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 the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

In their classic analyses, Hobbes and Hume argue that offensively violating a covenant is irrational because the offense ruins one’s reputation. This paper explores conditions under which reputation alone can enforce covenants. The members of a community are modeled as interacting in a Covenant Game repeated over time. Folk theorems are presented that give conditions under which the Humean strategy of performing in covenants only with those who have never offensively violated or performed with an offensive violator characterizes an equilibrium (...) of the repeated Covenant Game. These folk theorems establish that for certain ideal settings Hobbes’ and Hume’s arguments against offensively violating covenants are compelling. However, these ideal settings presuppose that the community has certain mechanisms that generate common knowledge of the identities of those with whom one should perform. I analyze the results of computer simulations of the interactions in a community whose members must rely upon private communication alone. The computer simulation data show that in this community, reputation effects cannot effectively deter members from offensively violating covenants. I conclude that Hobbes’ and Hume’s warnings against offensive violation are compelling only on condition that the community is sufficiently structured to generate common knowledge among its members. I also conclude that even in such structured communities, the Humean strategy is not the uniquely “correct” policy. (shrink)