Abstract

In the first edition of this Companion, John Dunn remarked that very few modern philosophers considered trust between people ‘a central issue in the theoretical understanding of politics’. Dunn saw this as strange, considering the enormous interest that John Rawls's theory on social justice had invoked. How could a ‘behind the veil of ignorance’ contract work to organize the distribution of goods in society if the agents could not trust each other to honour the contract? Rawls's theory presupposes either that such mutual trust exists or that society can produce institutions that could be relied upon to intervene against agents who violate the contract.