Last Friday, I posted a piece in The Stone at The New York Times suggesting the work of philosopher John Rawls as an intellectual touchstone for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.

The post has elicited a range of reactions. Of the 102 comments on the Times website, a handful offered ideas for what might be included in an Occupy manifesto, a few maintained that I mischaracterized the protestors’ aims or erred by putting Rawls side by side with the novelist and Tea Party favorite Ayn Rand. Many commenters offered ideas for alternative authors and texts to inspire the Occupiers: Marx, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Wallerstein, Lowi, Wolff, Habermas and Sandel, as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Book of Proverbs and the Golden Rule. Twenty or so comments expressed agreement that Rawlsian ideas should fuel the movement’s agenda.

And then there were a number of comments arguing that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t need Rawls and may not need any philosophical underpinning at all. For some, Rawls’s principles are “too radical” (no. 40, no. 60) because they put too much weight on the interests of the least advantaged. For others, Rawls is “not radical enough” (no. 62) because his theory calls for measly incremental policy changes that “already lay dormant in our constitutional republic.”  

According to Will Wilkinson, who responded to my post at length on Monday, Rawls is more radical than I let on, and “generations of students” suffer from a misperception of what lies at the heart of Rawls’s theory. For Wilkinson, the most contentious move in Rawls’s theory is not the difference principle, according to which inequality is only justified if it maximizes the well-being of the least well-off. This idea, he writes, “follows almost trivially from the idea that our main institutions ought to tend toward the common interest and mutual benefit” and is “the least significant and probably least contentious” proposal Rawls makes.

Oddly, Wilkinson immediately refutes his own point by contending that the principle is “uncommonly and, I think, implausibly strong.” Rawls himself argued that the difference principle is not a “constitutional essential” because “issues of distributive justice…are always open to differences of opinion” that may be difficult to reconcile (Justice as Fairness: A Briefer Restatement, 48). Nevertheless, Wilkinson offers a different proposal for what counts as Rawls’s wildest move: his purported failure to include economic rights under the first principle of justice:

One might sensibly imagine that if all liberties matter, and that if citizens are to enjoy the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others, then economic liberty must matter, and citizens ought to have as much of it as possible. However, Rawls specifically denies that robust economic rights and liberties are in any way implied by his first principle of justice. Economic liberties are not among our basic liberties. This is Rawls' boldest claim.