ABSTRACT. Rawls addresses in Political Liberalism the idea of the citizen as a moral person with equal claims to participate in the political processes of collective decision making, giving rise to the problem of public justification. The kind of redistribution needed in order to achieve social justice in the Rawlsian sense can be effected only by a much more developed and powerful state than would seem acceptable to those liberals who see strong reasons to improve rather strict limits on the range of legitimate state action.