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'''John Rawls''' an American political philosopher (1921-2002), whose book A Theory of Justice revived the social contract tradition and offered a systematic account of justice as fairness, becoming the most influential work of political philosophy in the English-speaking world during the second half of the twentieth century.

== Life and Education ==
John Bordley Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 21 February 1921, the second of five sons in a family of comfortable circumstances, and his early life was shadowed by tragedy, since two of his brothers died in childhood from diseases that he himself had contracted and passed on to them. His experience of illness and loss, and his awareness of the part that chance plays in the distribution of fortune, is often thought to have shaped the serious and humane temper of his later thought and his lifelong concern for the claims of the least fortunate.

He taught at Princeton, at Cornell and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty of Harvard University in 1962, where he remained until his retirement in 1991. He was a famously careful and deliberate teacher, revising his lectures year after year and inviting the criticism of his students, and he trained a generation of political philosophers who carried his ideas into the wider intellectual world and into the study of law, economics and public policy. His seminars and his written work together made Harvard for a time the centre of the study of political philosophy in the English-speaking world.

== A Theory of Justice and the Original Position ==
A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, is the book that restored political philosophy to the centre of the discipline. Rawls began from the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between free and equal citizens, and he sought to identify the principles of justice that such citizens would acknowledge as binding on their common institutions, principles that could be justified to everyone rather than imposed by the strong upon the weak, and he wished to show that a just society need not rest upon a shared religion or a single conception of the good life.

His central device is the original position, a hypothetical situation in which the parties who choose the principles of justice are placed behind a veil of ignorance, so that they do not know their place in society, their class, their talents, their conception of the good or even their generation. Deprived of knowledge of their own particular circumstances, they must choose principles that are fair to everyone, since they cannot tailor the rules to their own advantage or to that of the group into which they happen to have been born.

== Justice as Fairness and Its Rivals ==
Rawls presented his theory as an alternative to utilitarianism, which he thought might sanction the sacrifice of the few for the greater happiness of the many. He insisted that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override, and that the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests, so that the claims of liberty must be satisfied before the claims of welfare can properly be considered.

He also developed the idea of public reason, the principle that in debating fundamental political questions citizens should appeal to considerations that their fellow citizens could reasonably accept, rather than resting their public case upon doctrines that others cannot share. This ideal of a shared and accessible rationality gave his later work a distinctive place in debates about pluralism, toleration and the legitimacy of democratic decisions in societies deeply divided by belief and by competing visions of the good.

== The Law of Peoples and Later Work ==
In The Law of Peoples Rawls extended his conception of justice to the relations between nations, arguing for a set of principles to govern the conduct of peoples in their dealings with one another. He distinguished liberal peoples from decent hierarchical peoples who, though not liberal, respect basic human rights and have a consultative system of government, and he held that liberal peoples should tolerate and cooperate with such societies rather than seek to impose their own institutions upon them by force.

He also addressed the question of international justice and of the duties of wealthier societies toward poorer ones, arguing that a reasonable law of peoples must include a duty of assistance to burdened societies and an obligation to respect the human rights of all persons. He opposed the idea of a world state, believing that a diversity of well-ordered peoples is a more realistic and desirable condition than a single global authority, and he sought a middle path between isolation and universal empire.

== Illness, Death and Legacy ==
Rawls suffered the first of several strokes in 1995, which severely limited his capacity to work, yet he continued to revise his manuscripts with the help of his wife and colleagues and to respond to the critics who had engaged with his theory. He died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 24 November 2002, having spent his last years preparing his late writings for publication and gathering his lectures into the volumes that appeared after his death. His wife and former students saw the final manuscripts through the press, and the lectures on the history of moral and political philosophy appeared in the years that followed.

A Theory of Justice transformed the study of political philosophy in the English-speaking world, which had been widely thought to have lost its subject matter to logic and the analysis of language. It provided a framework within which questions about liberty, equality, the distribution of wealth and the nature of a just society could be discussed systematically, and it provoked a vast literature of commentary and criticism that continues to shape the discipline and to test its conclusions. His ideas about fairness and opportunity entered the vocabulary of public debate and of the law.

== See also ==
* A Theory of Justice
* Original position
* Justice as fairness
* Political liberalism

== References ==

<ref name="r1">John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1971.</ref>
<ref name="r2">John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1993.</ref>
<ref name="r3">John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press, 2007.</ref>

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[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Political science]]
[[Category:United States]]

John Rawls - Revision history

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