Since the mid-1960s until his retirement in 1995, John Rawls regularly offered a course titled "Political Philosophy of Modernity" at Harvard University. In this course, he discussed his own theoretical designs while also seizing the opportunity to relate his views on the philosophy of the political and the social to those of his predecessors: the contract theorists Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the utilitarians Hume and Mill, as well as Marx, who is in many ways the most interesting critic of classical liberalism. This volume brings together Rawls' major lectures on these classics and offers the rare opportunity to read the history of political philosophy through the eyes of one of its outstanding contemporary representatives.