Private and Public Dilemmas: Rawls on the Family

In: Polity, Band 44, Heft 3, S. 426-445

Abstract

This article, contrary to many feminist interpretations, argues that Rawls's work reflects not a patriarchal inability to address coercive family structures, but a deep understanding of the role of family life in expressing diversity, individual goods, and liberty. Moreover, his later espousal of a political liberalism founded on fairness and cooperation signifies not a shift toward toleration of either patriarchy or oppression in the family. Rather, by understanding the relationship between the political and the comprehensive as porous, and as neither dichotomous nor distinctly separate realms, Rawls proposes an effective strategy for combating oppression in the family while protecting comprehensive ends from political oppression. Ultimately, his paradigm accounts for the actual and the potential practices, and for the coercive and the voluntary aspects, of family life. He thus pushes "the limits of the possible.". Adapted from the source document.