The contrast between deliberative democracy, as outlined in the preceding, and the liberal conception of public dialogue can be well captured from the standpoint of John Rawls’s idea of “public reason.” Rawls specifies this principle as follows: “In a democratic society public reason is the reason of equal citizens who, as a collective body, exercise final political and coercive power over one another in enacting laws and in amending the constitution. The first point is that the limits imposed by public reason do not apply to all political questions but only to those involving what we may call ‘constitutional essentials’ and questions of basic justice.... This means that political values alone are to settle such fundamental questions as: who has the right to vote, or what religions are to be tolerated, or who is to be assured fair equality of opportunity, or to hold property.”