ABSTRACT
Rawls's project in Liberalism bears certain important similarities to Hegel's in his Philosophy of Right, and it will be instructive to sketch both the commonalities and the differences between their projects. In Theory, Rawls proposed "to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract". The combination of social unity and moral pluralism captured in Liberalism's idea of overlapping consensus generalizes and carries to a higher order of abstraction the conventional idea of toleration. This chapter shows how claims about the objectionable dependence of the original position on a particular philosophy of life can be turned into the internal tension in justice as fairness — the problem in Theory's account of stability — that Liberalism aims to address. Theory presents an attractive ideal of a just society — a well-ordered, democratic society, featuring a consensus on norms of justice.
