Thomas Pogge (b. 1953) is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. He wrote his dissertation at Harvard under the direction of Rawls, and became a close friend, as well as interpreter and critic of Rawls’s work. Pogge is very prolific, and his work spans many areas of political philosophy, with an emphasis on issues of global justice.

Pogge’s first book was Realizing Rawls (1989), in which he argues that Rawls’s “focus on the basic structure, combined with the priority concern for the least advantaged, makes Rawls a radical thinker” (Pogge 1989, 9). In the first part, he offers an interpretation of justice as fairness that responds to critics Nozick and Sandel. In the second part, he provides a reconstruction and defense of the two principles of justice, while offering criticisms of his own. For example, he doubts that Rawls adequately justified his claim that the lexical priority of the first principle over the second necessarily provides guidance for the relative urgency of reforms in nonideal conditions, and he rejects Rawls’s argument that the difference principle should not be formally incorporated into a just society’s constitution. The third part of the book represents the first step of an ambitious project to extend justice as fairness to apply to the global order. Pogge rejects “the dogma of absolute sovereignty, the belief that a juridical state (as distinct from a lawless state of nature) presupposes an authority of last resort” (Pogge 1989, 216). Instead, he suggests a model analogous to federalism, in which authority is dispersed among different levels.