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EDITOR'S NOTE
The structure of this text deviates markedly from that of an ordinary scientific article. It is not the orderly organized and carefully revised article in which contributions to conferences usually find their last resting place. Instead, it consists of the transcription of a lecture given by Brian Barry (1936-2009) and a summary of the ensuing debate during the founding conference of the Dutch Graduate School for Political Science in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 9-10 January 1991. The rationale behind this choice of form is simple and unscientific. Brian Barry himself lacked the time and interest to rearrange the notes he used at his talk into an article. Moreover, the notes he used were already part of the book manuscript he was working on at the time - the never completed third volume of his treatise on social justice. Brian felt that turning the lecture into an article would add little to, and only distract from his work on, the book - but he did not mind publication in the form I proposed: authorized lecture notes displaying one of the best political philosophers of our days struggling to perfect and further develop his ideas though debate with his critics. The text was offered for publication in the journal of the Dutch Political Science Association in the autumn of 1991, but its editors neither appreciated the format, nor were they impressed by the novelty of what Barry had to offer. It was rediscovered in 2009 in the process of converting files, created with now defunct word processing software, to a more current format. I have added nothing to the original text, except a couple of references to Brian Barry's own (later) work.
Although little of what Barry had to say is really surprising, from the point of view of 2009, the text does offer a rare glimpse into the ideas with which Theories of Justice: Volume III might have begun, and for the biographer it shows the very first signs of his growing impatience with academic political philosophy.
The 1991 lecture was prepared while he was working on the final draft of his second volume in the Theories of Justice series - or so he thought at the time. However, Brian Barry always refused to publish...