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1995 Spitz Prize Winner

Political Liberalism
by John Rawls

John Rawls, Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.

Rawls' book is the 1995 winner of the Spitz Prize--the seventh book on liberal-democratic theory to be honored by the CSPT. Beginning with the idea of a political conception of justice and ending with a defense of the priorities of the public institutions of basic liberties, Political Liberalism amends a central premise of his earlier Theory of Justice--the book that marked the renaissance of self-confident and assertive liberal political philosophy in our time. This amendment shifts the foundations of liberal democracy away from a comprehensive moral philosophy and toward the more historical and contingent foundations of public life and political practice. The problem of moral pluralism is addressed by distinguishing the reasonableness of public good in a democratic culture from more extensive views of the good in order "to uncover the conditions of the possibility of a reasonable public basis of justification on fundamental political questions." Political Liberalism stands in a unique relationship to the five other books short-listed for the award this year. Even as we differed in our rank orderings of these other exceptionally fine works, we quickly agreed that their common excellence is partly owed to the fact that all of them engage the locational and boundary issues as addressed in the lectures and articles that came to comprise this year's award winning book. In relocating the boundaries of justification, Political Liberalism has helped to set the terms by which liberal-democratic societies have come to understand themselves.