R <rhisiart at earthlink.net> wrote:
any LBOers have insight or opinions about john borden rawls, the english political philosopher who died recently?
R
Did you miss the flurry of discussion around this yesterday? I defended Rawls as the most significant moarl and political philosopher of the 20th century. I am not, btw, a Rawlsian, but a critic of Rawls. However, he was the most important political thinker in the English-speaking world since John Stuart Mill. He revitalized--practically recreated--political philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry after it had run on the shoals in England and America in the postwar period. (In fact it is hard to think of a really important political philosopher in Englsih between Mill and Rawls, despite a scattering of interesting minor work.) His two big books, A Theory of Justice, and Political Liberalism, are major contributions to political theory, legal theory, theory of knowledge, normative economics, and (dare one say, though they are not hip) cultural criticism. It is probably not unrealistic to expect that they will be read for centuries. The only serious rival to him in the Eu
ro-American world in the 20th century in weight and scope in Habermas, whose project is in some ways similar.
I just picked up the Cambridge Companion to Rawls, one of a small number of CCs to 20th century figures (there are also CCs to Habermas and Arendt). It looks very useful. I read a lively lecture in it that his also late Harvard colleague Burton Dreben gave on Political Liberalism with a nice exchange transcribed, questions from the Univ. of Ill. at Chicago phil dept, an unsual format and one that might be followed more often. People looking for an introduction to Rawls might start there. The older (1975) collection Reading Rawls has some good pieces of Marxist criticism by Richard Miller and Milton Fisk, among others.
jks
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