Those seeking to understand liberal debates about the justice of contemporary societies will in one way or another gravitate to the writings of the American political philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002). Rawls’s influence has been so vast that he is often described as having revived analytic political philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. Having pronounced political philosophy “dead” in 1956, Peter Laslett introduced Rawls’s article in his edited volume of 1967 by declaring political philosophy “alive again”. President Clinton, conferring on Rawls the National Humanities Medal in 1999, similarly claimed that, “[a]lmost singlehandedly, John Rawls revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy”. These claims are exaggerated, but they nonetheless gesture towards the novelty of Rawls’s arguments. In his most famous work, A Theory of Justice (1971), the fiftieth anniversary of which is marked this year, Rawls aimed to outline a vision of justice which reasonable persons could come to share. In retrospect, perhaps the most striking fact about that book is that Rawls did not seriously doubt the possibility of such a shared vision.

John Bordley Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, to what he himself described as a conventionally religious family. Although initially religion did not play a central role in Rawls’s life, this changed as he enrolled in Princeton University in 1939 and the Second World War began. Rawls took a course on Christian Thought to the Reformation in the autumn of 1941 and then a course on social philosophy with Norman Malcolm in the spring of 1942. His nascent interest in theology resulted in a senior thesis “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (1942). The thesis is remarkable in many ways, but two elements stand out in retrospect. First, when exploring an ideal Christian community, Rawls focused on inter-personal relationships within it and with God. As he put it, proper ethics “is the relating of person to person and finally to God”. It was clear to Rawls that proper relationships required equality among the members of that community (although he had not yet specified what this equality required in practice). Second, Rawls believed that the task of philosophy is analysis of experience – religious or otherwise – and a construction of a conceptual framework that could explain this experience. This position assumed that human beings could make a judgment about a particular case and yet not be able to formulate...