Discover the Best Books Written by John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and leading moral and political philosophy figure. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard.
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971) is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy." His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."
Rawls employs several thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals" to determine principles of social justice.
Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton in recognition of how Rawls's thought "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."