California Series on Social Choice & Political Economy
1 primary work • 2 total works
Book 20
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.
v. 16
What is social justice? In Theories of Justice Brian Barry provides a systematic and detailed analysis of two kinds of answers. One is that justice arises from a sense of the advantage to everyone of having constraints on the pursuit of self-interest. The other answer connects the idea of justice with that of impartiality. Though the first book of a trilogy, Theories of Justice stands alone and constitutes a major contribution to the debate about social justice that began in 1971 with Rawls's A Theory of Justice.