Abstract:
Rawls justified the priority of liberty by the contract procedure in the book A Theory of Justice, and he considered this principle as a universal rule that applies to all societies.Under criticism, Rawls realized that the design of his contract theory contained a kind of Kantian comprehensive doctrine and a liberal personality ideal.To alleviate suspicion of circular reasoning, he turned from moral constructivism to political constructivism.In his book Political Liberalism, Rawls retreated to political affairs from moral affairs.He continued to defend liberal values with concepts such as public reason and overlapping consensus.Public reason is equivalent to reciprocity, but the criterion of reciprocity without metaphysics does not necessarily lead to liberalism.So Rawls had to take the concept of legitimacy further, he thus turned to the political realities of American society to defend the ideal of liberal values.In his later work The Law of Peoples，Rawls even advocated the use of force in order to spread liberalism around the whole world.This actually declared the failure of the theoretical construction.Rawls’s retreat to theoretical construction shows that liberalism as a value cannot be universally justified, it is not a universal value as he initially thought, but a special ideology applicable to a certain time and place.
