John Rawls is the most influential 20th century political philosopher, but critics have complained about the ahistorical character of his approach. The purpose of this book is to argue that these critics are, at best, only half correct.Pre-Liberal Political Philosophy concentrates on four pre-liberal thinkers who are major figures in the history of philosophy and who are surprisingly formative in the development of Rawls’s mature political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.
Several illuminating connections are drawn between Rawls’s political liberalism and Plato’s contrasting appeal to the “noble lie” in politics, between Rawls’s overall method of reflective equilibrium and Aristotle’s dialectic, between Rawls’s opposition to merit in the distribution of wealth and Augustine’s similar anti-Pelagian stance, and between Rawls’s view of a just society as a common good of common goods and the natural law dimension of Aquinas’s philosophy. In general, the distance between Rawlsian abstraction and his historical embeddedness is lessened considerably.