Commentary Celebrating the Centenary of Rawls’s Birth and the 50th Anniversary of A Theory of Justice

Stuart Hampshire’s review of A Theory of Justice, in The New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972.

Iris Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ in D. F. Pears ed., The Nature of Metaphysics (Macmillan, 1959), and ‘Against Dryness’ Encounter (1961), Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Arguments’ Mind, vol. 67 (1958), and ‘Moral Beliefs’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 59 (1958–59), and Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, 1944), Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. (Routledge, 1945), H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Press, 1961), Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962), Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969).

Other notable works of substantive analytic moral and political philosophy that appeared in the aftermath of A Theory of Justice include Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1981), Hilary Putnam’s, Reason, Truth and History (1981), Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and The Limits of Justice (1982), Judith Shklar’s, Ordinary Vices (1985) Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Derek Parfit’s Reasons And Persons (1986), Richard Rorty’s, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1990), Iris Murdoch’s, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), Susan Hurley’s Natural Reasons (1992), Catherine MacKinnon’s Only Words (1996), Thomas Nagel’s, Equality and Partiality ((1995), Tim Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other (2000), Gerald Cohen’s, If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich? (Princeton University Press, 2000) Raymond Geuss’s, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton University Press, 2002) Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness (2002), Ronald Dworkin’s, Justice for Hedgehogs (2010), and Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (2010). This by no means exhaustive list is not intended to suggest some implausible cause and effect between TJ and the works which came after it but merely to acknowledge the multiplicity of major books (and periodicals) of normative moral and political theory that happened to emerge after the publication of Rawls’s masterpiece.

Bernard Williams’s review of A Theory of Justice in The Spectator 1972, reprinted in Bernard Williams Essays and Reviews 1959–2002, (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 86–7.

See, for example, Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016).