John Rawls wrote one book that changed the direction of Western political philosophy. A Theory of Justice, published in 1971 after two decades of work, is the single most influential work of political philosophy published in English in the 20th century. It revived a discipline that had been written off by many as moribund, set the terms for nearly every subsequent debate about liberalism, justice, and democratic legitimacy, and established Rawls as the dominant figure of late 20th century political philosophy until his death in 2002. He was a quiet, self-effacing man who avoided publicity, rarely gave interviews, and spent nearly his entire career at Harvard. The impact of his work made a larger-than-life reputation impossible to avoid.
Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore to a prominent Maryland family. His path to philosophy ran through traumas that shaped his work in ways his public persona rarely acknowledged. Two of his four brothers died in childhood after catching infections from him, which left him with a lifelong stammer and a deep sense of moral contingency — the recognition that the distribution of suffering in the world bore no relationship to anyone's deserts. He served as an infantryman in the Pacific during World War II, witnessed the aftermath of Hiroshima, and was deeply troubled by the moral implications of the atomic bombings. He came out of the war convinced that the fundamental question for political philosophy was the question of justice: what do we owe each other, and on what terms can we live together as free and equal citizens?
The answer Rawls developed over the following twenty years was what he called "justice as fairness." He argued that the principles of a just society are the principles that free and equal citizens would agree to if they had to choose the basic structure of their society behind what Rawls called a "veil of ignorance" — a thought experiment in which participants had no knowledge of their own talents, social position, race, sex, or personal goals. Behind this veil, Rawls argued, rational participants would choose two principles: first, that each person would have the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for others, and second, that social and economic inequalities would be arranged so that they both benefited the least advantaged members of society and were attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
This framework — known as "justice as fairness" or, in its more technical form, "the difference principle" — became the dominant framework for late 20th century debates about distributive justice. Its influence extended far beyond academic philosophy. It shaped debates about the welfare state, affirmative action, health care, taxation, and the foundations of liberal democratic politics. It became the target of sustained critiques from libertarian philosophers like Robert Nozick, communitarian philosophers like Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, and later from a new generation of feminist and multicultural theorists. Rawls spent the remaining three decades of his career responding to these critiques, refining his framework, and working out its implications for international justice and the nature of liberal political community.
His second major book, Political Liberalism (1993), took up one of the central problems his critics had identified. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls had assumed that citizens of a well-ordered society would converge on a shared comprehensive moral view. By the 1990s, he recognized that modern democratic societies are characterized by deep and reasonable pluralism — citizens hold fundamentally different religious, philosophical, and moral views that they will not abandon. Political Liberalism reworked his framework to accommodate this pluralism, arguing that liberal political principles must be justifiable through "public reason" — reasons that citizens with different comprehensive views can all reasonably accept — rather than by appeal to any single moral or religious framework.
His third major book, The Law of Peoples (1999), extended his framework to international relations, arguing for a less ambitious vision of global justice than many cosmopolitan theorists had hoped for. Rawls's international theory allowed for substantial diversity among "decent" peoples who need not be fully liberal, and it was criticized by more radical egalitarians as insufficiently demanding about global inequality.
Rawls died in 2002 at eighty-one, having spent his final years continuing to revise his earlier work in response to critics. His influence on contemporary political philosophy is difficult to overstate. Almost every serious contemporary debate about liberalism, justice, democratic legitimacy, or the moral foundations of political community either extends or challenges the framework Rawls established. He is, without much controversy, the most important political philosopher writing in English in the second half of the 20th century.