Abstract
1989 was an outstanding year for the spread of liberty. In an article published during the summer, Francis Fukuyama comments on this new, remarkable victory of liberal democracy, and predicts "the End of History" as its consequence. Not only has his thesis been abruptly challenged in the following decades, empirically, but the idealistic belief in an ideological consensus was also strongly undermined by the persisting variability of the notion of liberty: no more than before did a monolithical discourse on liberty emerge during the 20th century.
Although one of its greatest political philosophers, Rawls, did not provide any explicit general definition of the concept, the fact that he attributes inalienability to a set of "basic liberties" in his first principle is noteworthy. By assuming that "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others" (including political liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought), Rawls ensures that citizens will develop the needed moral powers to build a just society, and more importantly that their specific conception of justice will not collapse into general conceptions of the good.
