John Rawls 1921 – 2002

John Rawls was a 20th-century American political philosopher whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice is the most influential work of political philosophy of the post-war era. The book argues that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are those that would be agreed to by rational individuals in an original position, behind a veil of ignorance about their own talents, social position, and conception of the good. His later work, Political Liberalism, addressed how a just society can sustain itself among citizens who hold reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines. He revived the social contract tradition, gave the analytic tradition its most ambitious work in normative political philosophy, and shaped subsequent debates over justice, liberalism, and democratic theory. He taught at Harvard University for most of his career.

John Rawls (1921–2002) was the most influential English-language political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore, educated at Princeton with a wartime interruption for service in the Pacific, he taught at Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and from 1962 at Harvard, where he held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship.

A Theory of Justice (1971) reframed Anglophone political philosophy. The book argues that the principles of justice are those rational agents would choose from behind a veil of ignorance — a hypothetical position that screens out information about who they will turn out to be in the resulting society. Rawls argues that two principles emerge: equal basic liberties for all, and inequalities permitted only when they benefit the least well-off. The book combined unprecedented analytical rigor with a substantive liberal-egalitarian political vision.

Rawls's later work refined and reconceived the framework. Political Liberalism (1993) addressed how stable agreement on principles of justice is possible among citizens with different comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines. The Law of Peoples (1999) extended the framework to international justice. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) presented the mature view in compressed form. Robert Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Habermas's discourse-ethical critique, and the communitarian responses of Sandel, Taylor, and MacIntyre frame the philosophical conversation Rawls's work made possible.