Table Of Content‘The contemporary movement that traces its origins to
Whitehead and Hartshorne is at a critical juncture. Some
would align process thought with anti-liberal political
philosophies that are starkly at odds with the basic
commitments expressed by Whitehead and Hartshorne
themselves. Dombrowski is a leading process thinker whose
PROCESS
resistance against this anti-liberal shift should give pause to
those who have abandoned liberalism in this ominous time
of testing, in which pluralistic democracy is being challenged
PHILOSOPHY
around the globe.’
Derek Malone-France, George Washington University
AND POLITICAL
Argues for political liberalism as a process-
oriented view and process philosophy as a
LIBERALISM
politically liberal view
Daniel A. Dombrowski brings together the thought of philosophy’s
Rawls, Whitehead,
greatest political liberal of the twentieth century, John Rawls, with that
of the great process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles
Hartshorne
Hartshorne. He shows that political liberalism is intimately linked with
process philosophy, renaming it ‘process liberalism’. He justifies this
process liberalism in contrast to four potentially troublesome sources or
influences: metaphysics, religion, right-wing politics and left-wing politics.
Dombrowski engages a series of interlocutors and alternative positions
including Franklin I. Gamwell, Timothy D. Snyder, Martin Heidegger and
Karl Marx. In conclusion, he offers a compelling, intricate and resourceful
argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Rawlsian principles,
which in turn forms the basis of a future environmental ethics. Daniel A. Dombrowski
Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University.
Cover image: © iStockphoto.com
Cover design: stuart Dalziel
Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism
To my son, Damien
Process Philosophy and
Political Liberalism
Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne
Daniel A. Dombrowski
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface vii
1. Reflective Equilibrium as a Process 1
2. Political Liberalism and Process Thought 23
3. Gamwell on ‘The Comprehensive Question’: A
Rawlsian Critique 52
4. Religion, Solitude-in-Solidarity and Snyder’s Bloodlands 79
5. Heidegger, Political Philosophy and Disequilibrium 108
6. Organic Marxism and Process Liberalism 135
7. From Non-human Animals to the Environment 161
Bibliography 198
Index 211
Acknowledgements
Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘Gamwell on “The Comprehensive
Question”: A Rawlsian Critique’, American Journal of Theology &
Philosophy, 38 (2017): 27–48. Likewise, parts of Chapter 4 appeared
in the same journal in the article ‘Religion, Solitariness, and the
Bloodlands’, 36 (2015): 226–39.
Preface
The purpose of the present book is to defend the processual char-
acter of political liberalism. This defence will bring together the
thought of the greatest political liberal, John Rawls, who was
also throughout his long career at Harvard the most influential
political philosopher of the twentieth century, and the thought
of the greatest process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and
Charles Hartshorne, who spent most of their illustrious careers at
Cambridge and Harvard, in Whitehead’s case, and at University of
Chicago, in Hartshorne’s case. It is unfortunate that Rawls is not
better known as a process thinker; and it is equally unfortunate
that Whitehead and Hartshorne are not better known as political
philosophers. My aim is to remedy these defects such that scholars
in philosophy, politics, theology and religious studies will be better
equipped to defend political liberalism against its illiberal detractors
on both the political right and left.
Despite current illiberal tendencies in politics that are obvious,
the twenty-first century may very well turn out to be the Rawlsian
century. Samuel Freeman is one political philosopher who notes
that some of the giants in political theory had their greatest influence
in the century after they wrote (see Freeman 2007b: 5, 458, 472).
John Locke lived in the seventeenth century, but the American
state based on his views did not come into existence until the late
eighteenth century; Adam Smith wrote in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, but invisible hand economics did not spread across the globe
until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Karl Marx wrote
in the nineteenth century, but the communist revolutions fought
viii process philosophy and political liberalism
in his name did not occur until the twentieth century and in places
Marx did not anticipate. I think it is safe to say that pervasive plu-
ralism is here to stay such that either we will find a fair, politically
liberal decision-making procedure to deal with such pluralism in
the twenty-first century or we will unravel into ethnic or racial or
religious warfare, class or gender conflict, and fratricidal/sororal
chaos of all sorts. To put the point even more dramatically, in the
future we will either continue to advance the politically liberal pro-
cess of inclusion and toleration of reasonable differences or we will
perish. Because it would not be rational to allow the latter option
to occur, the ongoing process of political justification in a democratic
context is our only viable option if we hope to approximate justice.
The book has seven chapters. The first chapter deals with
method and hence informs what occurs in the remaining six chap-
ters. Specifically, it deals with the processual method of reflective
equilibrium. This method is wider than and includes Rawls’s more
famous methodological device of deliberating about justice in an
original position behind a veil of ignorance. The hope is that the
mistaken idea that the Rawlsian method of justification in political
philosophy is static will be thoroughly discredited. My primary
interlocutor in this chapter will be Nicholas Wolterstorff. The
second chapter continues the effort to bring together the twin con-
cepts of ‘political liberalism’ and ‘process’ by tracing the origin and
history of political liberalism and by detailing the politically liberal
views of Whitehead and Hartshorne. The emphasis in these first
two chapters is the ongoing character of both political liberalism
and the method by which politically liberal principles are justi-
fied. In the third chapter I examine the most notable challenge to
Rawlsian political liberalism from a thinker who is very well versed
in process thought: Franklin Gamwell. Here I will try to sort out
the relationship between metaphysics and political philosophy in a
way that is conducive to the justification and flourishing of politi-
cally liberal institutions.
By the end of the third chapter my own processual defence of
political liberalism will be open to view for readers’ consideration.
The next three chapters deal with alternative views that, each in
their own way, are theoretically problematic because they lead us
away from reflective equilibrium. In the fourth chapter I examine
preface ix
the historian Timothy Snyder’s magisterial book titled Bloodlands
so as to alert (or remind) readers to the disastrous consequences of
illiberal political philosophies of both the right and left. The fourth
chapter prepares the way for the fifth, where I examine Martin
Heidegger’s right-wing, indeed fascist, political philosophy. And
in the sixth chapter I will look at some recent defences of ‘organic
Marxism’ by Philip Clayton and Justin Heinzekehr, who argue for
a close connection between process thought and Marxism. This
contrasts with my own efforts to get political liberals to be more
explicit about their implicit processuality and to encourage process
thinkers to continue to affirm their historic liberality.
In the seventh chapter I offer a politically liberal defence of
both nonhuman animal rights and environmental ethics so as to
call into question the assumptions that in order to understand our
place within nature we need to travel towards either the green
nationalism that often characterizes right-wing political views
or a revised version of Marxism that is alleged to steer us away
from anthropocentrism. Even in light of the mass killing in the
Bloodlands discussed in the fourth chapter and the environmental
crisis discussed in the seventh chapter, I think that it makes sense
to remain cautiously optimistic regarding the processual effort to
asymptotically approach a realistic utopia that is just.
