He was certain he would die as an American soldier in the Pacific during the second World War, writes Vincent Browne. At the time he had decided to become a Protestant minister but, having survived the war, he became an academic and changed the ground rules for political debate, maybe for hundreds of years.
He was terribly shy, partly because of a speech impediment. He was kind, diffident, warm and perhaps the greatest political philosopher for more than 100 years and, in the views of many, among the world's top 10 political philosophers. He was John Rawls and he died on Sunday near Boston of heart failure, aged 82.
His seminal book, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971 and overturned the prevailing orthodoxy of political philosophy. Since then political philosophy has been largely about John Rawls.
For decades before A Theory of Justice the dominant view was that political justice was to be found in the greatest good for the greatest number. Rawls challenged that, pointing out how this disrespected the rights and concerns of minorities.
Instead he proposed two principles of justice: one a system of basic liberties that could not be bartered away in the interests of a common good; the other what he called the "difference principle", by which he meant, ambiguously, that social and economic inequalities were permissible only where they promoted the well-being of the least advantaged in society.
It was regarded by some as an egalitarian recipe, by others as allowing for too great inequalities on the grounds of financial incentives; the latter point being that huge inequalities could be justified on the basis of promoting the interests of the least advantaged, for instance, by being seen to promote employment. Rawls himself contested this latter interpretation.
But it was the way he sought to formulate principles of justice that was, for many, the most intriguing.
In a pluralistic modern society, where there are widely divergent concepts of what would constitute a "good life" - differences of religious and moral beliefs - and where there are widely divergent vested interests, it is difficult to formulate principles of justice that would find general acceptance. Without principles of justice that win widespread acceptance the ties that bind society together are likely to be weak.
The utilitarian principle (the greatest good for the greatest number) was seen to be inadequate, but so, too, did other notions, such as natural law theory, which eventually boiled down to "whatever you're having yourself" (this is my characterisation).
Rawls reverted to the social contract idea of the likes of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The social contract notion is a thought construct or thought experiment of a kind we regularly engage in throughout our everyday lives - what principles of justice would be all agreed upon if we assembled together at a huge conference called to agree on such principles.
The problem with traditional social contract theories, however, was that the participants in this hypothetical assembly took with them their own vested interests and their own strong moral, religious and philosophical beliefs. Therefore the old social contract theories were skewed in favour of prevailing moral and religious notions and in favour of prevailing vested interests.
To overcome this Rawls introduced the idea of what has famously become known as "the veil of ignorance", a further dimension to the social contract thought experiment. Because in devising the principles of justice the participants in assembly would not know their moral or religious views, they would be deprived of knowledge of other factors as well, such as whether they were rich or poor, male or female, young or old, intelligent or not intelligent, black or white.
The principles of justice that people would agree upon in such a situation therefore would be uninfluenced by vested interests or by particular moral or religious conceptions. Therefore, he argued, in a pluralistic modern society these principles of justice would win widespread (actually, unanimous) approval, being seen as non-partisan and non-sectarian. Thus we could all "buy into" these principles and feel bound by them.
His views were attacked on many grounds: that the social contract formulation was an implausible contrivance; that individuals in the social contract situation were shorn of their social dimension and therefore not social beings and the principles of justice emerging from such a hypothesis lacked a crucial dimension; that he offered no convincing way of resolving conflicts between the basic liberties he postulated.
These basic liberties are: political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law.
There are probably only a handful of people of this era who will be talked about in a thousand years' time. John Rawls is probably one of them.