> This point needs emphasising, though: there was a
> lot of political
> philosophy around before "Theory of Justice" was
> published -- it just wasn't
> going on inside a lot of Anglo-American academic
> Philosophy departments.
>
> Between the end of the war and the publication of
> "Theory" in 1971, any
> number of books and articles of political philosophy
> were published by
> scholars like Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin,
> Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper,
> Ernest Barker, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojeve, C B
> Macpherson, Friedrich von
> Hayek, Louis Althusser, Jurgen Habermas, and so on.
Oh, I am more than aware if this, as product of Michigan pol theory as well as philosophy. I mentioned Berlin and Habermas, matter of fact. But the point is that apart from the Straussian industry in Chicago, a hermeric proposition, and the similar Althusserian industry in Paris, the rest of this was a bunch of important but isolated pronouncements by people who felt, correctly, that they were in a wilderness. It's no myth that Rawls--and I didn't, most explicitly, say it started with ToJ in 1971 but earlier with his work of the 1950s--jump-started the discussion of both moral and political philosophy in the English speaking countries.
>
> Analytic philosophers (in their Philosophy
> Departments) often don't like
> these writers very much -- but they do need to be
> remembered any time
> someone makes the "political philosophy was dead
> before Rawls came along"
> claim -- as Rawlsians often do.
Well, I'm an open-minded analytical philosopher (not in a phil dept anymore) who likes most of those writers, including some people here mostly don't like (like Hayek). And I still think it's true--about Rawls, not just or only ToJ.
jks
__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com