The Law of Peoples

The Slovak edition of Rawls’s work The Law of Peoples is supplemented by the essay The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, which formed part of the expanded edition of The Law of Peoples published in 1999. Rawls proceeds from the premise that “peoples”, rather than states, are the basic unit of inquiry. In his view, groups of peoples constituting states ought to follow the principles he elaborated in his well-known work A Theory of Justice. Democracy appears to him to be the most logical means of realising these principles; however, even benign non-democracies, which he refers to as “consultation hierarchies”, should also be regarded as acceptable on the international stage. In this connection, he develops eight principles on the basis of which peoples should act on that stage (for example, peoples are free and independent, and other peoples must respect their freedom and independence; peoples are equal as contracting parties; peoples honour human rights; peoples have the right of self-defence, but not the right to wage war).
Author: John Rawls