A Theory of Justice: Original Edition

by John Rawls (Author), John Rawls (Author)

• New

  paperback
  

  $38.60

  Though the Revised Edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $20.49

  A Theory of Justice by John Rawls is one of the books by which our age will be remembered: perhaps the most important work of moral and political philosophy of the twentieth century, a classic to stand alongside Kant and Mill. Rawls argues that the correct principles of justice are those that would be agreed to by free and rational persons, placed in the 'original position' behind a veil of ignorance: not knowing their own place in society; their class, race, or sex; their abilities, intelligence, or strengths; or even their conception of the good. Accordingly, he derives two principles of justice to regulate the distribution of liberties, and of social and economic goods. In this revised edition the work is presented as Rawls himself wishes it to be transmitted to posterity, with numerous minor revisions and amendments and a new Preface in which Rawls reflects on his presentation of his thesis and explains how and why he has revised it.

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $45.49

  Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. Each person, writes Rawls, possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.