Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University in Frankfurt. His books include Contexts of Justice, The Right to Justification, Toleration in Conflict, Justification and Critique and Normativity and Power. In 2012, he received the Leibniz Prize, the highest honor awarded to researchers in Germany.

“Rainer Forst never ceases to astound. His new book deploys a ‘constructivist’ perspective to illuminate a stunning range of concepts and figures, from alienation and autonomy to human rights and structural injustice, from Rousseau and Kant to Rawls and Habermas.”Charles Larmore, Brown University“Rainer Forst’s idea of the right to justification demands that people not be subjected to a normative order that cannot be adequately justified to them. This book builds on that idea to provide a powerful interpretation of why anyone who is subject to a norm must be able to be its author.”Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto“This impressive collection of new essays expands Rainer Forst’s theory of ‘the right to justification’ into an analysis of power, historical progress, solidarity, luck egalitarianism and much else. He is one of the most important contemporary political philosophers.”Seyla Benhabib, Yale University and Columbia Law School“An excellent introduction to Forst's philosophical project.”The European Journal of Philosophy

• PrefaceSources Introduction: Between Two Worlds: Critical Constructivism after Kant I. Autonomy, Progress and Solidarity: Basic Questions of Social Philosophy1. Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination2. The Justification of Progress and the Progress of Justification 3. The Rule of Unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression4. Solidarity: Concept, Conceptions and Contexts5. Social Cohesion: On the Analysis of a Difficult Concept II. Justice, Rights and Non-Domination in a New Key: Critical Political Theory6. Normativity and Reality: Toward a Critical and Realistic Theory of Politics7. The Point and Ground of Human Rights: A Kantian Constructivist View 8. A Critical Theory of Transnational (In-)Justice: Realistic in the Right Way 9. Structural Injustice with a Name, Structural Domination without a Face?10. Kantian Republicanism versus the Neo-Republican Machine: The Meaning and Practice of Political Autonomy III. Debates: Political Liberalism, Luck Egalitarianism, Contractualism and Discourse Ethics11. Political Liberalism: A Kantian View 12. The Point of Justice: On the Paradigmatic Incompatibility between Rawlsian “Justice as Fairness” and Luck Egalitarianism 13. Justification Fundamentalism: A Discourse-Theoretical Interpretation of Scanlon’s Contractualism14. The Autonomy of Autonomy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie NotesReferencesIndex

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University in Frankfurt. His books include Contexts of Justice, The Right to Justification, Toleration in Conflict, Justification and Critique and Normativity and Power. In 2012, he received the Leibniz Prize, the highest honor awarded to researchers in Germany.

“Rainer Forst never ceases to astound. His new book deploys a ‘constructivist’ perspective to illuminate a stunning range of concepts and figures, from alienation and autonomy to human rights and structural injustice, from Rousseau and Kant to Rawls and Habermas.”Charles Larmore, Brown University“Rainer Forst’s idea of the right to justification demands that people not be subjected to a normative order that cannot be adequately justified to them. This book builds on that idea to provide a powerful interpretation of why anyone who is subject to a norm must be able to be its author.”Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto“This impressive collection of new essays expands Rainer Forst’s theory of ‘the right to justification’ into an analysis of power, historical progress, solidarity, luck egalitarianism and much else. He is one of the most important contemporary political philosophers.”Seyla Benhabib, Yale University and Columbia Law School“An excellent introduction to Forst's philosophical project.”The European Journal of Philosophy

• PrefaceSources Introduction: Between Two Worlds: Critical Constructivism after Kant I. Autonomy, Progress and Solidarity: Basic Questions of Social Philosophy1. Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination2. The Justification of Progress and the Progress of Justification 3. The Rule of Unreason: Analyzing (Anti-)Democratic Regression4. Solidarity: Concept, Conceptions and Contexts5. Social Cohesion: On the Analysis of a Difficult Concept II. Justice, Rights and Non-Domination in a New Key: Critical Political Theory6. Normativity and Reality: Toward a Critical and Realistic Theory of Politics7. The Point and Ground of Human Rights: A Kantian Constructivist View 8. A Critical Theory of Transnational (In-)Justice: Realistic in the Right Way 9. Structural Injustice with a Name, Structural Domination without a Face?10. Kantian Republicanism versus the Neo-Republican Machine: The Meaning and Practice of Political Autonomy III. Debates: Political Liberalism, Luck Egalitarianism, Contractualism and Discourse Ethics11. Political Liberalism: A Kantian View 12. The Point of Justice: On the Paradigmatic Incompatibility between Rawlsian “Justice as Fairness” and Luck Egalitarianism 13. Justification Fundamentalism: A Discourse-Theoretical Interpretation of Scanlon’s Contractualism14. The Autonomy of Autonomy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie NotesReferencesIndex