It has been the
practice in recent, mainstream American political theory to
appeal to notions of facts from which to draw on the values
of American society and to formulate, from such facts,
Americans' unique notions of justice and freedom. This
approach rests upon an obvious suspension of notions of value
that transcend sociological and psychological factors, the
culmination of which is the almost slogan-like formulation by its
most eminent proponent, John Rawls, of his theory of
justice being "political, not metaphysical." Yet such
theorists are neither anthropologists nor sociologists, nor
for that matter, are they critical theorists, so the assessments they
make of "our values" are ultimately either
pseudo-social scientific or ultimately a priori notions of what,
given our considered judgments, we may believe in spite of
facts.
