Brian Barry (1936–2009) was born in London and educated at Oxford. Barry irst met John Rawls when Barry was a Rockefeller fellow at Harvard in 1961–1962 (see Kelly 2009).

Later, Barry was invited to write a review article on Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, but he decided that a serious overall judgment of it required book-length treatment. Barry focused on the “central doctrines” (1973, 128) of A Theory of Justice, emphasizing the formulation and derivation of Rawls’s two principles of justice. Barry offers a number of helpful expository points (especially in 1973, ch. 7) and some trenchant critiques in the course of the book. Perhaps the best known of his critiques concerns “the derivation of the maximin criterion” in the Rawlsian original position (Barry 1973, 87). I think Barry gets the derivation wrong (he didn’t have the advantage of Rawls’s second thoughts as spelled out in TJ (xiv) and in JF (part iii). But he did make a plausible argument for saying that the parties in the original position would prefer a modiied version of the principle of maximizing average utility over Rawls’s own difference principle (Barry 1973, 93–95, 103).

Fair equality of opportunity was rejected (in Barry 1973, ch. 8) as adding nothing of value.