Political liberalism is a distinctive account of the normative foundations of liberal institutions and practices, developed by John Rawls and others in the final decades of the twentieth century. It remains a fairly active but hardly dominant research program in political philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Its most complete and influential statement is to be found in the second edition of Rawls’s second book, Political Liberalism (1994), and in a few preceding and subsequent works by Rawls (2001a; 2001b).