Rawls and Estrangement : Lessons from Classical German Philosophy and Decision Theory

Abstract

Marx develops and discusses two conceptions of estrangement: (1) political estrangement, understood as a dualism between the interests of citizenship and those pursued in civil society, and (2) economic estrangement, understood as a transformation of the individualistic pursuit of interests in civil society into a social process governed by an alien dynamic and characterized by a degrading instrumentalism. A decision-theoretic idea of strategic estrangement articulates in a more general way the self-transformation of independent agency into a ‘second nature’ with an alien dynamic. Relating these ideas to earlier, partly anticipatory discussions of estrangement in the works of Kant and Hegel can bring out their relevance to John Rawls’s conception of justice. This conception, it turns out, is vulnerable to political, economic, and strategic estrangement