Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawisian Political Philosophy

Samuel Freeman was a student of the influential philosopher John Rawls, he has edited numerous books dedicated to Rawls' work and is arguably Rawls' foremost interpreter. This volume collects new and previously published articles by Freeman on Rawls. Among other things, Freeman places Rawls within historical context in the social contract tradition, and thoughtfully addresses criticisms of this position. Not only is Freeman a leading authority on Rawls, but he is an excellent thinker in his own right, and these articles will be useful to a wide range of scholars interested in Rawls and the expanse of his influence.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part One: A Theory of Justice 1: Reason and Agreement in Social Contract Views 2: Utilitarian, Deontology, and the Priority of Right 3: Consequentialist, Publicity, Stability, and Property-Owning Democracy 4: Rawls and Luck Egalitarianism 5: Congruence and the Good Justice Part Two: Political Liberalism 6: Political Liberalism and the Possibility of a Just Democratic Constitution 7: Public Reason and Political Justification Part Three: The Law of Peoples 8: The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice 9: Distributed Justice and the Law of Peoples Appendices Appendix A: Remarks on John Rawls, Memorial Service, Sanders Theater, Harvard University, February 27, 2003 Appendix B: John Rawls: Friend and Teacher (Obituary from The Chronicle Review: The Chronicle of Higher Education December 13, 2002)

Review :
"Highly recommended."--D.H. Rice, CHOICE "Freeman is the leading authority on the thought and writing of John Rawls, and Rawls was the leading political and social philosopher of the twentieth century. Freeman's clear, careful, and deeply informed studies in these essays offer important insight about basic questions of interpretation and justification--about Rawls's contractualism, about his relation to utilitarianism, about the idea of public reason, and about his reasons for limiting his principles of distributive justice to the self-contained nation-state."--Thomas Nagel, New York University "Freeman is one of the leading political philosophers of his generation. His influential papers include some of the most sophisticated and illuminating discussions of themes from Rawls's earlier and later work. This important collection will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in political philosophy."--R. Jay Wallace, University of California at Berkeley "Freeman's papers range over some of the most important subjects in liberal political theory: the nature and varieties of contractarianism, the meaning of the priority of right, the idea of public reason, the problem of stability, the challenge of luck egalitarianism, the democratic character of judicial review, and the demands of international justice... The result is an extraordinarily substantial set of papers... This is a very valuable book."--Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "One great virtue of this collection of nine essaysis its clarification, in the face of numerous common misinterpretations, of the interrelationship of these two problems--the nature and the stability of justice--and the implications of the resulting contractarian position for such topics as public reason, consequentialism, luck egalitarianism, distributive justice, and cosmopolitanism."--Michael Howard, Philosophical Books