The fool and the franchiser

Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls are usually portrayed in antagonistic terms. While Hobbes, one of the first scholars to translate Thucydides, is often held to be an archetypal realist, Rawls, a self-proclaimed follower of Kant, is frequently said to argue from an explicit normative position. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that the two philosophers have more in common than is generally thought. Drawing on Hobbes's answer to the fool and Rawls's analogy of the franchiser, I suggest that there is a powerful link between the two philosophers that can tell us something valuable about their theories of formal justice. Against Brian Barry's characterization of Hobbes as an advocate of justice as mutual advantage and Rawls as a proponent of both justice as mutual advantage and justice as impartiality, I argue that the two philosophers adhere to one and the same tradition of justice, justice as reciprocity, which bases obligations of reciprocity not only on explicit express, but also on tacit acceptance of benefits

Analogy · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Impartiality · Law and economics · Normative · Original position · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Primary goods · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology · Social science · Sociology · State of nature · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · War, Ethics, and Justification

• The Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianism

  Open Access•Jody S Kraus•Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianis…•1993

  Add to list

• The construction of a ‘realistic utopia’

  Open Access•Chris Brown•Review of International Studies•2002

  Add to list