Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

Lectures on the History

of Political Philosophy

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john rawls

Lectures on the History

of Political Philosophy

Edited by

Samuel Freeman

the belknap press of

harvard university press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

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Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2008.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rawls, John, 1921–2002.

Lectures on the history of political philosophy / John Rawls ; edited by Samuel Freeman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-674-02492-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-674-03063-3 (pbk.)

1. Political science—Philosophy—History. I. Freeman, Samuel Richard. II. Title.

JA71.R297 2007

320.01—dc22 2006050934

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To my students

—John Rawls

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Contents

Editor’s Foreword ix

Introductory Remarks xvii

Texts Cited xix

Introduction: Remarks on Political Philosophy 1

lectures on hobbes

lecture i: Hobbes’s Secular Moralism and the Role of

His Social Contract

23

lecture ii: Human Nature and the State of Nature 41

lecture iii: Hobbes’s Account of Practical Reasoning 54

lecture iv: The Role and Powers of the Sovereign 73

appendix: Hobbes Index 94

lectures on locke

lecture i: His Doctrine of Natural Law 103

lecture ii: His Account of a Legitimate Regime 122

lecture iii: Property and the Class State 138

lectures on hume

lecture i: “Of the Original Contract” 159

lecture ii: Utility, Justice, and the Judicious Spectator 174

lectures on rousseau

lecture i: The Social Contract: Its Problem 191

lecture ii: The Social Contract: Assumptions and

the General Will (I)

214

lecture iii: The General Will (II) and the Question

of Stability

229

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lectures on mill

lecture i: His Conception of Utility 251

lecture ii: His Account of Justice 266

lecture iii: The Principle of Liberty 284

lecture iv: His Doctrine as a Whole 297

appendix: Remarks on Mill’s Social Theory 314

lectures on marx

lecture i: His View of Capitalism as a Social System 319

lecture ii: His Conception of Right and Justice 335

lecture iii: His Ideal: A Society of Freely

Associated Producers

354

appendixes

Four Lectures on Henry Sidgwick

lecture i: Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics

375

lecture ii: Sidgwick on Justice and on the Classical

Principle of Utility

385

lecture iii: Sidgwick’s Utilitarianism 392

lecture iv: Summary of Utilitarianism 412

Five Lectures on Joseph Butler

lecture i: The Moral Constitution of Human Nature

416

lecture ii: The Nature and Authority of Conscience 422

lecture iii: The Economy of the Passions 432

lecture iv: Butler’s Argument against Egoism 439

lecture v: Supposed Conﬂict between Conscience

and Self-Love

446

appendix: Additional Notes on Butler 452

Course Outline 458

Index 460

Contents

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Editor’s Foreword

These lectures derive from John Rawls’s written lectures and notes for

a course in Modern Political Philosophy (Philosophy 171) that he taught at

Harvard University from the mid-1960s until his retirement in 1995. In the

late 1960s and 1970s Rawls would teach his own theory of justice, justice as

fairness, in conjunction with other contemporary and historical works. For

example, in 1971 he taught, in addition to A Theory of Justice, works by

Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Berlin, and Hart. Later in the 1970s and early

1980s this course consisted entirely of lectures on most of the major histor-

ical political philosophers in this volume. In 1983, the last year he taught

historical ﬁgures alone without A Theory of Justice, Rawls lectured on

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Marx. In earlier years Sidgwick would of-

ten be discussed (1976, 1979, 1981), as would Rousseau, but in that case

Hobbes and/or Marx would not be discussed. In 1984 Rawls again taught

parts of A Theory of Justice in conjunction with Locke, Hume, Mill, Kant,

and Marx. Soon thereafter he dropped Kant and Hume from his political

philosophy course, and added the lectures on Rousseau. During this period

he wrote ﬁnal versions of the lectures presented here on Locke, Rousseau,

Mill, and Marx, along with the lectures that were published in 2000 as Jus-

tice as Fairness: A Restatement. (This explains the occasional comparisons

with justice as fairness found in the present lectures.) Since they were regu-

larly taught during the last ten to twelve years of Rawls’s teaching career,

the lectures in this volume on Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx are the

most ﬁnished and complete. Rawls typed them into computer ﬁles and ad-

justed and reﬁned them over the years, until 1994. As a result, they required

very little editing.

Somewhat less ﬁnished are the earlier lectures on Hobbes and Hume

from 1983. They do not appear to have been written out as a continuous

and complete set of lectures (with the exception of most of the ﬁrst Hume

[ix]

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lecture). The Hobbes and Hume lectures presented here were mainly de-

rived from transcriptions of recording tapes of Rawls’s lectures for that

term, which have been supplemented by Rawls’s handwritten lecture notes

and class handouts.

1

Rawls typically provided students with summaries that

outlined the main points in his lectures. Prior to the early 1980s (when he

started typing his lectures on a word processor), these handouts were hand-

written in a very ﬁne script which, when typed out, ﬁlled more than two

single-spaced pages. These handouts have been used to supplement the lec-

tures on Hobbes and Hume, and they also provide most of the content of

the ﬁrst two Sidgwick lectures in the Appendix.

One great beneﬁt of these lectures is that they reveal how Rawls con-

ceived of the history of the social contract tradition, and suggest how he

saw his own work in relation to that of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, and to

some degree Hobbes as well. Rawls also discusses and responds to Hume’s

utilitarian reaction to Locke’s social contract doctrine, including Hume’s ar-

gument that the social contract is superﬁcial and an “unnecessary shufﬂe”

(Rawls), an argument that established a pattern of criticism that continues

down to the present day. Another substantial beneﬁt of this volume is

Rawls’s discussion of J. S. Mill’s liberalism. It suggests many parallels be-

tween his own and Mill’s views, including not just the palpable similarities

between Mill’s principle of liberty and Rawls’s ﬁrst principle of justice, but

also the less tangible parallels between Mill’s political economy and Rawls’s

account of distributive justice and property-owning democracy.

The Marx lectures evolved perhaps more than others over the years. In

the early 1980s Rawls endorsed the position (held by Allen Wood, among

others) that Marx did not have a conception of justice but rather regarded

justice as an ideological concept necessary to sustain the exploitation of the

working class. He revises that position in the lectures included here, under

the inﬂuence of G. A. Cohen and others. Rawls’s interpretation of Marx’s

Labor Theory of Value seeks to separate its outmoded economics from

what he regards as its main aim. He construes it as a powerful response to

the Marginal Productivity Theory of Just Distribution and other classical

[x]

Editor’s Foreword

1. The editor served as one of Rawls’s graduate teaching assistants (along with An-

drews Reath) in the spring term of 1983, and recorded the Hobbes and Hume lectures

transcribed here. The lectures on Locke, Mill, and Marx were also recorded in 1983. These

tapes, as well as tapes of Rawls’s 1984 lectures, have been preserved in digital format and

deposited in the Rawls Archives at Widener Library, Harvard University.

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Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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