Skip to main content
Harvard University Press - home
A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice

Original Edition

John Rawls

ISBN 9780674017726

Publication date: 03/31/2005

Request exam copy

John Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls’s view, much of the extensive literature on his theory refers to the original. This first edition is available for scholars and serious students of Rawls’s work.

Praise

  • John Rawls draws on the most subtle techniques of contemporary analytic philosophy to provide the social contract tradition with what is, from a philosophical point of view at least, the most formidable defense it has yet received…[and] makes available the powerful intellectual resources and the comprehensive approach that have so far eluded antiutilitarians.

    —Marshall Cohen, New York Times Book Review

Author

  • John Rawls was James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. He was recipient of the 1999 National Humanities Medal.

Book Details

  • 624 pages
  • 1-9/16 x 6 x 9 inches
  • Belknap Press

From this author

Recommendations