Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2006
John Rawls is the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and from his commanding position exerted a decisive influence on his profession. Through his scholarship and teaching he played a major role in establishing the now-dominant understanding of liberalism in the academy and, more generally, of the method and purpose of the philosophical study of politics.Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution ([email protected]). He is the editor of the companion volumes Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004) and Varieties of Progressivism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004).This essay weaves together (and in places corrects) the argument of “John Rawls and the Liberal Faith,” in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 60–69, and “The Academic Liberal,” in The Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 2002.