CHICAGO -- John Rawls, who died last week at the age of 82, was the most distinguished political philosopher of the 20th century. His is not a household name, in part because he disliked publicity. Yet, to a great degree, it is thanks to John Rawls that philosophy has continued to animate politics. He enters philosophy's history alongside Locke, Mill, Henry Sidgwick and Kant. One of his characteristically generous contributions was to insist on the enduring significance of the writings of these historical figures: he constantly taught them in preference to his own.

When Mr. Rawls began his career, these figures and their themes — social justice, free speech, respect for human equality, religious pluralism — were neglected in philosophy. "Logical positivism" had convinced people that there were only two things that it made sense to do: empirical research and conceptual analysis. Science did the first, philosophy the second. So moral and political philosophy became the analysis of moral and political concepts and how language conveyed them.

Mr. Rawls, however, insisted on the importance of asking the big normative questions like, What makes a society just? He used a method of justification that he associated with Socrates, Aristotle and Sidgwick. He argued that, as we set out our ethical convictions, we try to identify those that are deepest and most reliable. (His example is the belief that slavery is wrong.) We then examine these convictions using the ethical theories known to us, seeking consistency and fit in our judgments taken as a whole. Judgments sometimes yield to a convincing theory; and theories often undergo revision or rejection in the light of judgments that they fail to fit.

Mr. Rawls believed that his own writings supplied only one of the theories we should consider in such a process. But he also believed he could show that his theory was superior to some other theories that had held sway: for example, utilitarianism, understood as the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. This theory, he argued, does too little to respond to our conviction that each person's life is in certain ways inviolable. (Utilitarianism cannot rule out slavery as being unjust, only for being inefficient.)

Beginning from this idea about each person's inviolability, Mr. Rawls invented the famous thought experiment called the "original position," which represents people choosing principles of justice for the society in which they will live. In the experiment, these people know that they have interests and plans, but they are behind a "veil of ignorance," not permitted to know their class, race, sex, religion or the precise content of their plans of life.

Mr. Rawls argues that, under these conditions, they will give priority to a group of traditional religious and political liberties on a basis of equality for all citizens. In the economic sphere they will permit inequalities, but only when those raise the position of the least well off. "Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view," says the last sentence of "A Theory of Justice," published in 1971.

These famous arguments underwent some revision over time. Mr. Rawls focused increasingly on the issue of religious pluralism, redesigning the theory to show that it could offer principles that all the major religions, and nonreligious people, could accept as a basis for life together in a pluralistic society. Although he seemed to lose interest in defending his economic principles against the criticism they increasingly received — as the Great Society yielded to a new era in which these principles seemed increasingly radical — he did insist that the American system of campaign financing was distorting the right to vote.

Another change was Mr. Rawls's growing interest in justice for women. Unlike some of his younger colleagues — Robert Nozick, for example, who also died this year, a man of constantly surprising perceptions — Mr. Rawls had, at first, little sense of the goals for which feminists were striving. But he understood that many of the proposed changes were just, and he worked constantly to integrate a concern for women's equality into his work.

Although he never questioned the naturalness, in some sense, of the traditional nuclear family, he did much to respond to feminist criticisms, acknowledging that families as we know them are often unjust to women. In his writings on international justice, he repeatedly underlined the importance of women's equal opportunity as a key to global justice.

John Rawls has sometimes been portrayed as a kind of natural saint, who effortlessly put others first. I believe the reality was more complicated and more admirable than that: he had a keen sense of the emotions that make for injustice, yet waged a constant struggle for justice. I recall a conversation with him about Wagner's "Tristan," when I was a young faculty member. I made some Nietzschean jibes about the otherworldliness of Wagnerian passion and how silly it all was. Mr. Rawls, with sudden intensity, said to me that I must not make a joke about this. Wagner was absolutely wonderful and therefore extremely dangerous. You had to see the danger, he said, to comprehend how bad it would be to be seduced by that picture of life, with no vision of the general good.

America has increasingly moved away from John Rawls. Inequalities have grown, and the electorate seems largely indifferent to them. But our own greed and partiality can hardly diminish the virtues of his distinguished work. Perhaps we can regard the occasion of his death as a challenge to look into ourselves and identify the roots of those selfish passions that eclipse, so much of the time, the vision of the general good. Purity of heart would be to see clearly what has blocked that vision and to act with grace and self-command toward the general good.

Martha Nussbaum is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

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