[Book Review] Why Political Liberalism?

Abstract

Paul Weithman’s Why Political Liberalism? attempts to determine why the solution to the stability problem from part III of A Theory of Justice was thought to fail. As its title suggests, Weithman’s book attempts to explain why “Rawls rebuilt his cathedral,” i.e., why he made the so-called political turn over the course of the 1980s, leading to the publication of Political Liberalism in 1993 (WPL, 16). The short and familiar answer is, of course, “stability.” But Weithman believes that the key ideas presupposed by this answer – i.e., the nature of the problem along with the particular arguments addressing it in both major texts – have not been understood as well as we might think.