Opponents and Implications of a Theory of Justice : Philosophy of Rawls (Readings in Philosophy)

John Rawls is the pre-eminent political philosopher of our time. His 1971 masterpiece, A Theory of Justice, permanently changed the landscape of moral and political theory, revitalizing the normative study of social issues and taking stands about justice, ethics, rationality, and philosophical method that continue to draw followers and critics today. His Political Liberalism (rev. ed., 1996) squarely faced the fundamental challenges posed by cultural, religious, and philosophical pluralism. It should be no surprise, then, that turn-of-the-century searches of the periodical indices in philosophy, economics, law, the humanities, and related fields turn up almost three thousand articles devoted to a critical discussion of Rawls's theory. In these Volumes we reprint a wide-ranging selection of the most influential and insightful articles on Rawls. This volume reprints articles representing criticisms of Rawls's justice as fairness, as presented in his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice (TJ], that involve comparing his view to distinctly identifiable opposed points of view, and also covers attempts to extend the principles of justice as fairness, or his style of social contract view, beyond the subject­matter of the basic structure of society, to which TJ largely confines itself.