The Possibility of Knowledge

"Freeman is the leading authority on the thought and writing of John Rawls, and Rawls was the leading political and social philosopher of the twentieth century. Freeman's clear, careful, and deeply informed studies in these essays offer important insight about basic questions of interpretation and justification--about Rawls' constructualism, about his relation to utilitarianism, about the idea of public reason, and about his reasons for limiting his principles of distributive justice to the self-contained nation-state."--Thomas Nagel, New York University

"Freeman's papers range over some of the most important subjects in liberal political theory: the nature and varieties of contractarianism, the meaning of the priority of right, the idea of public reason, the problem of stability, the challenge of luck egalitarianism, the democratic character of judicial review, and the demands of international justice.... The result is an extraordinarilly substantial set of papers.... This is a very valuable book."--Notre Dame Philosophical Review

"Freeman is one of the leading political philosophers of his generation. His influential papers include some of the most sophisticated and illuminating discussions of themes from Rawls' earlier and later work. This important collection will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in political philosophy."--R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley

"One great virtue of this collection of nine essays is clarification, in the face of numerous common misinterpretations, of the interraltionship of these two problems--the nature and the stability of justice--and the implications of the resulting contractarian position for such topics as public reason, consequentialism, luck egalitarianism, distributive justice, and cosmopolitanism."--Michael Howard, Philosophical Books