"Political liberalism and the law of peoples" by John Rawls,1993

Political Liberalism: Legitimacy and Stability within a Liberal Society

In a free society citizens will have disparate worldviews. They will believe in different religions or none at all; they will have differing conceptions of right and wrong; they will value various pursuits and forms of interpersonal relations. A democratic citizenry will have contrary commitments, yet in any country there can only be one law. The law must either establish a national church, or not; women must either have equal rights, or not; abortion and gay marriage must either be permissible under the constitution, or not; the economy must be set up in one way or another.

Rawls holds that the need to impose a unified law on a diverse citizenry raises two fundamental issues. The first is the issue of legitimacy: the legitimate use of coercive political power. In a democracy political power is always the power of the people as a collective body. How can it be legitimate for a democratic people to coerce all citizens to follow just one law, given that citizens will inevitably hold to different worldviews? The second issue is the issue of stability, which looks at political power from the receiving end. Why would a citizen willingly obey the law if it is imposed on her by a collective body many of whose members have beliefs and values quite dissimilar to her own? Yet unless most citizens willingly obey the law, no social order can be stable for long.

Rawls addresses these issues of legitimacy and stability within his theory of political liberalism. Political liberalism is not yet Rawls's theory of justice (justice as fairness). Political liberalism answers the conceptually prior questions of legitimacy and stability, thereby establishing the setting and starting points for justice as fairness.
..

"A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls,1971

His theory of justice as fairness envisions a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights cooperating within an egalitarian economic system.
His account of political liberalism addresses the legitimate use of political power in a democracy, aiming to show how enduring unity may be achieved despite the diversity of worldviews that free institutions allow.
His writings on the law of peoples extend these theories to liberal foreign policy, with the goal of imagining how a peaceful and tolerant international order might be possible.
..
Rawls was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother a chapter president of the League of Women Voters. Rawls studied at Princeton, where he was influenced by Wittgenstein's student Norman Malcolm; and at Oxford, where he worked with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin, and Stuart Hampshire. His first professorial appointments were at Cornell and MIT. In 1962 Rawls joined the faculty at Harvard, where he taught for more than thirty years.
.
Rawls's adult life was a scholarly one: its major events occurred within his writings. The exceptions were two wars. As a college student Rawls had considered studying for the priesthood; as an infantryman in the Pacific in World War II he lost his Christian faith on seeing the capriciousness of death in combat and learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. Then in the 1960s Rawls spoke out against the US involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam conflict impelled Rawls to analyze the defects in the American political system that led it to prosecute so ruthlessly what he saw as an unjust war, and to consider how citizens could conscientiously resist their government's aggressive policies.
.
Rawls's most significant achievement is his theory of a just liberal society, called justice as fairness.
Rawls first set out justice as fairness in systematic detail in his 1971 book :
A Theory of Justice.
Rawls continued to rework justice as fairness throughout his life, restating the theory in :
Political Liberalism (1993),
The Law of Peoples (1999), and
Justice as Fairness (2001).
.
Those interested in the evolution of justice as fairness from 1971 onwards should consult Freeman (2007). This entry reflects Rawls's final statement of his views on justice as fairness, as well as on political liberalism and on the law of peoples.
..