Describe main features of political liberalism.

John Rawl's Political Liberalism (1993) marked an important new development in liberal theory. Other conceptions of liberalism—such as the perfectionist and autonomy-based theory of Joseph Raz (1986)—offer comprehensive philosophies of life, which include ideals of personal character, friendship, and association. By contrast, political liberalism is a moral conception concerned only with the basic structure of a society, and presented as a view that is independent of any comprehensive doctrine. Its fundamental terms—such as the idea of individuals as free and equal citizens—are derived from the public political culture of a liberal democracy. Political liberalism recommends its principles as a way of fairly resolving disagreements in a pluralistic society; it does not expect free and equal citizens to agree on one comprehensive conception. Political liberalism instead locates an overlapping consensus in the midst of reasonable pluralism. Like liberalism itself, political liberalism is a family of conceptions, which share the aim of finding fair terms of social cooperation among free and equal members of a democratic society.