Liberalism as a doctrine of public and private: Locke, Mill and Rawls

Abstract

This article aims to think the relationship between public and private space from the standpoint of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, in order to show the ambivalence of the value of citizens as members of a liberal community. Since Locke, there is a principle that, in the typically English bourgeois cultural milieu, regulates social laws and behaviors, by praising the adequation of practices of the private forum to those of the public forum. Thus, the basis for thinking about legislation, ethics, and morals are established. This trend of thought culminates in significant variations which, however, always express the dualism of external / internal that is supposedly inherent to ordinary life. I will treat the basic genealogy of the liberal institutional conditions of the Western traditional democratic cultures, whose notion of citizenship is based on the relationship between public and private.