Abstract: There are no spaces or spheres of the personal or the private that are not also fraught with political potential and consequence. That insistent lesson from feminist thought is these days instanced, truly writes Gila Stopler, by the bafflements faced by liberal democracies confronting severe threat from illiberal ideas and incitements gathering steam under shelter of liberal basic-liberties guarantees. My questions here are whether the problem’s root in liberalism runs deeper than any ideology of a “private sphere,” and whether it is aggravated by a turn in John Rawls’s defense of liberal principles from a “comprehensive” to a “political” justificatory strategy.