In this Book
- Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: Penn State University Press
Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.
Table of Contents
- Illustrations
- pp. vii-viii
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Abbreviations
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. xvii-xxiii
- Part One: Kantian Affinities
- Chapter One: Rawls's Kantianism
- pp. 3-56
- Part Two: Reconstructing Rawls
- Chapter Four: The Priority of Civil Liberty
- pp. 152-172
- Chapter Six: The Difference Principle
- pp. 192-228
- Part Three: Kantian Foundations
- References
- pp. 318-325
- Back Cover
- p. 362