Lost in translation: The normative and the historical

I am intrigued by the use of the words ‘embedded’ and ‘capacity’ as they appear in what I take to be the strategy of Sovereignty Across Generations where these words are used to make what is evidently implicit within John Rawls’s political liberalism explicit, that is, a normative account of ‘the justice and legitimacy of political orders’. If I am correct about this strategy, my question is quite simple: is something lost in translation in this transition from Rawls’s more historical to this normative orientation? I conclude with a positive comment on the potential that a theory of temporality has for the development of a notion of political self-constitution as it pertains to the transition from ethnos to demos.