United StatesWho was John Rawls?
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921 and studied at Princeton, Cornell and Oxford. In 1962 he joined the faculty at Harvard, where he taught for more than thirty years. His book A Theory of Justice (1971) revived systematic political philosophy in the English-speaking world. Later works, including Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), addressed how people with different religious and moral views can share a just society and how liberal societies should relate to others. He died in 2002.
Political views
Proposed that principles of justice be chosen in an original position behind a veil of ignorance, where no one knows their place in society.
Source: plato.stanford.eduHeld that each person has the same claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which takes priority over economic goals.
Source: plato.stanford.eduArgued that social and economic inequalities are just only under fair equality of opportunity and when they benefit the least advantaged.
Source: plato.stanford.eduRejected welfare-state capitalism, favoring a property-owning democracy that spreads ownership of productive assets, or a liberal socialist regime.
Source: plato.stanford.eduDeveloped a doctrine of public reason in which citizens justify political decisions using values others can reasonably accept.
Source: plato.stanford.eduHeld that peoples should honor human rights and a duty of nonintervention, except to address grave violations of human rights.
Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Rawls is widely considered the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century in the English-speaking world, and his ideas shaped debates about equality, liberalism and public policy. Admirers credit him with a rigorous defense of liberal democracy and fair distribution. Libertarian critics, most notably Robert Nozick, argued that his principles override individual rights to property, while communitarians said his theory relied on an abstract view of the self. Others on the left argued it did not go far enough in addressing inequality.
In their words
Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all.