Social contract in Rawls’ political liberalism

Abstract

The relevance of John Rawls’ thought in the political philosophy of our time is due, among other reasons, to the fact that it includes the two types of justifications currently in vogue in any constitutional democratic regime. The evolution of his contractual theory represents exemplarily the two possible uses of the social contract as political legitimation. Our first intention in this paper is to underline the contrast between both uses, and then analyse the difficulties entailed by the merely “political” use of the contract method that Rawls defends in his latest works.