Reflecting on the Barry Prize: political philosophy before and after Brian Barry

Last year, the British Academy celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Brian Barry Prize. This paper reflects on how the essays that have won the Prize and contemporary political philosophy more generally, compare to works in political philosophy immediately before and during Brian Barry’s career. The Prize-winning essays, and the discipline more generally, continue to produce a prescriptive and engaged form of political philosophy that Barry and others in his generation (in particular, John Rawls) were so instrumental in reviving. I celebrate this but also express the worry that the discipline is sliding too far towards applied political philosophy. Political philosophers must not lose sight of foundational principles that should govern a just society.