Perverse Effects and Social Philosophy Rawls’s Theory of Justice

Abstract

Those who reflect on the nature of industrial society constantly refer to what I shall here call programmed Utopias. The pessimist version has it that societies are vast organisations in which individual behaviours would inevitably be programmed. The optimistic version (see, for instance, the American sociologist Etzioni’s book The Active Society) has it that industrial societies have to be corrected by improving their programming, i.e., by researching into better means of circulating information and by perfecting the retroactive mechanisms that link the different poles of a society (considered as an organisation) together.