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Article Excerpt
John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), xix + 476 PP.
1. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy presents a set of lectures written by John Rawls for his students at Harvard. They were part of Rawls's course in Political Philosophy, which covered, together with his own theory of justice, central works by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Marx. The volume also includes lectures on Sidgwick and Butler and (in the Introduction) an interesting account of the role, authority, and audience of political philosophy. Rawls taught this class throughout his teaching career. He prepared a set of detailed and well-organized notes, which were continuously improved as Rawls's own ideas evolved. At the time of his death, the notes on Locke, Rousseau, Mill and Marx were quite complete and self-standing. The lectures on Hobbes and Hume, on the other hand, were completed on the basis of transcripts from Rawls's classes. The preparation of this volume was undertaken by Samuel Freeman, who was also a teaching assistant of Rawls. We must certainly be thankful to Freeman for the care and competence with which he put together this extraordinary volume.
The book provides a discussion of some of the most important works in modern political philosophy by arguably the most important contemporary political philosopher. In what follows, we focus on three aspects of the book that we find particularly striking.
2. First, the book is an exemplar of how to approach philosophical texts. Rawls applies the principles exposed in his "Remarks about My Teaching" (xii-xv). One of these principles demands that we offer the best possible account of an author's views, reconstructing them in their best light. Thus, for example, Rawls reads Rousseau's idea of the "general will," which so frequently has been construed as the expression of an authoritarian project, as "a form of deliberative reason shared and exercised by each citizen" (227). He avoids the common superficial reading of Rousseau's idea of "forcing people to be free," and recommends an alternative rendering that dispels worries about authoritarianism. Similarly, he discards readings of Mill that say that he was wrong to think that his utilitarianism yields liberal principles of justice, assuming that someone with "Mill's enormous gifts can't be mistaken about something so basic to his whole doctrine" (268).
Of course everyone, even people gifted with enormous talents, make mistakes, but "(l)ittle mistakes and slips don't matter and we can fix them up." With fundamental errors, however, the attitude must be different. We should regard them as implausible unless it turns out to be impossible to find an alternative reading of the text that is capable of overcoming them. "If I saw a mistake in their arguments," Rawls says, "I supposed they saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where?" (xiv). The goal is to find out where the answer to these problems could be, rather than assume that the doctrines under examination are fundamentally flawed. In these and in other attitudes manifested throughout the book, Rawls shows an immense gratitude and generosity towards the authors he studies--even towards those with whom he strongly disagrees.
Another important aspect of Rawls's approach is that he elucidates other thinkers' perspectives in relation to their own time and history. Rawls is explicit about this in his introductory remarks on Locke's...
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