[LibWhacker]

The difference is that Rawls posits no possibility of any transcendent morality that would reward individual behaviour -- that is he is fundamentally a collectivist and anti-Lockean.

What is his standing now amongst academic philosophers? I know his Theory of Justice was all the rage when it was first published, but I hear much less of Rawls nowadays.

[CatoRenasci]

I'm long out of academia, but as far as I know, he's still widely read (saw the book in the Columbia bookstore for a course last fall). At the least he's still the starting position for modern treatments of liberalism as political philosophy.