The philosopher who, almost single-handedly, revived Anglo-American political philosophy from its mid-20th-century slumber. When Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, the dominant view in English-speaking philosophy was that substantive political theory was either disguised emotivism or empirical sociology. Rawls returned it to the grand tradition — rigorous, normative, systematic — and set the terms of debate for two generations.
His central device is the "original position": imagine rational parties choosing principles of justice for their society from behind a "veil of ignorance" that hides their class, talents, race, gender, and conception of the good. What would they choose? Rawls argued they would settle on two principles, in strict priority: equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged (the "difference principle").
This is The Social Contract theory reborn as a device of justification rather than historical fiction. It is also a broadly Kantian vision: persons as free and equal rational agents, coercion justified only through reasons they could accept. Libertarians — above all Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) — attacked the redistributive implications; communitarians (Sandel, Taylor, MacIntyre) attacked the "unencumbered self"; Rawls's own later work, Political Liberalism (1993), revised the theory to address the fact of reasonable pluralism. The debates he started remain live.
Synthesized from the published work, not direct quotation.
Rawls's own position is more textured than the common reading of him as an advocate of simple income-tax progressivity. In A Theory of Justice §43 he sketches a "distribution branch" of government whose central instruments are inheritance and gift taxation — the policy levers that prevent concentrated wealth from perpetuating itself across generations and that sustain the property-owning-democracy regime he preferred. On income taxation he was more measured than readers sometimes expect; he suggested that a proportional expenditure (consumption) tax could in principle satisfy his principles, provided that wealth and inheritance were taxed aggressively and the basic structure was already compressing top-end accumulation. The core of his framework is wealth, not income.
This yields reasonably clear contemporary positions. Substantial wealth taxation (Warren, Sanders, Zucman–Saez proposals), strengthened estate and inheritance taxes, and closing the step-up-in-basis loophole — which lets families transmit appreciated capital across generations without ever paying tax on the gains — would all find strong Rawlsian support. Piketty's progressive global wealth tax sits comfortably inside the framework. So would taxing capital gains at the same rate as labor income, since the preferential treatment of capital returns systematically advantages those who already own capital — a violation of fair equality of opportunity. Rawls would be skeptical of flat taxes and of regressive consumption taxes that aren't paired with aggressive wealth taxation, and he would have no patience for the argument that taxing wealth "punishes success." His framework rests on the observation that success in market societies reflects a large element of brute luck in talents, starting positions, and inheritances — none of which morally entitles anyone to their holdings in the strong libertarian sense that tax opponents usually assume.
The distinctive Rawlsian move is that the level of taxation matters less than what the system does to the basic structure. A moderately taxed society with broadly distributed productive assets could, by his test, be more just than a highly taxed society in which wealth remains concentrated and redistribution is the only corrective. The tax system, in the Rawlsian frame, is a tool for sustaining a basic structure in which cooperation on fair terms is possible — not a vehicle for penalizing the fortunate.