On Dec. 13, 1999, the six candidates for the Republican presidential nomination gathered in Des Moines. The event was a debate, the third in eleven days, and the last before the Iowa caucuses.
That night, each candidate was asked to name his favorite political philosopher. None of them gave a good answer, and only one bothered to name a philosopher at all. (He, alas, was Steve Forbes. The philosopher: John Locke.) Though the erudite Alan Keyes chose the founders of the United States, and bully John McCain invoked Teddy Roosevelt, it was George W. Bush who gave the most startling answer.
"Christ," he replied, "because he changed my heart."
Debate moderator and local anchor John Bachman immediately asked the candidate to clarify his response for the millions of television viewers, and Bush essentially refused. "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."
Volumes have since been written on how this response reflected the growing role of religion in politics. Comparatively few observers, however, have commented on how it simultaneously testified to the irrelevance of political philosophy.
On its face, the statement was ridiculous: Changing another person's heart, done quite effectively by, say, Walt Disney or Rosa Parks, does not make one a philosopher.
And if Bush had been concerned with the philosophic norms of reasoned, public argument, he would have known that an appeal to a vaguely defined personal experience, inaccessible to anyone but him, constitutes no evidence at all.
But the Texas governor successfully gambled that the word "philosopher" would mean so little to the electorate that he could score political points by deliberately misusing it.
Few Americans have ever heard of John Rawls, though his 1971 "A Theory of Justice" is among the most important works of U.S. political philosophy. Perhaps his greatest popular exposure came when his name was mentioned on "The West Wing."
During his lifetime Rawls sought to prove that the contemporary welfare state is neither an unjustified act of charity nor a watered-down socialism. Instead, programs like those of the New Deal and Great Society represented the fulfillment of the demands of justice itself.
According to Rawls, the appropriate position to take when judging a distribution of goods is that of a selfish person who has had any specific knowledge of her actual situation (attributes, skills, education, etc.) wiped from her brain. Behind this "veil of ignorance," the individual would recognize that, no matter who she turned out to be, she was likely to get more of what she wanted if the entire supply of goods was to expand.
Thus, she would reason that at least some inequalities (for example, those that promoted economic growth) could benefit her personally, and reject the economic equality demanded by socialism.
Since the veil of ignorance would preclude her ability to construct social arrangements tailored to benefit her specifically, she would have little choice but to require that, in Rawls's most famous formulation, "social and economic inequalities be arranged to the ... greatest benefit of the least advantaged."
Though Rawls' work has exerted tremendous influence, many philosophers can and do disagree with his conclusions. Most famously, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick has argued that freedom is incompatible with the kind of distribution patterns that Rawls advocated.
But in philosophy, political disagreements tend to clarify and illuminate the underlying issues, rather than cloud them in a haze of irrelevancies. Do we the people prefer talk of changed hearts and Swift Boats to substantive discussion of real problems?
One answer came from Adlai Stevenson decades ago. "In a democracy," he once observed, "people usually get the kind of government they deserve."
O'Connor is a Ph.D candidate in American studies.
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