When it comes to "a society"--another mysterious entity--the word becomes enigmatic, since the "we" of whom Rawls, say, seems to be speaking does not and cannot include every supposed member.

As I read him, I get the uneasy sense that "we" comes to mean those who already see eye-to-eye with John Rawls: we-who-think-in-such-and-such-a-way. This "we" is more or less bound to reach Rawls's conclusions, since it shares his premises. My guess is that it includes few Mormons, for example.

So the "overlapping consensus" Rawls hopes for is likely to shrink, not grow. His work is not intended for a mass audience, but I think its readership is bound to be even smaller in years to come, because it preaches to a choir that may not be around much longer. In essence he is arguing that the virtue of liberalism is that it's the only principle most of today's liberals can agree on. That may turn out to be a severely limited virtue.

Mr. Sobran is NR's critic-at-large.