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Saint Joseph’s University
THEORIES OF JUSTICE
Political Science 2711
Spring 2006
Tuesday and Wednesday, 3:00-4:15 p.m.
Barbelin 112G
Dr. Susan P. Liebell
Office: Barbelin 105 E-mail: sliebell@sju.edu
Office Hours: Weds, 10-12; Fri, 10-1 Phone: 610-660-1919/1917 and by appointment
This political theory seminar examines some of the major theories of justice available to political theorists in the
21st century. We begin with an indepth reading of the work that has defined justice in the 20th and 21st centuries: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. We continue by considering alternative theories of justice and criticisms of Rawls: Robert Nozick (libertarianism); Susan Okin (liberal feminism); and Michael Sandel and
Alasdair …ver más…

Consider the political, social, and economic events that each author may be responding to in their work.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books, 1974.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice – Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 1999 (the first edition was published in 1971 and should be referred to as “the original” version). Please buy the revised edition: ISBN
0674000781.
John Rawls, Law of the Peoples. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, Basic Books, 1989.
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Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
Selections available on Blackboard as a PDF or on library reserve.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.
Selections available on Blackboard as a PDF or on library reserve.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1984.
Selections available on Blackboard as a PDF or on library reserve.
Supplementary texts available on library reserve:
Brian Barry, Theories of Justice. University of California Press, 1989.
Samuel Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Several copies of this book are available from the University Book