Introductory Remarks

In preparing these lectures, developed over a number of years of teaching Political and Social Philosophy, I have considered how six writers, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Mill, and Marx, treat certain topics discussed in my own writings on political philosophy. Originally, I devoted about half of the course’s lectures to relevant topics from A Theory of Justice.7 Later, as I was developing the text of Justice as Fairness: A Restatement,8 those lectures concerned the more recent work instead, and I made available to the class Xerox copies of the manuscript.

Because the Restatement has now been published, I am not including those lectures in this book. There are only a few places where I have pointed out in any explicit way the connection between the works and ideas discussed and my own work; but where justice as fairness is mentioned, references to sections of the book are in footnotes, and where it seems useful, important ideas or concepts are defined or explained in those footnotes. An introductory lecture including some general remarks on political philosophy, and some thoughts on the main ideas of liberalism, may help lay the groundwork for a discussion of the six writers.

I shall try to identify the more central features of liberalism as expressing a political conception of justice when liberalism is viewed from within the tradition of democratic constitutionalism. One strand in this tradition, the doctrine of the social contract, is represented by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; another strand, that of utilitarianism, is represented by Hume and J. S. Mill; whereas the socialist, or social democratic strand, is represented by Marx, whom I will consider largely as a critic of liberalism.

7.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971; revised edition, 1999).

8.John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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Introductory Remarks

The lectures are narrow in focus, both from a historical and from a systematic point of view. They do not present a balanced introduction to the questions of political and social philosophy. There is no attempt to assess different interpretations of the philosophers discussed; interpretations are proposed that seem reasonably accurate to the texts we study and fruitful for my limited purposes in presenting them. Moreover, many important questions of political and social philosophy are not discussed at all. It is my hope that this narrow focus is excusable if it encourages an instructive way of approaching the questions we do consider and allows us to gain a greater depth of understanding than would otherwise be possible.

Jo h n R aw l s

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Texts Cited

Joseph Butler, The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1995).

Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1949).

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968).

David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902).

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948).

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967).

John Stuart Mill, Collected Works (cited as CW) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1907). Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1978).

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