Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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liberal and right-wing libertarian conceptions which regard pure ownership

as making a tangible contribution to production. (See Marx, Lecture II.)

Rawls’s lectures on Bishop Joseph Butler and Henry Sidgwick were not

left as ﬁnished as the other lectures in this volume. Nonetheless, he agreed

to their publication shortly before he died in November 2002, and they have

been included in the Appendix to this volume. Rawls taught Sidgwick for a

number of years (including 1976, 1979, and 1981) in his political philosophy

course, along with Hume and J. S. Mill, to give students an idea of the

works of (what he regarded as) the three major utilitarian philosophers. He

saw Sidgwick as the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition that be-

gan with Bentham. He also regarded Sidgwick’s comparative method in The

Methods of Ethics as providing a pattern for moral philosophy to emulate.

The ﬁrst two Sidgwick lectures included here were for the most part taken

from the handwritten notes that Rawls duplicated and handed out to stu-

dents. He used these handouts as his lecture notes, and then elaborated

upon them orally when delivering the lectures. For this reason, the ﬁrst two

Sidgwick lectures cannot be considered by any means complete lectures.

The third lecture on Sidgwick (1975) goes over some of the same material

as in the brief discussion of utilitarianism in Sidgwick, Lecture II, but dis-

cusses in much more detail the assumptions and implications of the classi-

cal utilitarian position. There is a good deal of material on utilitarianism in

this lecture and in the brief fourth lecture (1976) that is not available in any

of Rawls’s other published discussions of utilitarianism in A Theory of Jus-

tice, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,”

or elsewhere.

The ﬁve lectures on Butler were among Rawls’s handwritten papers.

These lectures were used in Rawls’s course on the history of moral philoso-

phy in the spring of 1982, when he also taught Kant and Hume. Rawls

thought that Butler provided the major non-utilitarian response to Hobbes

by an English philosopher. He also regarded Butler as among the major ﬁg-

ures in modern moral philosophy. Among Rawls’s handwritten notes to

himself (not incorporated into the lectures themselves) is the following:

“Important Points in Butler: (Hobbes and Butler, the two great sources of

modern moral philosophy: Hobbes as posing the problem—the writer to

refute. Butler supplied a deep answer to Hobbes).” In addition, Rawls found

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Editor’s Foreword

2. See John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1999), chap. 17.

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some connection between Kant’s and Butler’s doctrine of conscience, and

this perhaps provided Rawls with grounds for believing that Kant’s non-nat-

uralistic, non-intuitionistic account of morality was not peculiar to German

Idealist philosophy.

Finally, the Butler lectures are suggestive of the central

role that the idea of a “reasonable moral psychology” had in Rawls’s con-

ception of moral and political philosophy. (There are parallels in the lec-

tures on Mill and Rousseau too.) One of the main ideas behind Rawls’s

work is that justice and morality are not contrary to human nature, but

rather are part of our nature and indeed are, or at least can be, essential to

the human good. (See A Theory of Justice, chapter 8, “The Sense of Justice,”

and chapter 9, “The Good of Justice.”) It is noteworthy that Rawls’s discus-

sion of Butler’s reconciliation of moral virtue and “self-love” parallels

Rawls’s own argument for the congruence of the Right and the Good.

Rawls left among his papers a short piece called “Some Remarks About

My Teaching” (1993), which discusses his lectures on political philosophy.

Relevant portions of it are as follows:

For the most part I taught moral and political philosophy, doing a

course in each one every year over the years....Icame gradually to

focus more and more on political and social philosophy, and I came to

talk about parts of justice as fairness, so-called, in tandem with earlier

people who had written on the subject, beginning with Hobbes, Locke

and Rousseau, and occasionally Kant, although Kant was very difﬁcult

to work into that course. I included at times Hume and Bentham, J. S.

Mill and Sidgwick. However, usually Kant’s moral philosophy was

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Editor’s Foreword

3. Thanks to Joshua Cohen for this suggestion. It is conﬁrmed by notes that Rawls

made to himself. Among the references to Kant in Rawls’s notes on Butler are the follow-

ing two entries:

(4) Egoism contra Hobbes: Butler holds moral projects as much a part of the self as

other parts of the self: our natural desires, etc. Kant deepens this by connecting ML

[Moral Law] with the self as R+R [Rational and Reasonable]....

(9) Connect this up with Kant; including his notion of reasonable faith.

4. A somewhat similar version of Rawls’s account of his teaching is excerpted in the

Editor’s Foreword to the companion volume, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed.

Barbara Herman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xvi–xviii. That

account derives from Rawls’s published remarks on his teaching as found in John Rawls,

“Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence,” in Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic

Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 2000).

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taken up in a separate course along with other writers, who changed

from time to time, but often it covered Hume and Leibniz as examples

of strikingly different doctrines which Kant certainly knew something

about. Other writers occasionally considered were Clarke and Bishop

Butler and other British 18th century people, such as Shaftesbury and

Hutcheson. Sometimes I used Moore and Ross, Broad and Stevenson,

as modern examples.

In talking about these people I always tried to do two things espe-

cially. One thing was to pose their philosophical problems as they saw

them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and politi-

cal philosophy then was. So I tried to discern what they thought their

main problems were. I often cited the remark of Collingwood in his

An Autobiography, to the effect that the history of political philosophy is

not that of a series of answers to the same question but of a series of

answers to different questions, or, as he actually put it, it is “the history

of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was

changing with it.”

This remark is not quite right, but it tells us to look

for a writer’s point of view on the political world at that time in order

to see how political philosophy develops over time and why. I saw each

writer contributing to the development of doctrines supporting demo-

cratic thought, and this included Marx, whom I always discussed in the

political philosophy course.

Another thing I tried to do was to present each writer’s thought in

what I took to be its strongest form. I took to heart Mill’s remark in

his review of [Alfred] Sedgwick: “A doctrine is not judged at all until it

is judged in its best form” (CW: X, p. 52). So I tried to do just that. Yet

I didn’t say, not intentionally anyway, what to my mind they should

have said, but what they did say, supported by what I viewed as the

most reasonable interpretation of their text. The text had to be known

and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form. Leaving

aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending. If I departed

from it—no harm in that—I had to say so. Lecturing that way, I be-

lieved that a writer’s views became stronger and more convincing, and

would be for students a more worthy object of study.

Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for ex-

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Editor’s Foreword

5. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 62.

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ample, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter

than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the stu-

dent’s time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I

supposed they [the philosophers] saw it too and must have dealt with

it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their

way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised; or

wouldn’t arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text

I had overlooked, or hadn’t read.

In doing this I followed what Kant says in the First Critique at B866.

He says that Philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science and no-

where exists in concreto. So how can we recognize and learn it? “...we

cannot learn philosophy, for where is it, who is in possession of it, and

how shall we recognize it? We can only learn to philosophize, that is,

to exercise the talent of reason, in accordance with universal princi-

ples, on certain actually existing attempts at philosophy, always, how-

ever, reserving the right of reason to investigate, to conﬁrm, or to re-

ject these principles at their very sources.” So we learn moral and

political philosophy, and indeed any other part of philosophy by study-

ing the exemplars—those noted ﬁgures who have made cherished at-

tempts—and we try to learn from them, and if we are lucky to ﬁnd a

way to go beyond them. My task was to explain Hobbes, Locke, and

Rousseau, or Hume, Leibniz, and Kant as clearly and forcefully as I

could, always attending carefully to what they actually said.

The result was that I was loath to raise objections to the exem-

plars—that’s too easy and misses what is essential—though it was im-

portant to point out objections that those coming later in the same tra-

dition sought to correct, or to point to views those in another tradition

thought were mistaken. (I think here of the social contract view and

utilitarianism as two traditions.) Otherwise philosophical thought can’t

progress and it would be mysterious why later writers made the criti-

cisms they did.

In the case of Locke, for example, I remarked on the fact that his

view allowed for a kind of political inequality we would not accept—

inequality in basic rights of voting—and that Rousseau had tried to

overcome this, and I discussed how he had done so. Yet I would em-

phasize that Locke in his liberalism was ahead of his time and opposed

royal absolutism. He didn’t ﬂinch from danger and was loyal to his

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Editor’s Foreword

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friend Lord Shaftesbury, following him even in taking part, it seems, in

the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II in the summer of 1683.

He ﬂed for his life to Holland and barely escaped execution. Locke had

the courage to put his head where his mouth was, perhaps the only

one of the great ﬁgures to take such enormous risks.

None of these lectures were written with the intention that they would

be published. Indeed Rawls said, in discussing Kant in the paragraph that

immediately follows his remarks about Locke quoted above: “The last ver-

sion of the [Kant] lectures (1991) is no doubt better than earlier ones but I

couldn’t bear to have it published as it stands (as some have urged). It

doesn’t begin to do Kant justice on those questions, or to measure up to

what others can now do.” As this sentence indicates, Rawls resisted the pub-

lication of his lectures for years. It was only after he was prevailed upon to

publish his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (edited by Barbara

Herman and published by Harvard University Press in 2000), and that vol-

ume was substantially complete, that he agreed to allow his lectures on the

history of political philosophy to be published as well.

Finally, in the conclusion to Rawls’s “Some Remarks About My

Teaching,” he said (and what he says of Kant here, he, in all his modesty,

also would have said of the philosophers in this volume):

Yet, as I have said, I have never felt satisﬁed with the understanding I

could gain of Kant’s overall conception. This leaves a certain unhappi-

ness and I am reminded of a story about John Marin, a great American

watercolorist along with Homer and Sargent. Marin’s paintings, which

most of you must have seen, are a kind of ﬁgurative expressionism. In

the late forties he was highly regarded as perhaps our leading artist, or

among the few. Looking at his watercolors one can tell what they are

of: say, a skyscraper in New York City, the Taos mountains of New

Mexico, or the schooners and harbors of Maine. For eight years in the

1920s Marin went to Stonington, Maine, to paint; and Ruth Fine, who

wrote a splendid book on Marin, tells of going there to see if she

could ﬁnd anyone who had known him then. She ﬁnally found a

lobsterman who said, “Eeah, eeah, we all knew him. He went out

painting in his little boat day after day, week after week, summer after

summer. And you know, poor fellah, he tried so hard, but he never did

get it right.”

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Editor’s Foreword

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That always said it exactly for me, after all this time: “Never did get

it right.”

Mardy Rawls did much of the work in editing these lectures, and with-

out her help and advice I could not have completed them. Particularly from

1995 (after Jack’s ﬁrst stroke), Mardy assumed an invaluable role in bringing

to fruition many projects. She read each of these lectures carefully and

worked arduously to clarify and point out sentences that could be miscon-

strued. Before Jack asked me in 2000 to undertake the editing of this vol-

ume, Mardy had already more or less completed the editing of the lectures

on Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx. Jack went over these lectures carefully

and gave his approval. Anne Rawls transcribed (in 2001) from the recording

tapes the 1983 lectures on Hobbes and Hume. Mardy then put them into

readable form, whereupon I made further revisions and additions taken

from Rawls’s typed and handwritten notes and handouts. The lectures on

Sidgwick and Butler were typed up from Rawls’s handwritten lecture notes.

I made additions to the ﬁrst Sidgwick lecture, relying upon other notes on

Sidgwick in Rawls’s lecture ﬁles. In general, any editorial emendations in

these lectures involve the repositioning of paragraphs and sentences writ-

ten by Rawls himself.

I am grateful to Mark Navin for deciphering and typing the handwrit-

ten lecture notes on Sidgwick and Butler, and also for entering the editing

corrections made to the Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx lectures. I am also

especially grateful to Kate Moran, who typed up handwritten lecture notes

on Hobbes and Hume, checked carefully the quotations by all philoso-

phers, and prepared the manuscript for ﬁnal submission. Matt Lister,

Thomas Ricketts, and Kok Chor Tan helped in a number of ways as well.

Thanks to Warren Goldfarb and Andy Reath for helpful advice regarding

Rawls’s syllabi. T. M. Scanlon and especially Joshua Cohen gave me much

helpful advice on editing the lectures, regarding what to include and what

to leave unpublished, and I am most grateful to them both.

Finally, I am, once again, grateful to my wife, Annette Lareau-Freeman,

for her sage counsel and constant support in helping me bring the publica-

tion of these important documents to fruition.

Samuel Freeman

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Editor’s Foreword

6. [Note by Mardy Rawls: Thinking of the many times Jack told that story to his

classes, we chose Marin’s painting, “Deer Isle, Islets,” for the cover of Justice as Fairness: A

Restatement.]

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Introductory Remarks

In preparing these lectures, developed over a number of years of teaching

Political and Social Philosophy, I have considered how six writers, Hobbes,

Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Mill, and Marx, treat certain topics discussed in

my own writings on political philosophy. Originally, I devoted about half of

the course’s lectures to relevant topics from A Theory of Justice.

Later, as I

was developing the text of Justice as Fairness: A Restatement,

those lectures

concerned the more recent work instead, and I made available to the class

Xerox copies of the manuscript.

Because the Restatement has now been published, I am not including

those lectures in this book. There are only a few places where I have

pointed out in any explicit way the connection between the works and

ideas discussed and my own work; but where justice as fairness is men-

tioned, references to sections of the book are in footnotes, and where it

seems useful, important ideas or concepts are deﬁned or explained in those

footnotes. An introductory lecture including some general remarks on po-

litical philosophy, and some thoughts on the main ideas of liberalism, may

help lay the groundwork for a discussion of the six writers.

I shall try to identify the more central features of liberalism as express-

ing a political conception of justice when liberalism is viewed from within

the tradition of democratic constitutionalism. One strand in this tradition,

the doctrine of the social contract, is represented by Hobbes, Locke, and

Rousseau; another strand, that of utilitarianism, is represented by Hume

and J. S. Mill; whereas the socialist, or social democratic strand, is repre-

sented by Marx, whom I will consider largely as a critic of liberalism.

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7. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971;

revised edition, 1999).

8. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 2001).

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The lectures are narrow in focus, both from a historical and from a sys-

tematic point of view. They do not present a balanced introduction to the

questions of political and social philosophy. There is no attempt to assess

different interpretations of the philosophers discussed; interpretations are

proposed that seem reasonably accurate to the texts we study and fruitful

for my limited purposes in presenting them. Moreover, many important

questions of political and social philosophy are not discussed at all. It is my

hope that this narrow focus is excusable if it encourages an instructive way

of approaching the questions we do consider and allows us to gain a

greater depth of understanding than would otherwise be possible.

John Rawls

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Introductory Remarks

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Texts Cited

Joseph Butler, The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone (Bristol, En-

gland: Thoemmes Press, 1995).

Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts, 1949).

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Baltimore: Penguin

Books, 1968).

David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the

Principles of Morals, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1902).

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Ox-

ford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. H. J.

Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948).

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1983).

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1960).

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International

Publishers, 1967).

John Stuart Mill, Collected Works (cited as CW) (Toronto: University of To-

ronto Press, 1963–1991).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters,

trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Po-

litical Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1907).

Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1978).

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