John Rawls Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

John Rawls (1921–20 02) was a major American political philosopher of the twentieth century. His widely read book, A Theory of Justice, released in 1971, revived an age-old question: what makes a democratic society just? At a time when empirical research and language analysis dominated Anglo-American political philosophy, Rawls’ approach to political inquiry was unabashedly normative or value centered.

Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Princeton University, where he studied under Norman Malcolm, a former student of influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1943 Rawls completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy and enlisted in the U.S. army.

Rawls returned to Princeton in early 1946 on the GI Bill and completed his PhD in philosophy four years later. After serving as a philosophy instructor at Princeton for a year, he received a Fulbright fellowship in 1952 to study at Oxford University. This gave him an opportunity to attend H. L. A. Hart’s lectures on legal philosophy and also to participate in a seminar led by Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and British philosopher Stuart Hampshire. It was then that Rawls’ interests turned to the question of how normative principles, such as justice and equality, might be better realized through a carefully designed democratic process of deliberation. In the following years, he published several essays addressing this question, including “Justice as Fairness” in 1958,“Constitutional Liberty” in 1963, and “Distributive Justice: Some Addenda” in 1968. Rawls joined the philosophy department at Harvard in 1962 and remained there until his retirement in 1991.

While at Harvard, Rawls publically denounced the Vietnam War (1959–1975) but complained that if Americans must fight, exempting college students from the draft gave an unfair advantage to wealthy families. It was during this time that he completed the manuscript for A Theory of Justice. In the book, Rawls presented in detail his idea of justice as fairness. Drawing on the social contract tradition of English philosopher John Locke and Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rawls proposed a hypothetical original position, a Rawlsian state of nature, wherein citizens might freely enter into an agreement among themselves. However, to prevent them from favoring their own interests, they were to know nothing about how the choices they made would affect their particular case. This veil of ignorance would enable all citizens to share one another’s fate.

Rawls continued to revise and expound on what his critics called a liberal utopia of pure procedural justice. Rawls was not deterred. In Political Liberalism (1996) he explored the relationship between religion and democratic pluralism, showing how citizens who held irreconcilable moral outlooks might still achieve an “overlapping consensus” on political principles. In The Law of Peoples (1999), he extended his argument to international relations, insisting that popular government is educative in that, by learning more about what others think and want, people also learn more about themselves.

For his scholarly contributions, Rawls was honored with an endowed position of Conant University Professor at Harvard and received a National Humanities Mental of Excellence. After suffering a series of strokes, Rawls died on November 24, 2002, at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Bibliography:

Freeman, Samuel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Pogge,Thomas. John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice. Translated by Michelle Kosch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

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