John Rawls

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American political philosopher and one of the foremost thinkers of the second half of the 20th century, internationally acclaimed for his defense of egalitarian liberalism and his theories about justice. He was a professor of political philosophy at the universities of Princeton, Cornell and Harvard. From an original position in the contractualist spirit of the classical political philosophers, his theory reflects on the idea of justice, understood as equity, and establishes its basic principles. One of the author’s best-known formulations is the idea of the ‘veil of ignorance’ as a criterion for determining morality. His major works are A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2002).