Who was John Rawls?
The philosopher John Rawls came from Baltimore, born there in 1921. He studied at Princeton, then Cornell and Oxford, and from 1962 he taught at Harvard for over thirty years. His 1971 book A Theory of Justice brought new life to political philosophy in the English-speaking world. In Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples and Justice as Fairness he asked two questions. How can people with clashing religious and moral beliefs share one just society? And how should liberal societies deal with other peoples? He died in 2002.
Political views
- Asked readers to imagine choosing the rules of justice from an original position, behind a veil of ignorance, with nobody knowing their own place in society.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Said every person has an equal claim to a full set of basic liberties, and that these come before economic aims.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Held that inequalities of wealth and power are fair only if opportunities are truly equal and the worst-off gain from them.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Turned down welfare-state capitalism. He preferred a system in which wealth and capital are widely shared among citizens, or else liberal socialism.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Proposed public reason: citizens should defend political decisions with values that others can reasonably accept.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wrote that peoples should respect human rights and avoid interfering in each other's affairs, with an exception for grave abuses.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Many rank Rawls as the leading English-language thinker on politics of his century. His work shaped arguments about equality, liberalism and public policy. Admirers credit him with a careful defence of liberal democracy and fair sharing of resources. Libertarians, led by Robert Nozick, said his principles trample on individual property rights. Communitarians said he assumed an unrealistic, detached picture of the self. Some on the left felt his theory did too little about inequality.
In their own 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.”