John Rawls and Liberal Guilt

In contemporary political commentary, “liberal guilt” represents a cynical attempt to express moral concern without engaging in genuine and transformative action. This critique, however, overlooks a reading of “liberal guilt” as an expression of a conflict that cannot be worked through, namely a commitment to a suffering other to whom one feels indebted, and an attachment to a specific political arrangement from which one extracts benefits. This ambivalence, I suggest, produces forms of “moral paralysis” or the production of gestures that do not disturb the terms of liberal consensus. My aim is to explore how this contradiction is expressed in liberal thought through a psychoanalytic reading of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I will show how Rawls productively uses the work of Melanie Klein to ground guilt-feelings on terms other than those offered by Freud. Here, guilt is an expression of value that begets reparative gestures towards another. However, for Rawls, guilt can be expressed only in compressed and exchange-based terms that permit a return to political equilibrium and consensus. This means Rawls’s subject is endowed with a paranoid attachment to order, which dictates how guilt can be felt and enacted politically in relation to others. I show how this narration of guilt in Rawls’s thought gives theorists leverage to rethink “liberal guilt” as an expression of a contradiction between both paranoid and solidaristic attachments. Last, I show how “liberal guilt” may present itself as a site of political possibility.