A Theory of Justice

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Revised 1999).

Summary from Publisher: Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of… More

Political Liberalism

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Revised 1996, 2005).

Summary from Publisher: This book 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,”… More

Collected Papers

John Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Summary from Publisher: John Rawls’s work on justice has drawn more commentary and aroused wider attention than any other work in moral or political philosophy in the twentieth century. Rawls is the author of two major treatises, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism… More

The Law of Peoples

John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), including the paper “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.”

Summary from Publisher: This book consists of two parts: the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997, and “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993. The Law of Peoples extends… More

Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy

John Rawls, edited by Barbara Herman, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Summary from Publisher: The premier political philosopher of his day, John Rawls, in three decades of teaching at Harvard, has had a profound influence on the way philosophical ethics is approached and understood today. This book brings together the lectures that inspired a generation of… More

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

John Rawls, edited by Erin Kelley, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Summary from Publisher: This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise… More

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

John Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Summary from Publisher: This last book by the late John Rawls, derived from written lectures and notes for his long-running course on modern political philosophy, offers readers an account of the liberal political tradition from a scholar viewed by many as the greatest contemporary… More

A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith

John Rawls, edited by Thomas Nagel, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Summary from Publisher: A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith is Rawls’s undergraduate senior thesis, submitted in December 1942, just before he entered the army. At that time Rawls was deeply religious; the thesis is a significant work of theological ethics, of interest… More