As regular BHL readers know, I did a big series of blog posts on Rawlsian property-owning democracy last November. My criticisms were a response to some articles on property-owning democracy and a recent anthology of articles on the topic, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, edited by Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson. Paul Weithman, easily my favorite Rawlsian, has just published an in-depth, thoughtful review of the anthology which is mostly an explanation of how Rawls understood the idea of a property-owning democracy and the arguments he used to vindicate it. It is arguably the most detailed explanation of Rawls’s views on POD of anything I have ever read. So for those interested, check it out. An excerpt:

The ideal institutional descriptions of these regime-types imply that their aims are public. I believe that the publicity of aims, and their educational effects, are crucial to the contrasts Rawls means to draw between property-owning democracy and the other regime-types. But the reliance on publicity might seem to pose two problems for Rawls. First, the publicity of its aims might seem to make the ideal-type of, for example, welfare-state capitalism too unlike welfare states of the actual world for the ideal institutional description associated with “welfare state capitalism” to be linked to the familiar referent in the requisite way. Second, if the familiar referents do not have publicly avowed aims, then it is hard to see how Rawls can identify the aims he associates with their ideal-types.

I believe Rawls thinks that, in the actual world, the characteristic aims and design-principles of familiar types such as welfare-state capitalism are public knowledge, not because they satisfy the publicity condition of TJ, but because — more weakly — they are readily ascertainable by sophisticated observers and by reflective persons who live under them. They are public because, to use a phrase Rawls uses in a different connection, they are the “evident intention” of the regimes. And so I believe Rawls thinks he can identify the aims and design-principles associated with the ideal-types in part by generalizing from aims explicitly avowed in the actual cases from which they are worked up, but also by asking what aims would furnish the most plausible philosophical rationale for the institutions and policies of, for example, contemporary welfare states.

What might more plausibly be said to distance Rawls’s ideal-types from economic systems of our world than the publicity of their aims is the regimes’ high degree of internal coherence, bestowed by what might seem their unrealisitic unity of purpose. This might seem to require quite considerable abstraction from the messiness with which policies are made, particularly in democracies. For the economic systems of democracies are bound to be the cumulative result of so much log-rolling and deal-cutting, and of so many switches of party- and sectional-dominance, that it is impossible to offer a unified explanation of them or to recover a single intention animating their policies, let alone to discern an evident one. Thus (as with Weber’s ideal-types so with Rawls’s ideal institutional descriptions) articulation may seem to involve the intentional exaggeration of some features of actual systems at the expense of others, which in reality are equally prominent, and so to yield caricatures that impede rather than advance analysis.