PERSON
John Rawls
The political philosopher who rebuilt social contract theory from scratch—author of the veil of ignorance, the difference principle, and the demonstration that rational people designing institutions for a society they might join at any level would choose to protect the worst-off.
John Rawls was not a public intellectual in the usual sense. He did not write polemics. He did not appear on television. He wrote with the patience of a person building a cathedral—one carefully placed stone at a time, each load-bearing, each tested against the weight of what would rest upon it.
A Theory of Justice (1971) runs to nearly six hundred pages of dense argument. Its central contribution is a thought experiment so simple that a child could grasp it and so powerful that five decades of philosophy have not exhausted its implications: the
veil of ignorance. Imagine you must design the institutions of your society—the tax code, the educational system, the property laws, the rules for distributing advantage and absorbing loss. But you must choose them without knowing which position you will occupy once they take effect. You do not know whether you will be wealthy or poor, talented or ordinary, healthy