Dangerous Nation or Justice as Fairness

Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Author: Robert Kagan

Most Americans believe the United States had been an isolationist power until the twentieth century. This is wrong. In a riveting and brilliantly revisionist work of history, Robert Kagan, bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power, shows how Americans have in fact steadily been increasing their global power and influence from the beginning. Driven by commercial, territorial, and idealistic ambitions, the United States has always perceived itself, and been seen by other nations, as an international force. This is a book of great importance to our understanding of our nation’s history and its role in the global community.

New interesting book: Personalmanagement

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

Author: John Rawls

This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993). As Rawls writes in the preface, the restatement presents "in one place an account of justice as fairness as I now see it, drawing on all [my previous] works." He offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings.

Rawls is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, American society has moved farther away from the idea of justice as fairness. Yet his ideas retain their power and relevance to debates in a pluralistic society about the meaning and theoretical viability of liberalism. This book demonstrates that moral clarity can be achieved even when a collective commitment to justice is uncertain.

Library Journal

Rawls set out his contractualist conception of justice in A Theory of Justice and revised it in a later edition. From 1974 to 1989, he published articles whose theses varied somewhat from the detailed account of that work. In this self-contained attempt to reconcile the differences, he reorganizes his "original position" argument; revises his liberty principle to emphasize that there is not a single "liberty" that governments should aim at, but a set of liberties that ground citizens' powers to form and act from conceptions of justice and of a fully worthwhile life; and reanalyzes justice as fairness, so as to emphasize its political aspects. This book is the capstone to a half-century's deep thinking about its subject and will reward careful study. Recommended for most libraries. Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Editor's Foreword
	Preface
Pt. I	Fundamental Ideas	1
1	Four Roles of Political Philosophy	1
2	Society as a Fair System of Cooperation	5
3	The Idea of a Well-Ordered Society	8
4	The Idea of the Basic Structure	10
5	Limits to Our Inquiry	12
6	The Idea of the Original Position	14
7	The Idea of Free and Equal Persons	18
8	Relations between the Fundamental Ideas	24
9	The Idea of Public Justification	26
10	The Idea of Reflective Equilibrium	29
11	The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus	32
Pt. II	Principles of Justice	39
12	Three Basic Points	39
13	Two Principles of Justice	42
14	The Problem of Distributive Justice	50
15	The Basic Structure as Subject: First Kind of Reason	52
16	The Basic Structure as Subject: Second Kind of Reason	55
17	Who Are the Least Advantaged?	57
18	The Difference Principle: Its Meaning	61
19	Objections via Counterexamples	66
20	Legitimate Expectations, Entitlement, and Desert	72
21	On Viewing Native Endowments as a Common Asset	74
22	Summary Comments on Distributive Justice and Desert	77
Pt. III	The Argument from the Original Position	80
23	The Original Position: The Set-Up	80
24	The Circumstances of Justice	84
25	Formal Constraints and the Veil of Ignorance	85
26	The Idea of Public Reason	89
27	First Fundamental Comparison	94
28	The Structure of the Argument and the Maximin Rule	97
29	The Argument Stressing the Third Condition	101
30	The Priority of the Basic Liberties	104
31	An Objection about Aversion to Uncertainty	106
32	The Equal Basic Liberties Revisited	111
33	The Argument Stressing the Second Condition	115
34	Second Fundamental Comparison: Introduction	119
35	Grounds Falling under Publicity	120
36	Grounds Falling under Reciprocity	122
37	Grounds Falling under Stability	124
38	Ground against the Principle of Restricted Utility	126
39	Comments on Equality	130
40	Concluding Remarks	132
Pt. IV	Institutions of a Just Basic Structure	135
41	Property-Owning Democracy: Introductory Remarks	135
42	Some Basic Contrasts between Regimes	138
43	Ideas of the Good in Justice as Fairness	140
44	Constitutional versus Procedural Democracy	145
45	The Fair Value of the Equal Political Liberties	148
46	Denial of the Fair Value for Other Basic Liberties	150
47	Political and Comprehensive Liberalism: A Contrast	153
48	A Note on Head Taxes and the Priority of Liberty	157
49	Economic Institutions of a Property-Owning Democracy	158
50	The Family as a Basic Institution	162
51	The Flexibility of an Index of Primary Goods	168
52	Addressing Marx's Critique of Liberalism	176
53	Brief Comments on Leisure Time	179
Pt. V	The Question of Stability	180
54	The Domain of the Political	180
55	The Question of Stability	184
56	Is Justice as Fairness Political in the Wrong Way?	188
57	How Is Political Liberalism Possible?	189
58	An Overlapping Consensus Not Utopian	192
59	A Reasonable Moral Psychology	195
60	The Good of Political Society	198
	Index	203