“... the former exploit the latter even though both parties gain from exchange. Also, the reference to John Rawls is misleading. His statement in A Theory of Justice that ‘a departure from the institutions of equal liberty ... cannot be justified or compensated for by greater social or economic advantage,’ was explicitly made within the context of ideal ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... simply; even the distinction I have just made fails to dispel the suspicion of liberal partiality. John Rawls’s reputation is built on his monumental A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. But in later years, he not only refined the details of his account of justice as fairness; he also reconstructed its mode of presentation so that it might illuminate ...”

“... but of cleaned-up versions (those corrected for faulty information, for instance, or purged, as John Harsanyi requires, of ‘sadism, envy, resentment or malice’). Finally there is abstraction: the tendency to ignore as of secondary importance the practical application of the theory, particularly by asuming that the preferences on which utilitarianism ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply ...”

“... liberal thought, whether their provenance is Austrian, as in Hayek and Popper, or American, as in Rawls and Nozick. This is that the Enlightenment project of a form of political order resting solely or primarily on subscription to universal principles is merely a utopia. Whether it is embodied in the reactionary market utopia of the New Right or in more ...”

“... of the ideas of what Phillips likes to call ‘left-wing gurus’, such as Chomsky, Derrida, Rawls and Foucault. She has not, of course, read their work, but she knows it well enough to dismiss it out of hand. All Must Have Prizes is a slovenly book, dashed off with the recklessness of a journalist phoning in midnight copy for next morning’s ...”

“... a brute world) for guidance, ethical or practical, to an Isaiah Berlin, a Dworkin, a Nozick, or a Rawls? Of course not. Would you hear of civic obligation from a scholar who, with exquisite care and ethical unconcern, could declare that ‘questions about what it is that citizens may claim as of right in a democracy are also questions about what it is fair to ...”

“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...”

“... conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, has probably accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his ...”

“... no mention in the film, as there is in the Fish essay, of St Augustine, or the Johns: Milton and Rawls. Or of Isaiah Berlin’s view that ‘true liberty … consists in self-direction’ or of the ‘relation between faith as a guarantor of knowledge and knowledge provided by empirical inspection’. Nor does Harrison Ford show any sign of wondering about ...”

“... to perfecting the process of political competition and representation – see, for example, John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust. Judicial activism in the interest of protecting substantive rights not required (or previously decided) by the political process itself would, on this view, be undemocratic. It would be undemocratic because it would ...”

“... grand old capitalised words go, they suspect, so do grand, stirring visions of the human future. John Dewey shared Strachey’s and Virginia Woolf’s conviction that Sin had been a really terrible idea. He would certainly have agreed with Foucault that truth will always be intertwined with power, and that subjectivity is a social construction. Yet he was as ...”

“... intuitive judgments. Rather, they are often engaged in changing those judgments. Gendler discusses John Rawls’s famous ‘original position’, a hypothetical scenario in which rational agents decide how they will organise their society from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that prevents them from knowing their future role in that society. The power of ...”

“... The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil ...”