Rawls asked what society you'd pick without knowing your place in it
John Rawls imagined people designing a society from behind a veil, unaware whether they would be rich or poor. He argued they would choose equal basic liberties, fair opportunity, and inequalities only when they help the worst off. That 1971 thought experiment is widely credited with reviving political philosophy.
Rawls was born in Baltimore in 1921, the second of five sons of a prominent attorney and a mother active in Democratic politics and women's suffrage. Childhood brought double tragedy. At seven he caught diphtheria and a younger brother, Bobby, who visited his room, caught it and died; the next winter Rawls had pneumonia and another brother, Tommy, died after catching it from him. His biographer Thomas Pogge calls these losses the most important events of his youth.
At Princeton he was deeply religious, considered training for the Episcopal priesthood, and wrote a 181-page senior thesis on sin and faith. Then came the war. Enlisting in 1943, he served as an infantryman in New Guinea, earning a Bronze Star, and in the Philippines, and there he lost his Christian faith. Seeing the aftermath of Hiroshima during the occupation of Japan disillusioned him further; after refusing to discipline a fellow soldier, he was demoted to private and left the army in 1946.
He returned to Princeton, finished a doctorate in moral philosophy in 1950, and on a Fulbright at Oxford came under the influence of Isaiah Berlin and H. L. A. Hart. A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971; Will Kymlicka later wrote that it was generally accepted as the start of normative political philosophy's rebirth. Political Liberalism, in 1993, asked how power can be legitimate when citizens hold clashing religious and moral views.
In 1999 Bill Clinton gave him the National Humanities Medal, praising his case that a society where the fortunate help the unfortunate is both moral and logical. Courts in the United States and Canada cite him, and a 2008 survey of 1,086 American political theory professors ranked him first for impact. He died in 2002.
Source: John Rawls
