[OPE-L] Rawls on Marx's idea of species essence

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Mar 06 2007 - 17:33:45 EST


John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy:

Human beings are a distinctive natural kind--or species--in the sense that
they collectively produce and reproduce their conditions of social life
over time. Yet along with this their social forms evolve historically and
in a certain sequence until eventually a social form develops that is,
more or less, adequate to their nature as rational and active beings who,
as it were, create, working with the forces of nature, the conditions of
their complete social self realization. The activity by which this
collective self-expression is accomplished is species-activity: that is,
the cooperative work of many generations and is completed only after a
long period of time.

p. 363

book just out from Harvard University Press

Also a critique of left libertarian Marxism in the name of coercive
enforcement of policies required for justice as Rawls theorizes it...


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