John Rawls was born in Baltimore. He studied for B.A. (1943) and Ph.D. (1950) degrees at Princeton University. He served in the armed forces from 1943 to 1945. He taught at Princeton from 1950 to 1952 and at Cornell University from 1953 to 1959, and was professor at MIT from 1960 to 1962. In 1962, he joined the Harvard Philosophy Department and was appointed the Conant University Professor at Harvard in 1979. His 1971 book A Theory of Justice, which advocates a liberal position regarding equality and individual rights, became a classic of political philosophy during his lifetime. His other books include Political Liberalism (1993), Collected Papers (1999), Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
(2000), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001).
