Political Liberalism without a Theory of Justice?

Abstract

If John Rawls's theory of political liberalism is to provide practical guidance for the public reasoning of democratic citizens and officials, it must accommodate not only their divergent religious and philosophical views, but also their competing conceptions of justice. This means that political liberalism should not be understood simply as an extension or correction of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. In this paper, I propose an account of political liberalism's structure which is independent of Rawls's specific account of justice and which organizes the basic ideas of political liberalism by means of a six-step sequence.