Rawlsian liberalism in context

An excerpt from Katrina Forrester's new book In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, which is already giving philosophers indigestion, as it should.   As Forrester succinctly puts it on p. ix of her book:  in the wake of Rawls, "liberal political philosophers pass ethical judgments on the world by appealing to general moral principles designed to help us make sense of what justice requires of our politics and institutions."  The problem, of course, is that only other liberal political philosophers in the academy pay these judgments any mind, and thus political philosophy has been consigned to irrelevance.   Some embrace that (recall Tim Scanlon's comment here long ago [contra Richard Posner's claim that moral philosophers don't change behavior]:  "My aims in engaging in moral philosophy are (1) to get a clearer understanding of what kind of quesiont I am thinking about in thinking about right and wrong and (2) to make up my mind what to think about it (both how to understand certain crucial terms such as rights, blame, responsibility, and so on, and which moral claims to accept.)").   But there are other approaches to theorizing.