Abstract
John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the leading political philosophers of the twentieth century. His major works on justice and political liberalism have been translated into many languages and they are read around the world and not only the United States.1 He revitalized the social and political thought of Kant and gave it his own distinctive twist. His The Law of Peoples moves a considerable distance beyond his earlier work, which deals almost entirely with domestic justice and largely ignores international justice.2 I do not intend to review every aspect of this book.3 I shall focus on his specific notion of a “Society of Peoples” as viewed from the perspective of classical international society thinkers.4
Politics cannot be learned once for all, from a text-book, or the instructions of a master. What we require to be taught … is to be our own teachers. It is a subject on which we have no masters to follow; each must explore for himself, and exercise an independent judgment.
John Stuart Mill
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Notes
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1971)
John Rawls, and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
H. Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951).
M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new exp. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), p. 32.
I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
The Law of Peoples p. 46. As representative of that alternative view, he cites R. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
and R. Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), p. 83.
S. Korman, The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
J.S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), in Collected Works, vol. XIX, p. 546.
Sir Ivor Jennings, The Approach to Self-Government (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), pp. 55–56.
R. Emerson, Self-Determination Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 63.
Quoted by T. Musgrave, Self-Determination and National Minorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 148.
Jennifer Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-States System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
A. Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 334.
See James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, rev. exp. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1960).
Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 42. H. Reiss (ed.), Kant Political Writings, 2nd enl. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 102–05.
In that connection, Rawls makes a reference to J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)
and T. Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
See Chris Brown, “The Construction of a ‘Realistic Utopia’: John Rawls and International Political Theory,” Review of International Studies, vol. 28 (January 2002), pp. 5–21
and A. Buchanan, “Rawls Law of Peoples,” Ethics, vol. 110 (July 2000), pp. 697–721.
M. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 217–18.
T. Hobbes, Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive) ed. B. Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 1991), p. 258 (original emphasis).
For an excellent review of issues see T. Hobbes, Humanitarian Intervention: Legal and Political Aspects (Copenhagen: Danish Institute of International Affairs, 1999).
M. Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe (London: Fontana Press, 1998), ch. 13.
Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (London: Leicester University Press and London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977), pp. 120–21.
G. Gong, The “Standard of Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
J.S. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” in G. Himmelfarb (ed.), Essays on Politics and Culture: John Stuart Mill (New York: Anchor Books, 1963).
For an extended historical and contemporary inquiry into international trusteeship see William Bain, Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
M.D. Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 46–47.
On group morality or “the morality of communal ties” see M. Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” in Oakeshott (ed.), Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 76ff.
This is the great question of international relations, according to Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1995), part 1.
“The Advancement of Learning,” quoted by J. Gross (ed.), The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 235.
I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 1–19.
M. Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
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© 2005 Robert Jackson
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Jackson, R. (2005). Lifting the Veil of Ignorance: John Rawls’s Society of Peoples. In: Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979520_9
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