Rawls’ theory of justice and Aristotle’s political anthropology

This work attempts a systematic comparative research between the two philosophers, Aristotle and John Rawls, with an emphasis on Aristotle’s political anthropology and Rawls’ concept of the “primary position”. It is an attempt to investigate, on the one hand, the conditions and terms of the constitution of the two societies and, on the other hand, the calibration of the public presence of the citizen and the formation of his life plans that will make him a citizen. It is thus an attempt to calibrate the relevance of the moral and the political element, the meaning of the concept of the citizen and the individual respectively, and the limits of their political freedom and self-determination. In particular, in the case of Aristotle, and with the direct correlation of the ethical with the political element, the lived ethos and virtuous action of citizens is privileged, in the context of a real society where moral values are not externally imposed. In contrast, in Rawls’ case the terms of the constitution of society are shifted to the hypothetical symbolic construction of the primacy, where the terms of justice emerge outside the boundaries of actual social formation, behind a ‘veil of ignorance’.