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.
As is clear from his reliance on ideas found in political culture and his refusal to claim truth, the political turn in Rawls's later work led him to a much more modest conception of political philosophy. The papers in this volume examine the political turn in Rawls's work, its implications for political philosophy, and the ideas in A Theory of Justice which seem to anticipate it.