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“... John Rawls is best known as the author of a large book of ‘grand theory’, A Theory of Justice, that changed the face and refreshed the spirit of political philosophy when it was published in 1971. He is also the author of about forty scholarly articles, beginning with a chapter on ethics from his Princeton dissertation in 1951 and culminating with a short piece on Hiroshima, published in Dissent on the 50th anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets ...”

“... as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to ‘the cave’? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of our day, and their work exhibits many parallels: but on this deeply political matter they are worlds apart. John Rawls’s writing is ...”

“... It is over twenty years since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was published. It was recognised at once as an immensely significant contribution to modern political philosophy, and its reputation has only grown since. There are many questions, about social justice, toleration and the stability of a modern state, that can scarcely be discussed unless one starts from ideas that have been shaped by Rawls ...”

“... of Marx in Feminism as Critique, as well as in Susan Miller Okin’s recent discussion of John Rawls in Philosophy and Public Affairs. They leave us in no doubt that the persons, individuals, workers and citizens whom political theorists presuppose must at times be construed specifically as male. They point to theoretical evasions in the heart of ...”

“... argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry describes them, his sense of the ...”

“... Marxist’s heaven? For Miller, the aim of a theory of justice should be to present what John Rawls called a ‘realistic utopia’. Political philosophers should be ‘contextualists’ as opposed to ‘universalists’ and their prescriptions ‘fact-based’ in the sense of acknowledging the findings of empirical psychology and ...”

“... of grandiose theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal orthodoxy. The dead ...”

“... equality’. He also rejects as the measure of equality the ‘primary goods’ that John Rawls has specified as the objects of distribution in his political theory. Rawls described these as multi-purpose goods that any reasonable human being in most social circumstances would want: they include money and ...”

“... defender of a view that, in its logical structure and basic values, adheres to the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Raz believes that liberal institutions are justified because, for those civilisations capable of sustaining them, they provide the best way of promoting human well-being: their value, in other words, is instrumental. The argument depends both on ...”

“... only because an even more plausible explanation has recently been provided. One source for it is John Dunn’s new book. Let me hasten to say that the explanation of contemporary political behaviour is not the primary task that he sets himself. What he is explicitly concerned with is the exhaustion of the resources provided by traditional Western political ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... Aron’s intellectual heirs has led few of them to adopt the language of Mill, let alone that of John Rawls. Many have turned instead to the work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, the great specialist of India now retired from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Dumont was a student of Marcel Mauss and a contemporary of Lévi-Strauss who was virtually ...”

“... that its commitment to equality represents a threat to liberty. He also convincingly criticised John Rawls – most recently in Rescuing Justice and Equality – for fundamental weaknesses in his conception of equality. But it is not at all clear that the question posed by Cohen’s last book, ‘Why not socialism?’, can be answered in the terms in ...”

“... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”