NCJ Number
187300
Date Published
2001
Length
280 pages
Annotation
This substantially revised and updated second edition provides an expanded overview of the nature and scope of justice, as well as expositions and critiques of the principal contending theorists who are most relevant to the contemporary world.
Abstract
The first chapter deals with the largely conceptual issue of what is distinctive about the discourse of justice. The second chapter considers what is just, as it focuses on general issues about how, if at all, there can be correct answers to such issues, while contrasting the liberal tradition, which relates justice to universal individual rights and the limitations these place on government power, with the recently formulated communitarian response to liberalism that situates the discourse of justice more in the ongoing social and political life of actual communities. The third chapter relates the analysis of justice to the concept of rights in general and human rights in particular. This paves the way for a consideration of the rights-oriented libertarian theory of Robert Nozick, as the first of a number of influential and important theories of justice that the author uses to illustrate the range of conceptual and substantive views of justice, together with their applications to specific areas of political and social concern. In addition to Nozick's libertarian theory of justice, this second edition also has new chapters on the theories of Iris Marion Young, a feminist who takes justice seriously, and Jurgen Habermas, whose recent work is having a major impact on political theories of law and justice. Other chapter address Posner's theory of justice as efficiency; Sadurski's theory of justice as desert; and the Marxist theory of formal justice (the critique of rights), material justice (exploitation and desert), and socialist justice. The concluding chapter considers whether justice is in eclipse as it examines justice in law, in the economy, and in democracy. 272-item bibliography