ABSTRACT
Political liberalism and the strand of liberal egalitarianism had made some progress so that it was possible to talk about rights and to think that they were essential for a democratic foundation for education. Liberal philosophy of education was at its peak also with R. S. Peters at the London Institute of Education and Israel Scheffler at Harvard. The fact is that political liberalism and egalitarianism emerged at a time of great historical stability in the post-war West. Forrester also describes the collapse of social liberalism in the 1970s and the bad timing of Rawls’ programme: The publication of his grand philosophical defense of the welfare state came on the eve of its crisis: to some it looked as if it hailed from a bygone era, the last gasp of dying ideology. The success of Rawls’s theory in the coming decades only deepened its untimeliness: the more welfarism fractured in politics, the more entrenched Rawls’s arguments became in political philosophy.
