"Political Liberalism, as most of its reviewers have found, is a disappointing book. Its formal organization is poor, still bearing too many traces of the discrete lectures out of which it has been assembled, with a high rate of repetition and lack of independent direction. It belongs with that peculiar sub-set of books in which an author sets out to correct or defend a celebrated earlier work, and succeeds only in producing an arid shadow of it – Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge or Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? are companion cases that come to mind. The experience of reading it is one of regret. The imperfect dignity of A Theory of Justice remains. [...] The contradiction between the postulates of consensus, to which Rawls continually subscribes, and the realities of dissensus, to which his best impulses belong, is incurable. [...] If the modern state is as described, deep in its democratic convictions and traditions, how could there possibly be a deadlock over the realization of freedom and equality for its citizens? The two halves of the statement fall apart. If he had pursued the logic of the second, rather than the will-o'-the-wisp of the first, becoming less congenial to the state and more attentive to the impasse, Rawls would have written a better book. The needed sequel to his major work had another title – A Theory of Injustice."