John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (1921-2002) almost single-handedly revived Anglophone political philosophy. His 1971 A Theory of Justice arrived when Isaiah Berlin had recently asked whether the field still existed, and decisively answered that it did.

Born in Baltimore to an attorney's family, Rawls suffered a formative tragedy: he passed two fatal infections to younger brothers, who both died. He graduated from Princeton in 1943 and enlisted in the Army, serving in New Guinea and the Philippines. In occupied Japan he saw the aftermath of Hiroshima and lost his religious faith. Discharged in 1946, he returned to Princeton for doctoral study.

A 1952 Fulbright at Oxford brought him to Isaiah Berlin and H. L. A. Hart. After Cornell and MIT, he settled at Harvard in 1962, retiring in 1991. A 1995 stroke slowed but did not stop him; he completed The Law of Peoples in 1999. He died in 2002, age 81.

A Theory of Justice asks what principles of justice rational individuals would choose behind a "veil of ignorance" — knowing nothing of their talents, position, gender, race, or wealth. The result is two principles. First: each person has equal basic liberties. Second: social and economic inequalities are permitted only when (a) attached to positions open under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) benefiting the least advantaged. The second clause — his difference principle — became the most contested.

Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) attacked from the libertarian right. Communitarians — MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor — challenged from the other side. The exchange produced what scholars call the "Rawls industry." Political Liberalism (1993) addressed legitimacy in pluralist societies via overlapping consensus, and The Law of Peoples extended the inquiry to international justice. Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 1999.