John Rawls was, by any reasonable standard, the most influential political theorist of the twentieth century. Despite this status, he maintained an uncommon humility, as his sole autobiographical statement, quoted in Steve Pyke's Philosophers (1995), demonstrates:

From the beginning of my study of philosophy in my late teens I have been concerned with moral questions and the religious and philosophical basis on which they might be answered. Three years spent in the U.S. Army in World War II led me to be concerned with political questions. Around 1950 I started to write a book on justice, which I eventually completed.

The "book on justice" is his seminal A Theory of Justice (1971), which Robert Nozick--who disagreed strongly with its conclusions--called "a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill, if then." Jonathan Wolff has...