John Rawls


Rawls, John (Bordley)

(1921– ) philosopher; born in Baltimore, Md. After earning a Ph.D. from Princeton (1950) and teaching at Princeton (1950–52) and Cornell (1953–76), he became a professor at Harvard. His articles in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in his widely discussed study A Theory of Justice (1971), revolutionized political philosophy by reviving a form of the social contract theory.