Rawls’s idea of political liberalism centers on a family of reasonable, liberal political conceptions of justice, the common problems they address, and the shared features of their solutions. Rawls understands this family to harbor the most reasonable conception of political justice for a pluralistic democracy(PL 156–157); to include his offering for this title, justice as fairness, as a central and prototypical member (PL xlvi–xlvii, 167–168, 226, 451 n.27); to specify the “focal class” of conceptions capable of meeting with a reasonable overlapping consensus in such a society (PL 167–168); and to furnish the content of democracy’s public reason (PL xlvii–xlviii, 226, 450). This family of reasonable, liberal, political conceptions of justice is delimited by the intersection of these very notions: (1) political conceptions of justice; (2) liberal conceptions of justice; and (3) reasonable ones at that.

(1) Members of this family count as political conceptions of justice by adhering to the following three strictures: steering clear and being articulated independently of the contentious claims of comprehensive doctrines (i.e. wide-ranging religious, philosophical, metaphysical, and/or moral worldviews); retaining focus squarely on “the domain of the political,” or the province of matters centered around the involuntary and inescapably coercive political relationship of citizens with respect to their society’s basic structure of socioeconomic and political institutions; and formulating their positions using the shared, intuitive ideas of the democracy’s public, political culture (PL 11–15, 174–175, 376, 452–453).Although Rawls sometimes refers to the members of this family as various liberalisms, he is referring to political liberalism and its constituent reasonable, liberal political conceptions of justice rather than comprehensively liberal views (PL xxiv–xxvii, xlvi, 303, 374 n.1; LHPP 11–12).