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What Philosophers Dream Of

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Bernard Williams, 2 July 2015

Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 
by Bernard Williams.
Princeton, 435 pp., £24.95, January 2014, 978 0 691 15985 0
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... the revival of liberal political philosophy in the United States in the 1960s, and his reviews of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin remain some of the most acute there are. But these philosophers started from within. They may have been prompted to write by the establishment of civil rights in the 1960s and the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War, but ...

Gassing and Bungling

Glen Newey, 8 May 1997

Between Facts and Norms 
by Jürgen Habermas, translated by William Rehg.
Polity, 631 pp., £45, July 1996, 0 7456 1229 6
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... similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any ...

Cameron’s Crank

Jonathan Raban: ‘Red Tory’, 22 April 2010

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it 
by Phillip Blond.
Faber, 309 pp., £12.99, April 2010, 978 0 571 25167 4
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... triumph of a perverted and endlessly corrupting liberalism’. After a drive-by shooting of John Rawls (‘he had no convincing vision of the good society or the good life’), and a wildly constructive misreading of Rawls’s famous ‘veil of ignorance’, Blond ties himself in verbal knots as he tries to ...

Rock Bottom

Thomas Nagel: Legislation, 14 October 1999

The Dignity of Legislation 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £35, July 1999, 0 521 65092 5
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... the relation between theories of justice and conceptions of institutional design. Waldron faults John Rawls for treating the institutional question only for the case of a ‘well-ordered society’, one whose members are agreed on the fundamental principles of justice and committed to supporting institutions that conform to them. He argues that since ...

Famine and Fraternity

Amartya Sen, 3 July 1986

Is that it? 
by Bob Geldof and Paul Vallely.
Sidgwick, 352 pp., £10.95, May 1986, 0 283 99362 6
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... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob ...

Sensitivity isn’t enough

Peter Berkowitz: The theory of toleration, 7 September 2000

Virtue, Reason and Toleration: The Place of Toleration in Ethical and Political Philosophy 
by Glen Newey.
Edinburgh, 208 pp., £50, November 1999, 0 7486 1244 0
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... and public policy from them. This is the opinion of many who practise philosophy in the manner of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Philosophical reflection on the nature of toleration, Newey contends, shows that this is wrongheaded. It is, Lord knows, not the abstraction that Newey objects to, but – quite rightly – the conceit that philosophical ...

Protest Problems

Jan-Werner Müller: Civil Repression, 8 February 2024

... activist Andreas Malm doesn’t think it is.)In the 1960s, mainstream liberal philosophers such as John Rawls recognised the legitimacy of breaking the law in a spectacular fashion to sway majorities; in the early 1980s, Jürgen Habermas defended resorting to illegal means to stop the stationing of new nuclear weapons. These lessons appear to have been ...

Local Justice

T.M. Scanlon, 5 September 1985

Morality and Conflict 
by Stuart Hampshire.
Blackwell, 175 pp., £18.50, September 1984, 0 631 13336 4
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Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality 
by Michael Walzer.
Blackwell, 343 pp., £15, September 1984, 0 631 14063 8
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... sort found in the writings of Spinoza and Kant and represented in our own day by the theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick and others (though these writers differ in how ‘universal’ they intend their principles to be). The essays collected in Morality and Conflict chronicle a movement in the author’s thought from philosophical theory of this kind ...
Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics 
by Annette Baier.
Harvard, 368 pp., £33.95, February 1994, 0 674 58715 4
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... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...

The SDP’s Chances

William Rodgers, 23 October 1986

... been a long debate in the Party about its intellectual roots. Did it owe more to R.H. Tawney or to John Rawls? In a free society, what relative importance should be attached to the values of liberty and equality? How could Social Democrats distinguish themselves from Croslandite democratic socialists if the Labour Party’s temporary recovery was ...

Can Marxism be rescued?

Alan Ryan, 17 September 1987

An Introduction to Karl Marx 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge, 220 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 521 32922 1
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Making sense of Marx 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge, 556 pp., £32.50, May 1985, 0 521 22896 4
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Analytical Marxism 
edited by John Roemer.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 521 30025 8
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... and defended in the plainest prose. Lest that give the impression that Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer see themselves as Marxists first and philosophers second, it must at once be said that their work is remarkable for the unflinching way in which they throw out whatever won’t pass a dispassionate scrutiny. Elster’s Making sense of Marx has been ...

Personal Identity

Bernard Williams, 7 June 1984

Reasons and Persons 
by Derek Parfit.
Oxford, 543 pp., £17.50, April 1984, 0 19 824615 3
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... and neglected other areas of philosophy, and (with the exception of some philosophers such as John Rawls) other disciplines. Derek Parfit has written a brilliantly clever and imaginative book which treats in a very original way a wide range of ethical questions. It spends virtually no time on meta-ethics (perhaps too little), but it avoids many of ...
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 
by Richard Rorty.
Blackwell, 401 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 12961 8
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The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy 
by Stanley Cavell.
Oxford, 511 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 502571 7
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Philosophy As It Is 
edited by Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat.
Pelican, 540 pp., £2.95, November 1979, 0 14 022136 0
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... Wittgenstein’s. The third member of Rorty’s liberating trinity is – surprisingly – John Dewey, for whom Rorty claims the honour of having understood the importance for the general culture of making essentially the same breach with the philosophical tradition as did Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Philosophy, then, has already undergone its crucial ...

A Bear Armed with a Gun

David Runciman: The Widening Atlantic, 3 April 2003

Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order 
by Robert Kagan.
Atlantic, 104 pp., £10, March 2003, 1 84354 177 7
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... of the ‘rogue state’ is a lot closer to the work of a neo-Kantian political philosopher like John Rawls than to anything you will find in Hobbes. But it is true that far from being stuck in the past, the Americans have moved beyond Hobbes, and Europe, in one crucial respect. That is in their preoccupation with the new threat posed by weapons of mass ...

The Central Questions

Thomas Nagel: H.L.A. Hart, 3 February 2005

A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream 
by Nicola Lacey.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 19 927497 5
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... and started a great flood of work by others which has not ceased with his death. Along with John Rawls, he initiated the vastly influential tradition within analytic philosophy of substantive moral exploration of major public issues, bringing high standards of clarity, rational argument and lucid expression to questions that matter to many more ...

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