The Law of Peoples

This book consists of two parts: the essay ''The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,'' first published in 1997, and ''The Law of Peoples,'' a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993. ''The Idea of Public Reason Revisited'' is John Rawls's most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine. ''The Law of Peoples'' extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. Taken together, the two works comprising The Law of Peoples are the culmination of more than fifty years of Rawls's reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times.