Rawls, John(1921–2002)
John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century. Educated at Princeton University, he taught at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty of Harvard University in 1962. Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) revitalized political theory as an academic discipline and rejuvenated interest in the substantive social issues that had long been neglected by academic philosophers. Rawls continued to refine and defend his theory in a series of articles and lectures, the most important of which he revised and collected in his 1993 work Political Liberalism. In 1999 The Law of Peoples extended his theory to questions of international relations, and in the next two years, despite declining health, he published Lectures of the History of Moral Philosophy (2000) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001).
Justice as Fairness
The primary objective of Rawls's political theory is to articulate and defend a conception of justice for a modern democratic regime. The theory begins with the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between free and equal persons. The principles of justice for such a society characterize its fair terms of cooperation by specifying its citizens' basic rights and duties and by regulating the distribution of its economic benefits.
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