Political Liberalism.

RAWLS, John.

Item Number: 96780

New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

First edition of this work which continues and revises the idea of justice as fairness as presented in A Theory of Justice. Octavo, original boards. Signed by John Rawls on the half-title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Carin Goldberg. From the library of Daniel Bell. Rare and desirable signed.

Political Liberalism continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines―religious, philosophical, and moral―coexist within the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on A Theory of Justice...a decisive turn towards political philosophy" (Times Literary Supplement).