SUMMARY
What principles of justice should underwrite the basic structure of society? This is a question that all people of good will have confronted at one time or another and the answers are, not surprisingly, quite varied. John Rawls offered perhaps the most influential, though not uncontroversial, answer of the last 150 years. Draws on and expanding the social contract tradition, it has proved a touchstone for almost all thinking about liberalism and its vision of a just society. We will closely study his Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (available here), which is something like the summative statement of his work, a work that seems particular timely in light of both the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — itself an attempt to articulate principles of justice — and the widespread contemporary pessimism about liberalism's own future.

EDITION
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement by John Rawls, Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674005112

READING SCHEDULE

• Monday: Part I ("Fundamental Ideas")
• Tuesday: Part II ("The Principles of Justice")
• Wednesday: Part III ("The Argument from the Original Position")
• Thursday: Part IV ("Institutions of a Just Basic Structure")