Book on the Habermas-Rawls Debate

Habermas and Rawls
Disputing the Political

Ed. by James Gordon Finlayson
& Fabian Freyenhagen

(Routledge, 2011)

315 pages


Description

Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions — roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the Habermas-Rawls dispute with an eye toward the ways in which the dispute can cast light on current controversies about political philosophy more broadly. Moreover, the volume will cover a number of other salient issues on which Habermas and Rawls have interesting and divergent views, such as the political role of religion and international justice.

The volume includes a new article by Jürgen Habermas in which he comments on the contributions.

Contents

Introduction:
The Habermas-Rawls Dispute: Analysis and Re-evaluation
James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen

Part I: The Habermas-Rawls Dispute

1: Reconciliation through the Public Reason (1995) - Jürgen Habermas
2: Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas (1995) - John Rawls
3: Reasonable versus True (1996) - Jürgen Habermas

Part II: Disputing the Political

4: Justice: Transcendental not Metaphysical - Joseph Heath
5: The Justice of Justification - Anthony Simon Laden
6: The Justification of Justice (1999) - Rainer Forst
7: Procedure in Substance and Substance in Procedure - James Gledhill
8: Habermas, Rawls, and Moral Impartiality - Chris McMahon
9: Rawls and Habermas on the Place of Religion in the Political Domain - Catherine Audard
10: Two Models of Human Rights - Jeffrey Flynn
11: Beyond Overlapping Consensus - James Bohman

Part III: Afterword

12: A Reply to my Critics - Jürgen Habermas

James Gordon Finlayson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Head of Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the excellent "Habermas: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Fabian Freyenhagen is a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Essex. He is the co-editor (with Thom Brooks) of "The Legacy of John Rawls" (Continuum, 2005).