1 Global Justice and Two Kinds of Liberalism

In a recent article, Nagel (2005) distinguishes between ‘political ’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ approaches to global justice. He points to Rawls’s view as a prime example of an account of global justice that is political in this sense. Rawls (1993) also describes his view as political, but he does so in reference to a slightly different distinction between ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive ’ versions of liberalism. There are thus at least two senses in which a liberal theory can be political. The first aim of this paper is to explore the differences between these two senses. The second aim is to assess whether it is desirable for liberal theory to be political in Nagel’s sense. My arguments endorse Nagel’s political approach, while rejecting his ‘strong statism ’ (Cohen and Sabel 2006). The paper proceeds in four sections: (i) Nagel’s notion of ‘political’, (ii) Rawls’s notion of ‘political’, (iii) the relationship between the two senses, and (iv) resisting Nagel’s conclusions