In the latter part of the twentieth century, a number of political theorists began to argue that “traditional” conceptions of liberalism – such as those offered by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill – were no longer able to respond satisfactorily to the challenges associated with securing justice amidst the increasing plurality of competing, conflicting, and often incommensurable and irreconcilable beliefs present in contemporary constitutional democracies. Effectively addressing those challenges, it was suggested, would require (1) a redrawing of the boundaries of liberal concern so as to better distinguish between matters of public and private interest – between the political and the nonpolitical; and (2) a focus on securing a consensus on a framework for regulating and mediating only the former. The school of thought associated with this line of argument has come to be known as political liberalism, the most famous (contemporary) proponent of which is John Rawls,...
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PatrickYoung, S. (2011). Political Liberalism. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_12
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