John Rawls

In 1928 he caught diphtheria. His brother Bobby, 20 months younger, came into the sickroom and died of it. The next winter he caught pneumonia, and his brother Tommy caught it from him and died too. Thomas Pogge, his biographer, calls those the central events of his childhood, and Rawls traced his lifelong stutter to them. His father was a well-known Baltimore attorney and his mother worked for women's suffrage. What followed looked ordinary: an Episcopal prep school in Connecticut, then Princeton, where he read theology seriously enough to consider the priesthood and wrote a 181-page senior thesis attacking Pelagianism on the ground that it would render the Cross of Christ to no effect. He graduated summa cum laude in 1943 and enlisted in the Army that February.

A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971 and restarted a field that had been quiet for a generation. Its device was a bargaining table behind a veil of ignorance, where people choose the rules of a society without knowing which place in it they will occupy. From there, Rawls argued, they would insist on equal basic liberties for everyone, and on tolerating inequality only where it improved the position of the worst off. He taught at Cornell and MIT before returning to Harvard in 1962 for almost 40 years, holding the James Bryant Conant University Professorship and training Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O'Neill, T. M. Scanlon and Elizabeth Anderson among many others. Political Liberalism followed in 1993, The Law of Peoples in 1999, and a restatement in 2001.

He served as an infantryman in the Pacific with the 32nd Division, through New Guinea and then the Philippines, and came out of the trench fighting with a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Bronze Star and no Christian faith. After the surrender he joined the occupation, made sergeant, and saw what was left of Hiroshima. Ordered to punish another soldier, he refused on the ground that no punishment was warranted, and was broken back to private. He left the Army in January 1946 and said very little about any of it for the rest of his life. In 1968 Milton Friedman put him up for membership of the Mont Pelerin Society, the citadel of free-market economics. Rawls joined, and withdrew three years later, shortly before A Theory of Justice went to press.

The book drew fire from every direction at once. Robert Nozick came from the libertarian side. Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer denied it could stand outside any particular culture. Amartya Sen and G. A. Cohen pressed the question of equality of what. Rawls answered rather than dug in, and Political Liberalism narrowed the claim. A stroke in 1995 was the first of several. He finished two more books anyway. He took the Schock Prize and a National Humanities Medal in 1999 and died of heart failure at Lexington, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2002. Students at Tiananmen had held the book up at the officials facing them. In a 2008 survey of political theorists he finished first.

John Rawls's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith book
  His 181-page Princeton senior thesis, written while he considered the priesthood 1942
• A Theory of Justice book
  The original position, the veil of ignorance and the difference principle 1971
• Political Liberalism book
  How citizens who disagree about everything else can still share a constitution 1993
• The Law of Peoples book
  Finished after the strokes. His fullest statement on justice between nations 1999
• Justice as Fairness: A Restatement book
  An answer to 30 years of objections, published a year before he died 2001

• 1928 aged ~7 Diphtheria at seven, and the death of his brother Bobby The following winter pneumonia took his brother Tommy the same way.
• 1939 aged ~18 Leaves the Kent School for Princeton
• February 1943 aged 21 Enlists in the Army He graduated summa cum laude the same year.
• 1945 aged ~24 Joins the occupation of Japan and sees the ruins of Hiroshima Promoted to sergeant, then demoted to private for refusing to discipline another soldier.
• 1950 aged ~29 Takes a Princeton doctorate in moral philosophy
• 1962 aged ~41 Returns to Harvard, where he teaches for almost 40 years
• 1971 aged ~50 Publishes A Theory of Justice Roughly 600 pages, and the book that reopened normative political philosophy.
• 1995 aged ~74 The first of several strokes He finished The Law of Peoples and a restatement anyway.
• November 24, 2002 aged 81 Dies of heart failure at Lexington, Massachusetts

• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. nominated him to the Mont Pelerin Society
• Amartya Sen b. 1933
  Indian-American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on welfare economics and famine reshaped development. pressed the equality-of-what objection
• Martha Nussbaum b. 1947
  Philosopher whose work on emotions, justice, and human capabilities has shaped global ethics. extended and challenged the framework
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. the tradition he restarted
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. awarded him the National Humanities Medal