Egalitarian liberals are liberals who believe that liberalism—against its classical formulations—carries within itself coercively backed guarantees against inequalities. . . . The liberal commitment to equal freedom, on its modern reformulation, requires not only equality of status. This commitment also allows, indeed requires, that the liberal state act to rectify inequalities in the worth of people's liberties—at least where those inequalities become great enough to threaten people's status as political equals. The worth of people's liberties is now understood to be connected in important ways to those people's ability to command resources. The main thrust of the liberal research agenda for the past thirty years has been to demonstrate that a response to concerns about inequalities in the worth of liberties can be built into liberal theory at the level of justice. In addition to mandating equality of status between citizens, liberal theory is now said to generate far more ambitious principles. These principles require that the state seek to rectify an ever expanding array of inequalities in people's actual life prospects, especially inequalities that result from unchosen circumstances such as differences in people's natural talents or their social starting places. John Rawls's famous "difference principle," which sees liberal justice as requiring that social inequalities be arranged so as to benefit the least well-off members of society—is a paradigm expression of this feature of egalitarian liberalism.
(John Tomasi, "Should Political Liberals Be Compassionate Conservatives? Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative," Social Philosophy & Policy 21 [winter 2004]: 322-45, at 341 [italics in original; footnote omitted])