Is Rawls a populist?

In Liberalism against Populism, William Riker attempts to discern which of two accounts of democracy, that of Madison or that of Rousseau, better serves individual liberty. Riker sees in Rousseau the champion of a tyrannical version of democracy—populism—which asserts the intrinsic morality of any majoritarian decision. In this paper I underline the limits of Riker's interpretation of populism and propose to substitute his dualistic reading of Madison and Rousseau as representing liberal and populistic strains of democracy with a twofold reading of Rousseau himself. Presenting the two faces of Rousseau- the "bad" and the "good" - I examine Rawls’s Political Liberalism as an example of Rousseauism, though not necessarily the best kind. I investigate Rawls's unstable position between liberalism and populism, and hold that the philosophical "abstinence" (Raz 1990) of his political liberalism is prone to shifting towards "bad" Rousseauism. In the name of stability liberalism as a political doctrine claims to disinvest from metaphysical commitments to win agreement. However the argument of this paper is that a political justification of liberalism becomes dogmatic when it casts out metaphysics.