Rawls thinking Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Rawls thinking - Essay Example This kind of utopianism is not especially useful in the international scheme. Utopianism is unrealistic. It supposes that a perfect world can be created by men and that is one of our goals on Earth. E. H. Carr, for example, is a realist: he believes the world is not perfectible and that efforts to do so will end in failure and sometime calamity (Copleston, 99). The political system contains too many variables for any person or group to control. The League of Nations is a good example of this. The problems of the world are not the creation of any one person or group and so they cannot be tackled head on. Utopianism is a dead end and Rawls version of it is also a dead end. In a sense Rawls opinion of international relations is a continuation of Rousseaus (Rawls, 224). To fully understand this with must go back more than 200 years into the past. The Enlightenment was a remarkable time in human history. For many years, humans had lived in an intellectual or cultural â€Å"dark ages† where very little changed and people were wedded to their superstitions. Centuries went by and nothing really progressed. Instead of testing the world around them they simply accepted what clergymen or monarchs told them was true and left it at that. They didn’t test their limits; they just read old books and believed the facts in them. But this state of affairs could not last forever. There is an impulse, a curiosity, in humans that seeks sensible explanations. In the 17th century the Enlightenment began. Motivated by trade, the printing press, and a number of very significant intellectual leaders, this period of history saw a lot of the superstitions that gui ded people’s lives beaten back. Thinkers like Diderot, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson revolutionized the way we think about the world and our place in it (Sahakian, 87). Scientific innovation was also telling us more and more about our world, was