September 11, 2008
Though Rawls in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy says that follows Collingwood in taking it that political philosophy is "a series of answers to different questions" arising from various pressing problems in the societies in which the theories were produced, he does not relate he works by his theorists to the common languages of political thought, as shaped by the politicians, historians, preachers, rhetoricians, journalists, party apologists, pamphleteers and essayists of their times.
Yet he describes the main argument in each of his major philosophers in terms of what would be done or accepted by "rational and reasonable" agents in his own specific sense of those terms. His subjects do not use that vocabulary; and Rawls does not have a major interest in recovering the way the past looked to and was described by those who lived it.
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