Wanking, II

Actually, this is genuine joy of sharing, and requires no anonymity - its hard to mar john rawls with but a mildly obscene blog title.

Things that I am reading to finish this paper due 5 months ago

(1) THE LAW OF PEOPLES, John Rawls, Harvard University Press 1999

This book consists of two parts: the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," and "The Law of Peoples." Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" is Rawls's most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine--such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls's own "Justice as Fairness," presented in A Theory of Justice.

The Law of Peoples extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an "outlaw society," and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions.

(2) Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy
Samuel Freeman, Oxford University Press 2007

John Rawls (1921-2002) was one of the 20th century's most important philosophers and continues to be among the most widely discussed of contemporary thinkers. His work, particularly A Theory of Justice, is integral to discussions of social and international justice, democracy, liberalism, welfare economics, and constitutional law, in departments of philosophy, politics, economics, law, public policy, and others. Samuel Freeman is one of Rawls's foremost interpreters. This volume contains nine of his essays on Rawls and Rawlsian justice, two of which are previously unpublished. Freeman places Rawls within historical context in the social contract tradition, addresses criticisms of his positions, and discusses the implications of his views on issues of distributive justice, liberalism and democracy, international justice, and other subjects. This collection will be useful to the wide range of scholars interested in Rawls and theories of justice.

(THATS ME. I am a wide range of scholar interested in this)

(3) Political Theory and International Relations
Charles R. Beitz, Princeton University Press, 1979

Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies.

(4) Global Collective Action
Todd Sandler, Cambridge University Press, 2004

This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring coordinated efforts of two or more entities, that is, collective action. The global community has achieved successes on some issues such as eradicating smallpox, but on others, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, efforts to coordinate nations’ actions have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. The author identifies modern principles of collective action and applies them to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and their consequences are dependent on one’s own and others’ actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory, which is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.

(5) Four Essays on Liberty
Isaiah Berlin, Oxford University Press, 1969
Reviews: `Practically every paragraph introduces us to half a dozen new ideas and as many thinkers - the landscape flashes past, peopled with familiar and unfamiliar people, all arguing incessantly. It is all a very long way from the austere eloquence of Mill's marvellous essay On Liberty, with which this collection's title seems to challenge comparison; but it is a measure of the stature of these essays that they stand such a comparison.' and "an exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be."