1. Temporary Lecturer J.H.S.T. Jayamaha Department of Political Science, University of Peradeniya John Rawls’s Contribution to the Modern Political Philosophy Abstract John Rawls is the best-known political philosopher in the modern period. The purpose of this article is to determine John Rawls’s contribution to modern political philosophy. This article opens with a biography of Rawls. From thereon, it introduces and discusses John Rawls’s four roles of political philosophy, and this article provides an introduction to Rawls’s writings in political philosophy. It provides an exposition on the fundamental ideas of Rawls’s ‘Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993)’, and at the end of this article, discussed the basic ideas of ‘Law of people’ (1999). Key Words: Political Philosophy/ Social Justice/ Liberalism 1. Life Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a prominent lawyer; his mother was a chapter president of the League of Women Voters. Rawls studied at Princeton and Cornell, 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 wrote an intensely religious senior thesis (BI) and had considered studying for the priesthood. Yet Rawls lost his Christian faith as an infantryman in World War II 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 draft for the Vietnam war because it discriminated against black and poor Americans. The Vietnam conflict impelled Rawls to analyze the defects in the American political system that led it to prosecute