It is not surprising, for example, that judges appeal to his texts, when justifying a sentence, in order to substantiate the decision taken. Despite this rather discreet public profile, in the North American legal world his thesis on justice is well known and used repeatedly. Rawls was never an intellectual avant la lettre he almost never intervened in the public sphere in order to channel an opinion or defended a controversial position. Rawls’s work, however, has not been influential only in the academic field. Later, his administrators would still be in charge of publishing the notes that the philosopher had used to teach his classes of History of Moral and Political Philosophy at Harvard University, whilst they also published his first youth texts. An influence that became even broader and deeper with the publication of Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), the other books that Rawls published in his lifetime. Therefore, the influence of this work on current political thought, especially in the academic field, is an undoubted fact.

Cohen wrote that «at most two books in the history of Western political philosophy have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice: Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan». At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Gerald A. In the mid-1970s, Robert Nozick argued that «today, those who do political philosophy have to work according to Rawls’s theory or explain why they don’t».

Many can consider that the publication of A Theory of Justice -his opus magnum- turned him into a classic of modern political thinking. John Rawls (1921-2002) is one of the most important political philosophers of the contemporary ages.

A theory of justice book