Rationalism and Relativism: An Essay on John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay creates an unlikely conversation between two 20th century thinkers: John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott. I say “unlikely” because apart from a few scant remarks in the writing of each the two did not directly engage each other. The essay begins by examining Oakeshott’s explication of “The Rationalist” and her tradition in the history of political thought. Specifically, the essay shows that rationalism in politics involves the belief that reason is an infallible guide to political activity and that the Rationalist seeks certainty and perfection in political affairs. The essay goes on to tease out the rationalistic tendencies in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and then it analyzes Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and applies these criticisms to Rawls. Briefly, Oakeshott marks a distinction between technical and practical knowledge, and he argues that the principles that make up technical manuals like A Theory of Justice are abridgments of and no substitute for the understanding we gain through our practical experience and our participation in a given political tradition. While explaining Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and Rawls, the essay indicates some of the relativistic proclivities in Oakeshott’s appeal to political practices and traditions, and then it entertains objections to Oakeshott that a Rawlsian might offer. Here Rawls’ commitment to the liberal tradition and the relativity implicit in his explanations of “reflective equilibrium” and “reasonableness” are examined and Rawls’ similarities to Oakeshott are noted. Ultimately, this essay argues that the strength of Rawls’ work lay not in the fact that his principles of justice are established by rational agents in an original position, but in the fact that they are principles that emerge from and cohere with ideas deeply rooted in the Western tradition itself.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".