Partisan or liberal?

N. Rescher,Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 166, cited in White at 167. Original emphasis. It is very odd, therefore, to find the public role of Christian natural law theory defended in the final chapter on the grounds that “the neo-natural law conception of the basic good of religion eschews any religious or theological orientation [displaying] much the same sort of neutrality towards religious matters characteristic of both political and perfectionist liberalism” (at 146). There is something here I haven't understood. W. Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality”,Ethics 99 (1989), 883–905, at 893. George Sher in his recentBeyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge: University Press, 1997) — probably the most sophisticated discussion of neutrality to date — also discusses whether and how liberal neutrality might be justified by an appeal to personal autonomy. J. Rawls,Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia, 1993), 197. Supra n.4,J. Rawls,Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia, 1993), 197 at 3–4. J. Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus”,Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987), 1–25, at 8. K. Baynes, “Constructivism and Practical Reason in Rawls”,Analyse & Kritik 14 (1992), 18–32, at 30. My interpretation of Rawls owes much to Baynes's account.