With the death of John Rawls, from heart failure on Sunday at the age of 81, America and the English-speaking world lost its leading political philosopher. An exceptionally modest and retiring man, with a bat-like horror of the limelight, he consistently refused the honours he was offered and declined to pursue the career as public commentator or media guru opened to him by his achievements.
Nevertheless, after its appearance in 1971, his most important book, A Theory Of Justice - written during the Vietnam war - became required reading for students of philosophy, politics and law and, in that way, Rawls has influenced several generations. Indeed, the book, which sold more than 300,000 copies in the US alone, more or less single-handedly rejuvenated and transformed the study of political philosophy.
Rawls never wrote about himself and virtually never gave interviews. Friends described him as a complex and, in some sense, a troubled man, who, although not a believer, had retained an essentially religious outlook - he had a profound sense of "there but for the grace of God go I". Ia field dominated by men, many of Rawls's most eminent students were women - among them Christine Korsgaard at Harvard and Onora O'Neill, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and this year's Reith lecturer.
At heart, A Theory Of Justice is concerned with what its author called the classical problems of modern political theory - problems about the grounds of basic civil liberties, the limits of political obligation and the justice of economic and other inequalities. But where the dominant tradition of liberal thought in the first three quarters of the last century was utilitarian, taking his cue from Hume, Mill and Sidgwick Rawls sought to rehabilitate the social contract tradition - the tradition of Locke, Rousseau and, above all, Kant.
If there is a single principle at the centre of his system, it is that basic civil and political rights are inviolable. Rawls believed, following Kant, that from the moral point of view, the most distinctive feature of human nature is our ability freely to choose our own ends. It follows, on his account, that the state's first duty with its citizens is to respect this capacity for autonomy - to let them live life according to their own lights and to treat them, in Kant's phrase, "as means not as ends".
A leading feature of Rawls's theory, then, is the priority it gives to the right over the good - to claims based on the rights of individuals, over claims based on the good that would result to them, or to others, from violating those rights.
Put another way, he argued, in opposition to utilitarian, perfectionist and communitarian principles, that the first duty of the liberal state was to safeguard the individual's basic civil liberties and that "the loss of freedom for some" can never be "made right by a greater good shared by others".
As Rawls understood, however, it was not enough simply to affirm the priority of the right over the good; he had to come up with an adequate account of how basic freedoms were to be reconciled with one another and how wealth and opportunity were to be distributed.
In order to clarify our thinking on these issues, he introduced the concept of the "original position". He asked us to imagine a situation in which a group of individuals are brought together to agree the basic constitution of a society they are about to enter, but in which, to ensure their impartiality, they are placed behind a veil of ignorance.
The veil denies them any knowledge of their race, gender, social class, talents and abilities, religious beliefs or conception of the good life.
Rawls contended that with the banishment of this sort of bias-inducing knowledge, the participants in the original position are forced, even if self-centred, into the moral point of view - or, as he called it in the last rousing chapters of A Theory Of Justice, "the perspective of eternity". It follows that any principles issuing from it are bound to be fair.
If we think of the first part of Rawls's theory as being taken up with the construction of the original position, then the second part is devoted to establishing the principles that would be agreed upon in it. He argued that the participants in an original position would pursue a low-risk strategy and agree to principles that are fundamentally egalitarian - principles which would guaranteed them the highest possible minimum levels of freedom, wealth and opportunity, even at the cost of lowering average levels.
In particular, Rawls suggests that they would elect to be governed by two principles - his own famous "two principles of justice".
The first of these dictates that each person should have the right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a like liberty for others; the second, that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the advantage of the worst off and should be attached to careers open to all. In other words, he defended a state which remained absolutely neutral between different ways of life, while promoting, in its economic policies, the well-being of the least advantaged.
Rawls was born, the second of five brothers, to an old and wealthy Baltimore family and acquired, early on, almost Puritan good manners and moral earnestness. He was educated at Kent school, Connecticut, and entered Princeton University, New Jersey, at the outbreak of the second World War.
After completing his first degree a semester early, Rawls joined the US army and, as an infantryman, saw action in New Guinea and the Philippines. He was in the Pacific in August 1945, when the US dropped its atomic load on Hiroshima and, 50 years later, wrote a piece condemning the act. This is a rare example of Rawls taking a stand on a concrete political issue - for the most part, he kept his strongly held and radical political allegiances to himself.
After the war, Rawls returned to Princeton to do a doctorate on methods of ethical decision-making and to teach. His thesis, completed in 1950, began the formulation of his concept of "reflective equilibrium", but Princeton failed to recognise his genius. After an extremely fruitful year at Oxford, where he was encouraged by encounters with Herbert Hart, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, among others, he moved in 1953 to Cornell University in New York State, working under Max Black and Norman Malcolm in one of the best and most analytically oriented departments in America.
Rawls was surprised by the success of A Theory Of Justice; indeed, nobody could have predicted the book's impact - 10 years after it came out, a specially published Rawls bibliography listed more than 2,000 publications dealing with one aspect of his work or another. Nowadays it is rare to find a work of political philosophy that does not mention his name.
In 1993, he published his second book, Political Liberalism, which collected, in revised form, some of his main writings since A Theory Of Justice. Its major concern is to draw a distinction between liberalism as a philosophy of life and as a narrower political creed. Liberals have traditionally based their defence of freedom and equality on certain presuppositions about the nature of the person and of the good life.
In his later writings, Rawls set out to do something quite new in the history of liberal thought, by casting liberalism as a strictly political creed - one which appeals not to contentious views about God, morality or the person, but to less contestable values of reciprocity, fairness and mutual respect. In this way, he hoped that a conception of justice, rooted in liberal values of fairness and liberty, could become, even in a society like modern America, where there is little agreement about fundamental moral questions, the basis for what he called "an overlapping consensus".
Rawls was incapacitated by a stroke in 1995. He is survived by his wife Margaret, two daughters and two sons.
John Borden Rawls: born February 21st, 1921; died November 24th, 2002