A Theory of Justice. - [JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS]

1971. Cambridge, 1971. 8vo. Original full purple cloth with green lettering to spine, in the original green dust-jacket with purple lettering. A crease to the spine of both binding and dust-jacket, but otherwise just a bit of wear to extremities of dust-jacket and a few small tears to extremities as well. A very nice dust-jacket indeed. Internally fine and clean. XV, (1), 607 pp. First edition of this seminal classic, in which the "justice as fairness"-theory is presented for the first time. The work is now very difficult to come by in the first printing and especially difficult to find in a nice dust-jacket.John Rawls is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century. "A Theory of Justice" is his first major work and the most influential of all of everything he wrote. He sets out to solve the problem of distributive justice and does so by applying a variant of the "social contract". The result is the famous theory of "justice as fairness", which is presented for the first time in this groundbreaking work. Rawls uses elements of Kantian as well utilitarian philosophy in order to describe a method for the moral evaluation of social and political institutions. The work evoked an immense interest in the philosophical and political world and received a flood of attention from all sorts of legal scholars, i.e. economists, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians etc. The important and lasting contributions Rawls has provided in this work have revived the study of political philosophy in academic circles, and he is probably the only political philosopher who is frequently cited by the court of law in America and by politicians in Great Britain.