Mass. philosopher named to list of influential Princeton grads

There are four names that top Princeton's list of most influential graduates: James Madison, Alan Turing, Woodrow Wilson, and a Lexington man who was fond of dancing the jitterbug.

Liberal philosopher and longtime Lexington resident John Rawls was recently named the fourth most-influential Princeton graduate by Princeton Alumni Weekly. That, on the surface, sounds impressive. It is magnified by the three names ahead of him: Madison, fourth President of the United States and unofficial author of the U.S. Constitution; Turing, the father of the computer, and Wilson, the 28th president and philosophical architect of the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations.

So what did Rawls do to rank among these giants?

He pursued justice.

A new philosophy

Rawls spent his career philosophically forming a realistic utopia where social institutions were universally just and fair. He hoped justice would promote humans to seek meaning in life, according to Thomas Pogge, a former student of Rawls and author of "John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice."

To that end, he postulated that a society would be fair if everyone involved agreed on the system before they knew exactly what their role would be.

His work is more complicated than that. But it is the basis for Rawls' political philosophy, and why he has been hailed as the most important liberal political philosopher of the 20th century. He taught at Cornell, MIT, and Harvard, spending more than 30 years at the latter.

Although Rawls worked on his theories throughout the 1950s and '60s, his first book, "A Theory of Justice," was released in late 1971, during a year of civil unrest where America's social institutions were under a magnifying glass. The Vietnam War was still raging with almost no public support, and the civil-rights movement was fighting for racial equality.

Into that storm stepped Rawls.