John Rawls

Abstract John Rawls’s bookA Theory of Justice’has received an enormous amount of attention, probably more than any other twentieth-century work of political philosophy I have not come upon any knowledgeable scholar who has been ready to accept Rawls’s conclusions as a sound view of justice. Yet they all agree that the book is an important one. Why so? Because it uses a novel method and so presents the subject in a new perspective, always a virtue in philosophy. The novelty does not lie in the basic feature of the method, a hypothetical contract, but in its application. The idea of a social contract is familiar and indeed ancient in political philosophy, having been used to explain and justify political obligation, the citizen’s duty to obey the laws of the state. Rawls’s innovation lies in transferring the idea to explaining the concept of justice. It is true that the earliest use of the idea in philosophical literature occurs in Plato’sRepublic,whose initial subject isdikaiosyne,justice in the wide sense of what is right, and perhaps that suggested to Rawls the possibility of adopting the idea in a new way. Even so, the novelty of his approach is nonetheless striking and stimulating.