ABSTRACT
Rawls is often credited with singlehandedly restoring and reinvigorating the enterprise of political philosophy. It is often said that A Theory of Justice (TJ) marks a return to grand-scale philosophical analysis of substantive questions of political theory. Within its pages are developed systematic accounts of distributive justice, the grounds of political legitimacy, and the relation of political rights to individual goods that are not only philosophically rigorous, but also attentive to important developments in related disciplines such as economics and decision theory. Jonathan Wolff ’s claim, “before Rawls there were only two options in political philosophy: utilitarianism, or no theory at all” (1998, 120), captures nicely what seems to be the general opinion among contemporary political philosophers.12
