John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (Baltimore, 1921 - Lexington, 2002) was an American philosopher who taught political philosophy at Harvard for decades and became one of the central figures of twentieth-century political liberalism. Trained in the analytic tradition, he revived normative political philosophy with the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971.

Born into a family of Baltimore lawyers and Democratic activists, he grew up in a city shaped by racial segregation, an experience often cited as the root of his lifelong concern with justice. He studied at Princeton, where he first became absorbed in theology and later turned to moral philosophy. During the Second World War he served as an infantryman in the Pacific, an experience that left a deep mark and that, according to his biographers, led him to lose his Christian faith. He earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1950, taught at Cornell and MIT, and from the early 1960s was a professor at Harvard, where he stayed until his retirement.

His major book, A Theory of Justice, develops what he called justice as fairness. It proposes two principles: that everyone has an equal right to basic liberties, and that social and economic inequalities must be arranged so that they benefit the least advantaged and attach to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. The first principle takes priority over the second. To justify them, he relied on the original position, a thought experiment in which those who design the rules of society do so behind a veil of ignorance that hides their gender, race, class and talents, so that the principles they choose are impartial.

In Political Liberalism (1993) he turned to a different question: how political power can be legitimate in societies where citizens hold religious and moral views that cannot be reconciled. His answer rests on the overlapping consensus and public reason. The Law of Peoples (1999) extended these ideas to relations among peoples, and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) answered many of the criticisms his earlier work had received. From 1995 onward he suffered a series of strokes that severely limited his work, and he died in 2002 at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

His influence has been broad. He is widely regarded as having restored to political philosophy its normative purpose, and his ideas have been debated by philosophers, economists, political scientists, sociologists and theologians. Courts in the United States have cited his work. Not everyone finds him convincing, and some critics argue that his theory sits far from actual political practice. Even so, few dispute that he changed how social justice is discussed in the contemporary world.