Robert Paul Wolff

Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls' A Theory of Justice has been the subject of a lively debate among philosophers, economists, and political scientists. In this book, Robert Paul Wolff provides an interpretation and critique of Rawls' theory that both clarifies it and reveals its basic flaws.

According to Professor Wolff, Rawls' device of a bargaining game among self-interested parties is designed to solve Kant's problem of deriving substantive moral and political principles from purely formal criteria of rationality. This book traces the ever-greater complications introduced by Rawls into his theory to overcome weaknesses and respond to critics. Once he has reconstructed Rawls' theory to exhibit its underlying structure, Professor Wolff subjects it to a series of fundamental criticisms and shows where it fails by appealing to economic, psychological, and sociological considerations, as well as to those of philosophy.

Understanding Rawls contends that Rawls' approach to social philosophy by way of formal models of game theory and welfare economics is fundamentally misguided. The bargaining "theorem" sketched by Rawls is shown to be invalid, and the author suggests that a different mode of analysis, owing more to the legacies of Marx and Freud, would be more fruitful in the search for a usable conception of social justice.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Society for Philosophy & Culture
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. März 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781301643899
• Artikelnr.: 72341466

Autorenporträt

Robert Paul Wolff received a doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Massachusetts, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He has published twenty-one books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics, and Afro-American Studies. Among his best-known books are Kant's Theory of Mental Activity and In Defense of Anarchism, which has just been translated into Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian. In 1992, he was invited to join the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies to assist in the establishment of a doctoral program, which he has coordinated since it was established in 1996. Wolff is now the director of the new university- wide Program for Undergraduate Mentoring and Achievement which provides mentoring and instructional services to traditionally underrepresented students in their first year at UMass. In 2005 Wolff published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a meditation on the experience of joining an Afro-American Studies Department and what it taught him about America. In 1990, Wolff founded University Scholarships for South African Students, a charitable organization that offers financial aid to poor Black students studying at South Africa's historically Black universities and technikons.