Routledge Revivals
1 total work
Since its publication 25 years ago in 1965, "Political Argument" has occupied an important role in the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy. A number of ideas and terms in it have become part of the standard vocabulary, such as the distinction between "ideal-regarding" and "want-regarding" principles and the division of principles into aggregative and distributive. The book provided the first precise analysis of the concept of political values having trade-off relations and its analysis of the notion of the public interest has also been significant. Brian Barry has prepared a new introduction for this reissue (which has been out of print for a number of years), in which he reconstructs the intellectual milieu within which it was conceived and comments in detail on how its ideas have influenced political theoretical thinking since that first puhblication.