Joseph Heath at Persuasion:
According to popular perception, universities have become cesspools of radical left-wing indoctrination, dominated by cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and post-modernism. As someone who has been working on the inside through the past three decades of intellectual fads and enthusiasms, I am sorry to report that, not only is this false, it is the opposite of true. The hegemonic ideology in the fields of political philosophy, legal theory, and political science, throughout my entire career, has been American liberalism. And not just any old American liberalism, but rather the very specific manifestation of this tradition articulated in the work of John Rawls.
Indeed, the intellectual dominance of Rawls has been so complete, for so long, that we have all become desperately bored of talking about him. To provide a sense of the magnitude of the phenomenon, consider that, of the five most highly-cited works of English-language political philosophy published in the past century, two were written by Rawls, and the other three were written in response to Rawls. Political philosophy has basically been all Rawls all the time for as long as I can remember. Every decade or so a new book comes along, promising to shift the paradigm, to give us all something new to talk about. Each one has fizzled out, sending us all back to Rawls.
What explains this extraordinary persistence?
More here.
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