Latarnia magiczna Johna Rawlsa

The dissertation attempts to define the role play ed by John Rawls's thought – especially ideas articulated in his book “Theory of Justice” – for the development and crisis of liberal ideas at the end of the 20th century. The author describes Rawls’s thought as a synthesis of ideas and concepts of classical contractualism, deontologism and, in further plan, abstract constructivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. The Rawlsian idea of social contract, based on the hypothetical situation of the “veil of ignorance”, which is supposed to minimize inequalities and maximize the benefits of each participant of the social game, leads to a detached view of the world of politics, the rejection of the teleological dimension of community and the design of society in accordance to the abstract ideological simulacra. As the author concludes, embedding a liberal project in radical abstraction in place of political memory and a totalizing vision of the world, that rejects any illiberal ideas, results in blindness to the fragility of empirical political projects and antagonization of suppressed political ideas, that adopt a non-liberal concept of good and purpose.