Social Justice in the Liberal State

"[4] Ackerman addresses the positive case for a liberalism that glorifies neither the state bureaucracy nor the private market.

References to the sphere of relations among states are few, but the breadth of the attack on the fundamental issues of man and society is impressive.

[5] To Ackerman, liberalism is a kind of structured conversation in which verbal negotiation among those with differing visions of the good life is an alternative to the exercise of naked power.

It works, crudely, on the idea that the premises of a course of contract reasoning can be manipulated so as to yield (more or less) any conclusion that the theorist has some antecedent interest in producing.

Ackerman argues for a maximal separation doctrine in that religion does not have an appropriate place in the public realm of a liberal democracy.