ABSTRACT
There are two ways to understand Political Liberalism. It might be seen as a remedy to the problem (discussed in the final section of Chapter 7) that Rawls encounters with the argument for the stability of a well-ordered society of justice as fairness. Rawls discusses the remedial task of Political Liberalism in the first Introduction:
I will discuss how the main ideas of Political Liberalism remedy the problems Rawls encounters in Part III of A Theory of Justice. But Political Liberalism also can be understood independently of Theory and as responding to different problems. Taken on its own terms, Political Liberalism responds to two main questions, one regarding the practical possibility of a well-ordered liberal society, and the other the conditions of the legitimacy of the exercise of political power in a liberal society. Legitimacy is not a concept that Rawls uses in A Theory of Justice. It is a different concept than justice, and it becomes
especially important under non-ideal conditions in societies where justice as fairness is not uniformly applied.
