Rawls's Realistic Utopianism : A Critical Discussion

The article investigates Rawls’s realistic utopianism with reference to two orders of methodological criteria, namely desirability and feasibility. The article shows how the roles attributed to the two criteria gradually change throughout Rawls’s path from “A Theory of Justice”, to “Political Liberalism2 and, finally, to “The Law of Peoples”. In particular, the article focuses on the implications connected to Rawls’s attempt at enhancing the practical significance of his principles, an attempt that leads him to ascribe an increasing centrality to feasibility considerations and to downgrade his concerns with the desirability and theoretical adequacy of the proposed principles. The article questions Rawls’s methodological approach and it suggests that realistic utopianism tends to distort the character of both desirability and feasibility. More precisely, the article argues that, due to its attempted synthesis between desirability and feasibility and to its search of a middle-ground between realism and utopianism, Rawls’s realistic utopianism ends up trapped into ambiguities that render it unable to appropriately vindicate its principles and to fulfil the normative aspirations of political philosophy.