The purpose of the present book is to defend the processual character of political liberalism. This defence will bring together the thought of the greatest political liberal, John Rawls, who was also throughout his long career at Harvard the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, and the thought of the greatest process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, who spent most of their illustrious careers at Cambridge and Harvard, in Whitehead's case,

more »

... nd at University of Chicago, in Hartshorne's case. It is unfortunate that Rawls is not better known as a process thinker; and it is equally unfortunate that Whitehead and Hartshorne are not better known as political philosophers. My aim is to remedy these defects such that scholars in philosophy, politics, theology and religious studies will be better equipped to defend political liberalism against its illiberal detractors on both the political right and left. Despite current illiberal tendencies in politics that are obvious, the twenty-first century may very well turn out to be the Rawlsian century. Samuel Freeman is one political philosopher who notes that some of the giants in political theory had their greatest influence in the century after they wrote (see Freeman 2007b: 5, 458, 472). John Locke lived in the seventeenth century, but the American state based on his views did not come into existence until the late eighteenth century; Adam Smith wrote in the late eighteenth century, but invisible hand economics did not spread across the globe until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Karl Marx wrote in the nineteenth century, but the communist revolutions fought