James Madison, John Rawls and the Quest for Political Stability

LIZÁRRAGA, FERNANDO ALBERTO

Santiago de Chile

Conferencia; 5th Annual Academic Conference 2018: Governance and Institutional Change.; 2018

Civic Initative University of Massachusetts - Escuela de Gobierno y Gestión Pública, Universidad de Chile

In this paper I intend, primarily, to outline some thoughts regarding the views on stability by two of the most important American political thinkers: James Madison, drafter of the Constitution, and John Rawls, undoubtedly one of the most influential egalitarian political philosophers in recent decades. So, I will first single out and comment on some of the main ideas in Federalist 10, in order to see, in a second moment, how a contemporary philosopher like Rawls fits into the broad tradition of American political thought, combining liberal, republican, egalitarian, and utopian elements. In a nutshell, I will hold that Madison?s piece is an interrogation about the nature of instability and the means to avoid or overcome it by institutional procedures, and that Rawls?s theory takes up this tradition and pushes it into new grounds, combining freedom and equality as the basis of a society that can be stable if a wide consensus is built upon fair principles of justice.