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Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?

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ISBN: 978-1-405-15736-0

April 2008

Wiley-Blackwell

344 pages

Description
John Rawlsis considered the most important theorist of justice in much of western Europe and the English-speaking world more generally. This volume examines Rawls’s theory of international justice as worked out in his last and perhaps most controversial book, The Law of Peoples. It contains new and stimulating essays, some sympathetic, others critical, written by pre-eminent theorists in the field. These essays situate Rawls’s The Law of Peoples historically and methodologically, and examine all its key ingredients: its thin cosmopolitanism, its doctrine of human rights, its principles of global economic justice, and its normative theory of liberal foreign policy. The book will set the terms of the debate on The Law of Peoples for years to come, thereby shaping the broader debates about global justice.
About the Author
Rex Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas and Honorary Professor at Cardiff University. His most recent books are A System of Rights (1997) and a revised edition of R.G. Collingwood's An Essay on Metaphysics (2002).


David Reidy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of many articles and chapters in political philosophy and the philosophy of law and on Rawls in particular. He is the co-editor, with Mortimer Sellers, of Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (2005).

Features

  • A collection of new and stimulating essays on Rawls’s controversial last book, The Law of Peoples.

  • Rawls is considered the most important theorist of justice in much of western Europe and the English-speaking world more generally.

  • The essays are written by pre-eminent theorists in the field.

  • Situates The Law of Peoples historically and methodologically, and examines all its key ingredients.

  • Will set the terms of debate on The Law of Peoples for years to come, thereby shaping broader debates about global justice.