Right to Justification

Rainer Forst is professor of political theory and philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and director of the research cluster on the "Formation of Normative Orders." He has also taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Free University Berlin, and Dartmouth College. He is the author of Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism and the forthcoming Toleration in Conflict: History, Import, and Contemporary Significance of a Controversial Concept and Justification and Critique. Jeffrey Flynn is assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University and the translator of Hauke Brunkhorst's Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. He is currently at work on a book entitled Human Rights: Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue.

Rainer Forst is the premier political philosopher of his generation in Germany and one of the most innovative and promising in the world today. An extraordinarily impressive feature of his philosophical work is his ability to move expertly and deftly between foundational arguments of an abstract nature and practical considerations having to do with the way that political life actually works. The Right to Justification will have a significant impact on American philosophy. -- Charles Larmore, Brown University, author of The Practices of the Self Rainer Forst's master idea is that people have a right and duty of reciprocal justification in the domain of shared institutions and that testing for the justice of such arrangements means testing for how far they are indeed justifiable. These essays demonstrate the personal signature Forst gives to that idea and the effective manner in which he applies it in different contexts. -- Philip Pettit, Princeton University, author of A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency Rainer Forst is at the forefront of the exciting encounter between critical social theory and Anglo-American normative philosophy. His work is a worthy successor to the Rawls-Habermas dialogue, which ended all too quickly. This work documents his systematic attempt to build a theory of human rights and democratic justice, beginning with the principle of the right to justification. He writes with grace and wit; this book will be widely read. -- Seyla Benhabib, Yale University Rainer Forst advocates a critical theory of justice grounded on the 'basic right to justification.' In these luminous essays, he elaborates this simple yet powerful idea in relation to a broad range of issues, including the notions of practical reason and human autonomy; political liberty and multicultural toleration; deliberative democracy and the welfare state; and human rights and global justice. The result is a philosophical tour de force and a major new program