For many, John Rawls is the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. In this seminar, we will follow the development of Rawls comprehensive political philosophy from his early work in the 1950s and 1960s concerning his theory of justice, to his „political turn“ in the 1980s and ending with his approach to international law in the 1990s as well as the debate with Habermas.
This will be done on the basis of fundamental papers Rawls wrote to introduce, eleborate and defend arguments and conceptions he either already presented in his works A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism or brought up in reaction to criticism.
Objects of this seminar mainly will be (1) his conceptions of justice and political liberalism, (2) ideas central to Rawls‘s thinking like the idea of an overlapping consensus, the notion of primary goods, or the priority of the right over the good, (3) the methodological approach of political constructivism, and (4) the law of peoples.