Political Liberalism: Legitimacy and Stability within a Liberal Society
In a free society citizens will have disparate worldviews. They will believe in different religions or none at all; they will have differing conceptions of right and wrong; they will value various pursuits and forms of interpersonal relations. A democratic citizenry will have contrary commitments, yet in any country there can only be one law. The law must either establish a national church, or not; women must either have equal rights, or not; abortion and gay marriage must either be permissible under the constitution, or not; the economy must be set up in one way or another.
Rawls holds that the need to impose a unified law on a diverse citizenry raises two fundamental issues. The first is the issue of legitimacy: the legitimate use of coercive political power. In a democracy political power is always the power of the people as a collective body. How can it be legitimate for a democratic people to coerce all citizens to follow just one law, given that citizens will inevitably hold to different worldviews? The second issue is the issue of stability, which looks at political power from the receiving end. Why would a citizen willingly obey the law if it is imposed on her by a collective body many of whose members have beliefs and values quite dissimilar to her own? Yet unless most citizens willingly obey the law, no social order can be stable for long.
Rawls addresses these issues of legitimacy and stability within his theory of political liberalism. Political liberalism is not yet Rawls's theory of justice (justice as fairness). Political liberalism answers the conceptually prior questions of legitimacy and stability, thereby establishing the setting and starting points for justice as fairness.
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