A Theory of Justice
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season607 pages, about 12 hours: the length of 1.9 typical books on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbOne reader reports quitting twenty pages in and returning two years later to finish it.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 12 reviews from critics and book blogs, none credit the plot and 12 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesA book blog calls it the first theory of a well-ordered society since Plato’s Republic; Fountain Magazine places it in Hobbes’s contract tradition.
The case for it
on the whole book
“a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy”
Robert Nozick · Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974 on a second reading
“the smarter you get, the smarter it gets”
Jonathan Wolff · Five Books, 2015 on Rawls’s vision
“It’s hard to forget Rawls’s vision once you’ve read it”
a book blog on the original position
“It is, without a doubt, an absolutely fascinating concept”
a Substack review
The case against
on the prose
“long winded, repetitive, and doesn’t appear to know why we use commas in prose”
a book blog on the length
“getting through five hundred pages of hard (and dry) reasoning and argument”
a book blog on the theory
“otherwise obscure and obscurantist work of analytic political theory suddenly appear as the intellectuals’ lifeboat”
Bradley C.S. Watson · Claremont Review of Books, 2007 on the style
“a complex and in places rather dry book”
a book blog
