 The contemporary civic republican interpretation carries with it what could be seen as a significant drawback, namely, that it reduces the distance between classical republicanism and the mainstream liberal tradition. At one level, this should surprise no one. After all, classical republicans and classical liberals shared many political commitments (constitutionalism and the rule of law, for example), and many figures are regarded as central to both traditions (Montesquieu, for example). The difficulty arises, however, from the suggestion that on the new instrumental interpretation, republicanism for all intents and purposes collapses into liberalism (Patten 1996; Larmore 2001). Indeed, at one point in his Political Liberalism, Rawls explicitly states that his theory has “no fundamental opposition” with a non-perfectionist, instrumental interpretation of republicanism (1993, 205). What then is the advantage of civic republicanism over mainstream liberalism (Herzog 1986; Goodin 2003; Brennan and Lomasky 2006)?