Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are perhaps the two most renowned and influential figures in social and political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, they had a famous exchange in the Journal of Philosophy. Quarreling over the merits of each other’s accounts of the shape and meaning of democracy and legitimacy in a contemporary society, they also revealed how great thinkers working in different traditions read—and misread—one another’s work.

In this book, James Gordon Finlayson examines the Habermas-Rawls debate in context and considers its wider implications. He traces their dispute from its inception in their earliest works to the 1995 exchange and its aftermath, as well as its legacy in contemporary debates. Finlayson discusses Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, considering them as the essential background to the dispute and using them to lay out their different conceptions of justice, politics, democratic legitimacy, individual rights, and the normative authority of law. He gives a detailed analysis and assessment of their contributions, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their different approaches to political theory, conceptions of democracy, and accounts of religion and public reason, and he reflects on the ongoing significance of the debate. The Habermas-Rawls Debate is an authoritative account of the crucial intersection of two major political theorists and an explication of why their dispute continues to matter.

"This book should quickly establish itself as the definitive account of the debate. It is lucid and penetrating, drilling deeply into both the inner workings of the theories that serve as the debate's backdrop, as well as the parries and thrusts of the exchange itself." - Political Theory

"A well-informed and detailed account of the exchange between Habermas and Rawls about questions of political justice and legitimacy." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Finlayson’s deep engagement with this debate has much to offer...[an] excellent study." - Contemporary Political Theory

"Finlayson has written a detailed and illuminating analysis of the debate between Habermas and Rawls...the book is essential reading for anyone interested in modern political philosophy." - Ethical Perspectives

"Takes the views of each philosopher on a range of contested issues as an opportunity to explore the views of the other." - Review of Politics

"The book makes an important contribution to the field by drawing on Rawls’s and Habermas’s criticisms of each
other’s theories to develop a clear, in-depth interpretation of both theories, using each to illuminate the other." - Cercles