Publisher's Synopsis
The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.David Cardwell 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. David Cardwell 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 David Cardwell, "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, David Cardwell's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.
