THE MOVE TO POLITICAL LIBERALISM

A different form of particularist argument for liberal states is offered by those who defend political liberalism. They too ground their case for the liberal state on features of existing societies – in this case, the norms that characterize the public political culture of such societies and the standards of political justification they believe those norms imply. The foremost advocate of this strategy is John Rawls, and I shall concentrate on the argument advanced in his book Political Liberalism. To understand that argument, however, it will be helpful first to examine the relation between it and his earlier A Theory of Justice.

Though some readers view the explicitly particularist aims of Political Liberalism as a significant departure from the position advanced in Theory, that view should not be overstressed. Though the later book more forthrightly declares that its argument is aimed at liberal pluralistic societies, the argument of Theory had similarly relied heavily on the considered judgments of the liberal citizens to whom it was addressed, and in an essay appearing shortly after Theory Rawls acknowledged that its argument presupposed certain liberal ideals. Furthermore, what has clearly not changed between the two books is the conception of the liberal state Rawls defends. That conception asserts that deliberation over fundamental political matters should exclude substantive ideas of the good and comprehensive frameworks of value of the sort the critic wishes to introduce.