Paul Weithman, “Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn” (Oxford UP, 2010)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 22, 2012 · 1h 14m

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are marked mainly by the publication of his two major books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). The most common account of Rawls’s intellectual trajectory has it that the later Rawls came to regard the project of A Theory of Justice as deeply flawed. That is, Political Liberalism is often read as an attempt to dial back or even renounce the project of A Theory of Justice. In…