For Nussbaum, perfectionist liberalism "is a species of a genus of liberal views that might be called “comprehensive liberalisms”" as opposed to "political" or "public" liberalisms. All perfectionist liberalisms are therefore comprehensive while not all comprehensive liberalisms are perfectionist. An eminent case of a comprehensive, yet non-perfectionist liberal theory is Lockean libertarianism, which is built on the ideal of self-ownership rather than on a conception of the good life. For Nussbaum "liberalisms that base political principles on some comprehensive doctrine about human life" cover "not only the political domain but also the domain of human conduct generally". Furthermore, they depart from non-comprehensive (i.e. political or public reason) liberalism in grounding their political principles in a theory of the good (life), while the latter takes an allegedly "neutral" stance which is supposed to be compatible with all kinds of (reasonable) theories of the good (life).
