John Rawls

American · 1921 to 2002

John Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons born to a prominent attorney and a mother active in the campaign for women's suffrage. As a boy he caught diphtheria and then pneumonia, and passed each illness to a younger brother in turn; Bobby died of diphtheria in 1928 and Tommy died of pneumonia the following winter, a loss that marked him for the rest of his life. He studied at Princeton, graduating in 1943, then served as an infantryman in the Pacific with the 32nd Infantry Division, fighting through New Guinea and the Philippines before joining the occupying army in Japan, where he passed through the ruins of Hiroshima. He had entered the war having considered the priesthood, and he came out of it without his Christian faith. Rawls returned to Princeton for his doctorate, married Margaret Warfield Fox in 1949, and began an academic career that carried him from Princeton to Cornell, to a visiting post at Harvard, to MIT, and in 1962 to a professorship at Harvard he would hold for nearly thirty years. There he spent the better part of two decades developing the argument that became A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, which asked what principles of fairness free and equal people would choose for their society if they did not know in advance what place in it they would occupy. The book remade Anglo-American political philosophy almost overnight and drew Robert Nozick's rival Anarchy, State, and Utopia into being three years later. Rawls went on to refine and in places revise his position in Political Liberalism in 1993, and in 1999 President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal. A first stroke in 1995 slowed him badly, but with his family's support he completed The Law of Peoples and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, both published in 2001. He died of heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2002, at the age of eighty one.