New Book: "A Companion to Rawls"

A Companion to Rawls

Ed. by Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy

(Wiley-Blackwell, October 2013)

587 pages




From the Introduction

"It is now more than 10 years since John Rawls died in 2002, at the age of 81, and more than 60 years since his first publication in 1951. Yet, his work continues to occupy a unique and central position in contemporary political philosophy. Over the years it has generated an enormous secondary literature and sparked numerous interpretive and critical debates. The recent publication of Rawls's Princeton undergraduate thesis and his Harvard lectures in moral and political philosophy and the archival processing by Harvard of Rawls's unpublished papers, lectures, letters, annotated books, and so on, have only served further to stimulate interest in and debate over Rawls's work, often raising new questions, reviving debates thought to be settled, and suggesting new ways of understanding Rawls's work. With all this in mind, we were keen to produce with this volume not so much a summary of past scholarly work as a serviceable roadmap for current and future work on Rawls. Accordingly, we asked our contributors to address themselves to the themes and issues that in their view will or should occupy the attention of scholars engaged or likely to engage in this work." 

Contents [preview]

Introduction - Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy

Part I. Ambitions

1. From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory - David A. Reidy
2. Does Justice as Fairness Have a Religious Aspect? [pdf] - Paul Weithman

Part II. Method

3. Constructivism as Rhetoric - Anthony Simon Laden
4. Kantian Constructivism - Larry Krasnoff
5. The Basic Structure of Society as the Primary Subject of Justice - Samuel Freeman
6. Rawls on Ideal and Nonideal Theory - Adam Swift & Zofia Stemplowska
7. “The Choice from the Original Position” - Jon Mandle

Part III. A Theory of Justice

8. The Priority of Liberty - Robert S. Taylor
9. Applying Justice as Fairness to Institutions - Colin M. Macleod
10. Democratic Equality as a Work-in-Progress - Stuart White
11. Stability, a Sense of Justice, and Self-Respect - Thomas E. Hill, Jr
12. Political Authority, Civil Disobedience, Revolution - Alexander Kaufman

Part IV. A Political Conception

13. The Turn to a Political Liberalism [pdf] - Gerald Gaus
14. Political Constructivism [doc] - Aaron James
15. On the Idea of Public Reason [pdf] - Jonathan Quong
16. Overlapping Consensus - Rex Martin
17. Citizenship as Fairness - Richard Dagger
18. Inequality, Difference, and Prospects for Democracy - Erin I. Kelly

Part V Extending Political Liberalism: International Relations

19. The Law of Peoples - Huw Lloyd Williams
20. Human Rights - Gillian Brock
21. Global Poverty and Global Inequality - Richard W. Miller
22. Just War - Darrel Moellendorf

Part VI. Conversations with Other Perspectives

23. Rawls, Mill, and Utilitarianism - Jonathan Riley
24. Perfectionist Justice and Rawlsian Legitimacy - Steven Wall
25. Rawlsian Liberalism versus Libertarianism - Barbara H. Fried
26. The Young Marx and the Middle-Aged Rawls - Daniel Brudney
27. Challenges of Global and Local Misogyny [abstract] - Claudia Card
28. Critical Theory and Habermas - Kenneth Baynes
29. Rawls and Economics - Daniel Little
30. Learning from the History of Political Philosophy - S.A. Lloyd
31. Rawls and the History of Moral Philosophy - Paul Guyer

Jon Mandle is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University at Albany. He is the author of "Global Justice" (Polity Press, 2006) and "Rawls's A Theory of Justice: An Introduction" (Cambridge University Press, 2009) 

David A. Reidy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He is co-editor (with Martin Rex) of "Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?" (Blackwell, 2006).