John Rawls

In 1928, when he was barely seven years old, he suffered from diphtheria. The next year, he was struck with pneumonia.

In 1949, he married Brown University graduate, Margaret Fox.

This famous American political philosopher did not like giving interviews and was not comfortable with limelight.

John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Lee Rawls, an attorney and Anna Abell Stump Rawls. He suffered from an emotional turmoil early on, when two of his brothers died in childhood due to fatal illnesses.

He briefly attended a school in Baltimore after which he enrolled at the Kent School in Connecticut. In 1939, he enrolled at the Princeton University.

In 1943, soon after obtaining a degree in arts, he was commissioned into the United States Army. He served during the World War II but left the army, after witnessing the Hiroshima bombing.

Withdrawing his service from the army, he got enrolled again at the Princeton University in 1946, to secure a PhD in the field of moral philosophy.

In 1950, he published the thesis titled, ‘A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character’.

In 1951, he published 'Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics', in the Cornell University journal titled, ‘Philosophical Review'. In the same journal, he also wrote, ‘Justice as Fairness' and 'The Sense of Justice'.

In 1952, he was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University. He returned to the United States of America, where he initially worked as an assistant professor and later became the associate professor at the Cornell University.

By 1962, he became a full time professor at Cornell University and soon received a tenured position from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, he opted to teach at the Harvard University.

In 1963, he authored a chapter titled, ‘Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice' for the book, ‘Nomos, VI: Justice', Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

In 1967, he authored the chapter titled, ‘Distributive Justice’ in the Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman book titled, 'Philosophy, Politics, and Society'. The following year, he wrote the article, ‘Distributive Justice: Some Addenda'.

‘A Theory of Justice’ is one of his seminal works and magnum opus that was widely hailed during its time of publication as ‘'the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II'.