Why Political Liberalism?

This book offers a fresh, rigorous and compelling interpretation of John Rawls's reasons for taking his so-called "political turn". The book takes Rawls at his word that justice as fairness was recast as a form of political liberalism because of inconsistencies Rawls found in his early treatment of social stability. The book argues that those inconsistencies are best seen by identifying one of the threats to stability with which the early Rawls was concerned: the generalized prisoner's dilemma. Showing how the Rawls of A Theory of Justice tried to avert that threat shows that the much-neglected third part of that book is of considerably greater philosophical interest than is generally appreciated. The book painstakingly reconstructs Rawls's attempts to show that a just society would stable, and just as carefully shows why Rawls came to think those arguments were inconsistent with other parts of his theory. The book then shows that the changes Rawls introduced into his view between Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism result from his attempt to remove the inconsistency and show that the hazard of the generalized prisoner's dilemma can be averted after all. Recovering Rawls's two treatments of stability helps to answer contested questions about the role of the original position and the foundations of justice of fairness.