John Rawls is widely considered one of — if not the  — most influential American philosophers. Rawls’s work, and work on his work, has been cited thousands of times. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton (one of the few commendable decisions Clinton ever made), and there is a veritable library’s worth of introductory guides and YouTube explainers on his work.

Rawls’s academic influence has been so pronounced that political philosophers across the spectrum have either written long critiques of his work or tried to show how, say, Marxism is compatible with his theory of justice as fairness. This, even though Rawls was legendarily modest, and not a particularly good writer — not to mention that Rawls’s thinking never obtained the interdisciplinary sweep of his libertarian rival Robert Nozick or contemporary political philosophers like Martha Nussbaum or Jürgen Habermas.

Despite these achievements, Rawls is an odd and even, in a way, tragic figure. For a long time, his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, was rather crudely praised or condemned as offering the most systematic defense of the mid-twentieth-century liberal welfare state. While this seriously understated his radicalism, the irony is that even this moderate welfarism was being rolled back by the time Rawls published Theory in 1971.