"How persuasive is this change of mind? It is not hard to resist it. Contrary to his hopes, Rawls's new construction is more fragile than the old. A Theory of Justice presupposed a historical time and a national space, but abstracted from them to generate ostensibly timeless principles. Political Liberalism introduces history and sociology directly into its justificatory structure, but in a way that exposes rather than heals the original contradiction. For the whole book depends on the thesis that a plurality of incompatible—but reasonable—comprehensive doctrines is a permanent feature of modern societies. But Rawls offers no evidence for this claim, which he seems to think so obvious as to require none. He simply alludes to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notes the growth of toleration that followed them, and then concludes that nevertheless ‘the fact of religious division remains’. Given the relentless advance of secularization in all European societies, the fate of supernatural beliefs today tells, of course, against rather than for Rawls's assumption. Perhaps American anachronism here has misled him."
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Original Language: English
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Perry Anderson, "Designing Consensus: John Rawls" (1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Political_Liberalism
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Political Liberalism
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