John Rawls 1921 - 2002

In the late 1930s, an anxious teenager sits in a boarding school in Connecticut, surrounded by the trappings of privilege he doesn’t quite know what to do with. The school is Kent, Episcopalian and elite, a feeder into the American establishment. The boy’s days are filled with chapel services, Latin, math, sports, and the casual assumption that people like him will one day help run things. He is shy, serious, and introspective. The world outside his campus is sliding toward catastrophe — the rise of fascism, economic turmoil, the approach of war — but inside the routines of American upper-class life continue. The boy’s name is John Bordley Rawls, and he will spend the second half of the twentieth century trying to answer one basic question: what does a just society look like, if we take seriously the fact that no one  ...