Critical liberalism grows out of a theory of obligation that is rooted in the structural origins of groups rather than in the cultural difference of groups. The normative standing of indigenous peoples, other ethnic minorities, African Americans, women, immigrants, and so on depends not on who they are, or on the extent to which they command human attachment, but on the historical record of exclusion and selective inclusion through which they have been constituted. The responsibility of states lies in the fact that states themselves have forged social groups, and the political identities they anchor, by using such markers as cultural practices, phenotypical traits, biological sex, sexuality, property ownership, and wealth to organize access to power and delimit the boundaries of citizenship.

A structural theory of obligation locates critical liberalism along three normative dimensions, generating a distinctive intervention into debates regarding particular versus universal theories of justice, procedural versus substantive conceptions of the good, and individual versus collective rights. Viewed through the constructivist lens, these debates yield a framework of political claim making, a mechanism of democratic legitimation, and a conception of the subject of rights. Moving from this level of abstraction to the specific, critical liberalism argues for establishing the standing of particular claims through the language of structural injustice rather than cultural difference, contestation over consensus as a source of liberal democratic legitimacy, and the category of membership rights as a conceptual refinement of the proper subject of rights.