Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Law and economics is the leading intellectual movement in law today. This book examines the first great law and economics movement in the early part of the twentieth century through the work of one of its most original thinkers, Robert Hale. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1930s, progressive academics in law and economics mounted parallel assaults on free-market economic principles. They showed first that "private," unregulated economic relations were in fact determined by a state-imposed regime of property and contract rights. Second, they showed that the particular regime of rights that existed at that time was hard to square with any common-sense notions of social justice. Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights. Taken together, these writings on coercion and property rights offer one of the most profound and elaborated critiques of libertarianism, far outshining the better-known efforts of Richard Ely and John R. Commons. In his writings on public utility regulation, Hale also made important contributions to a theory of just, market-based distribution. This first, full-length study of Hale's work should be of interest to legal, economic, and intellectual historians.

"What is Property?" is a book by French philosopher and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, first published in 1840. In this work, Proudhon examines the concept of property and its implications for society. He argues that property is theft and that it is the source of all social ills. He also proposes a new form of social organization based on mutualism and voluntary cooperation. This book is an important work in the history of anarchism and has been influential in the development of modern economic thought. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 - 1865) was a French politician, philosopher, and economist. He is best known for his theories of mutualism and anarchism, which he developed in his works such as "System of Economic Contradictions" (1846) and "The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century" (1851).