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Political Liberalism (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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John Rawls, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, provided a signal contribution to the development of contractarian political philosophy with the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971). Writing in the spirit of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, especially the latter, Rawls attempted to work out the implications of ’justice as fairness” and to show the inadequacy of a rival view of justice, that of the maximization of the good in society, which was sanctioned by classical utilitarianism. The principle of utility, as espoused by Jeremy Bentham,...

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