Political Philosophy: Rawls, Nozick, and Arendt

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) revived normative political philosophy within the analytic tradition and remains its single most influential work of the postwar period. Rawls sought principles of justice for the basic structure of society through a thought experiment he called the original position: rational parties choose principles to govern their society from behind a 'veil of ignorance,' knowing general facts about human society but deprived of any knowledge of their own particular place within it — their class, talents, race, sex, or conception of the good — so that no one can tailor principles to their own advantage. Rawls argued that parties reasoning under these fair conditions would choose two principles: first, an equal claim to the most extensive set of basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme for all; and second, that social and economic inequalities must be arranged so that they are attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, a requirement Rawls called the difference principle. This framework of 'justice as fairness' aimed to combine a strong commitment to individual liberty with a robust concern for distributive equality, and it set the agenda for decades of subsequent debate in political philosophy.