> 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?
sorry, i did. will have to check out why.
R
>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 i n the
>Euro-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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