Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas and Honneth A Deconstructive Perspective

Deconstructing influential theories of justice by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Miriam Bankovsky explores and critiques the early and later work of these three important liberal theorists. Bankovsky examines the commitments that all these thinkers make to a conception of justice as, in Rawls' words, an "art of the possible" and the difficulties that such commitments present for their theories. Taking a deconstructive approach, the book argues that such a defence of possibility must be supplemented by an acknowledgement of the ways in which theory ultimately fails to reconcile the conflicting demands of 'justice' - namely, it's demand for responsibility for the other in the particular and for impartiality among all. In so doing, the book draws attention to the "perfectible" (simultaneously possible and impossible) status of theories of justice, celebrating such perfectibility as the very condition for justice's critical function.

Miriam Bankovsky lectures in politics at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the co-editor, with Alice Le Goff, of Recognition Theory and Contemporary French cal Philosophy Reopening the dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2012).