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John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), xix + 476 pp.
1. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy presents a set of lectures written by John Rawls for his students at Harvard. They were part of Rawls's course in Political Philosophy, which covered, together with his own theory of justice, central works by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Marx. The volume also includes lectures on Sidgwick and Butler and (in the Introduction) an interesting account of the role, authority, and audience of political philosophy. Rawls taught this class throughout his teaching career. He prepared a set of detailed and wellorganized notes, which were continuously improved as Rawls's own ideas evolved. At the time of his death, the notes on Locke, Rousseau, Mill and Marx were quite complete and self-standing. The lectures on Hobbes and Hume, on the other hand, were completed on the basis of transcripts from Rawls's classes. The preparation of this volume was undertaken by Samuel Freeman, who was also a teaching assistant of Rawls. We must certainly be thankful to Freeman for the care and competence with which he put together this extraordinary volume.
The book provides a discussion of some of the most important works in modern political philosophy by arguably the most important contemporary political philosopher. In what follows, we focus on three aspects of the book that we find particularly striking.
2. First, the book is an exemplar of how to approach philosophical texts. Rawls applies the principles exposed in his "Remarks about My Teaching" (xii-xv). One of these principles demands that we offer the best possible account of an author's views, reconstructing them in their best light. Thus, for example, Rawls reads Rousseau's idea of the "general will," which so frequently has been construed as the expression of an authoritarian project, as "a form of deliberative reason shared and exercised by each citizen" (227). He avoids the common superficial reading of Rousseau's idea of "forcing people to be free," and recommends an alternative rendering that dispels worries about authoritarianism. Similarly, he discards readings of Mill that say that he was wrong to think that his utilitarianism yields liberal principles of justice, assuming that someone...