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35 Pol. Theory 5 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/ptxa35 and id is 1 raw text is: Political Theory IFebruar 2007 5-28 © 2007 Sage Publications Back toward a http:/t.sagp~ub_~n.com Comprehensive Liberalism? http://nli nesagepub.com Justice as Fairness, Gender, and Families Ruth Abbey University of Notre Dame, Indiana This article examines the attempts by John Rawls in the works published after Political Liberalism to engage with some of the feminist responses to his work. Rawls goes a long way toward addressing some of the major feminist- liberal concerns. Yet this has the unintended consequence of pushing justice as fairness in the direction of a more comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, form of liberalism. This does not seem to be a problem peculiar to Rawls: rather, any form of liberalism hospitable to feminist concerns must be, at the very least, a partly comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, doctrine. Keywords: Rawls; feminism; political liberalism; comprehensive liberalism; justice as fairness Introduction One of the notable developments within feminist political theory over the last decade and a half has been the increasing willingness of some fem- inist thinkers to consider the uses, rather than just the disadvantages, of lib- eralism for feminism.1 This article examines the contributions of John Rawls to this rapprochement between feminism and liberalism, for in the works published after Political Liberalism (PL), Rawls engaged at greater length with some of the feminist responses to his work than he had hitherto. In The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (IPRR) and Justice as Fairness: Author's Note: Thanks are owed to Eileen Hunt Botting, Clare Chambers, Mary Dietz, lain McKenzie, Sasha Pavkovic, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for helping to fund this work. 5