Rawls on Justice
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2021
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the face of modern political philosophy by reinventing the question of what constitutes fairness. From ‘the veil of ignorance’ to ‘reflective equilibrium’ it introduced new ways of thinking about the problem of justice along with new problems for thinking about politics. David discusses Rawls’s influence on what happened next.
- Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982, 1998)
- Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989)
- Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019)
- [Audio]: 'John Rawls' A Theory of Justice,' BBC Radio 3, Arts & Ideas
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode of History of Ideas |
| 0:25.9 | brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. It's about John Rawls, |
| 0:30.0 | the man who reinvented modern political philosophy. David explores how he made old ideas fresh |
| 0:36.7 | and asks why he had so much impact but so little influence. |
| 0:57.2 | The writer I'm talking about today, John Rawls and his book A Theory of Justice, |
| 1:01.5 | which was published in 1971. It seemed like it doesn't really belong in this series of talks. |
| 1:08.0 | I mentioned it in the very first one, on Rousseau, and said that Rawls was an example of that other |
| 1:13.6 | kind of political thinker, political philosopher who asks the what question, not the why or how question. |
| 1:20.0 | Rawls' question is what is justice? He wants to build that idea up, he wants to put it together, |
| 1:26.0 | he wants to make it to make sense, he's not one of the people who wants to strip it down, tear it |
| 1:31.9 | down, pull it apart, expose it. Show us just how weird it is that we've come to think of this |
| 1:38.4 | as justice, or that as justice. He wants us in a calm, careful, rational way to pull our thoughts |
| 1:46.8 | together and to build them up into a coherent picture of what should count as justice for us. |
| 1:55.5 | He's often contrasted to Thomas Hobbs. Hobbs who thought the central question of politics is what |
| 2:01.0 | is peace or what is order, safety, security. Rawls is not about that, Rawls is about fairness and |
| 2:07.8 | justice, he wants to know what it would be to live not in a safe society, but in a fair society, |
| 2:13.1 | and frankly, unless you're very lucky, there's nothing in Hobbs' argument that's going to guarantee |
| 2:18.3 | you that kind of fairness. But what they have in common is that they are trying to pull it together, |
| 2:24.8 | to hold it together, to hold their what answer together against the people who want to pull it apart, |
| 2:31.2 | who want to strip off the mask and see what horrors lie underneath. Rawls is also often in |
| 2:39.6 | current writing about politics and political theory, contrasted with Friedrich Nietzsche, |
| 2:45.6 | one of the people I've talked about in this series. The contrast is sometimes phrased, |
... |
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