The British Marxist historian E. H. Carr once mounted a fierce defence of utopian thinking in a paragraph in which he had seemed to argue against the idea at first. In The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939, he wrote: "Just as nobody has ever been able to make gold in a laboratory, so nobody has ever been able to live in Plato's republic or in a world of universal free trade or in Fourier's phalansteries. But it is, nevertheless, perfectly right to venerate Confucius and Plato as the founders of political science, Adam Smith as the founder of political economy, and Fourier and Owen as the founders of socialism. The initial stage of aspiration towards an end is an essential foundation of human thinking. The wish is the father to the thought. Teleology precedes analysis."

In that spirit, I see the American liberal philosopher John Rawls' theory of justice as a fine utopian introduction to the perfectionist possibilities of the human condition. In his A Theory of Justice, published more than five decades ago, he advanced an idea of distributive justice which proposes that social systems should be organised so that the least advantaged fare better than they would in any alternative economic arrangement.

The key to Rawls' thinking lies in his concept of the Original Position. As I have written elsewhere, the concept is based on a thought experiment in which members of a society act from beyond a veil of ignorance which prevents them from knowing what position - such as ethnicity, gender and social status - they would occupy in a world of their imagined making. Ignorance of subjective personal circumstances would mean awareness of objective social circumstances. In this process, two principles would be upheld: the liberty principle and the difference principle. The first would offer everyone the greatest degree of liberty without intruding into the freedom of others. The second would offer every individual an equal opportunity to prosper. Either way, those who are the most disadvantaged at the initiation of the Rawlsian social contract would be better off once that contract has come into force.

Rawls was interested in what he called a "realistic utopia", what commentators have termed a "feasible but ideal society that serves as a practical and moral goal for the present. This concept balances the 'ought' of an ideal society with the 'is' of current reality, providing a vision for a just and stable society that does not contravene human nature but extends the limits of political possibility. His approach combines ideal theory with realistic constraints to show that a reasonably just, though not perfect, society is achievable".

Expectedly, he was criticised by both realists, who declared, in one account, "a realistic utopia to be too utopian", and from cosmopolitans, who thought "that it is not utopian enough". The twin attacks are equally "cool". When an idea incenses two extremes of opinion, whether philosophical or ideological or political, that idea is getting somewhere. The idea of the Original Position can well serve as a yardstick against which to judge realists, who have dispensed with the idea of any meaningful progress in human affairs, and cosmopolitans/idealists, for whom no incremental change in human fortunes can ever suffice.

Bangladesh

It appears to me that Rawls is politically important to Bangladesh today. As the February elections next year approach, there is a great deal of churn in society. That is good because revolutions are worthless unless they produce norm-changing social churn. Three revolutions explain Bangladesh: those of 1947, 1971 and 2024. The first revolution protected the Muslim identity of East Bengal; the second preserved the Bengali identity of East Pakistan; and the third reclaimed the agency of Muslim Bengalis to determine their political future. (This is in a nutshell: Each revolution had more than one goal.) This is fine, but the question is what Bangladesh should be from now on. After all, all revolutionary practice is situated, not in destroying an old order for its own lying sake but in creating a new and just order. Every revolution reduces concrete structures of injustice to indiscriminate rubble but only to use the fallen stones to raise a new edifice of truth.

What should a new Bangladeshi edifice look like? I would not be presumptuous enough to even try to answer. Any answer should rest on Bangladeshis, and Bangladeshis alone. But that answer would do well to remember Rawls' Original Position. A new Bangladesh could be viewed through a veil of ignorance in which citizens strive, even in a mere thought experiment, to imagine a country that is still theirs but in which they will not remain themselves any more.

Thus, a burqa-clad mother of five would look at the world through the eyes of a third-gender dreamer whose only care is for the skies. A full-time priest would exchange uncomfortable places with a situational atheist (and the other way around). A boy would become a girl, say. A girl would become a better boy than the one she hopes to marry one day. Underaged girls would not be married off to adult men. People would change, and so would their habitat. The habitually-threatened villages of riverine Bangladesh would enjoy at least some of the geographical protection of patrician Dhaka because of better flood-control measures. And so on.

How much of the Rawlsian utopia could be achieved would depend on the material conditions of existing Bangladesh, but imagination takes on a life of its own once it is let out of the cage of the present.

I hope earnestly that Bangladeshis would spare a thought for Rawls as they embark on the next phase of their national journey.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com