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Communitarianism
As its name suggests, communitarianism is a broad tradition of political thought that emphasizes the moral and political value of community. Although the label is of twentieth-century vintage, contemporary communitarians often claim thinkers like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as their intellectual forebears. In the modern era, the communitarian project has included both a critique of liberal political theory as well as a critique of the practices of liberal society. Thus, for example, one aim of Hegel's communitarian philosophy was to critically respond to Kantian moral and political philosophy, and JeanJacques Rousseau's communitarian theory of politics in The Social Contract was motivated by his repulsion at eighteenth-century Europe civilization, which was becoming increasingly liberal and capitalist. More recently, in the 1980s, a new round of the liberal communitarian debate took center stage in Anglo-American political theory. In this debate, communitarian thinkers were primarily reacting against the neo-Kantian liberal political theories of philosophers like John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin. Four theorists, in particular, are associated with this recent communitarian critique of liberalism: Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor. Curiously, none of these four habitually identifies himself as “communitarian” and, moreover, their respective philosophical projects differ greatly from one another. Nevertheless, commentators have identified a similar theme in their respective works that criticizes contemporary liberal theory for neglecting the value of community.
The Communitarian Critique of Liberal Theory
Contemporary communitarians critique what they see as a politically and ethically noxious mixture of abstract rights, impartial decision procedures, and narrowly self-interested rationality that are prominent in neo-Kantian liberal theory. In their view, these features render liberal theory theoretically and morally deficient, because it is excessively, even incoherently, individualistic (or “atomistic”) and neglects the essential roles that virtue, tradition, and communal belonging play in our lives. Analyzing this critique more closely, we can identify several related criticisms.
The myth of “neutral” liberal justice. Neo-Kantian liberalism conceives of social justice as morally neutral between the diverse views of what a good human life entails which are held by the citizens of modern liberal democracies. As it is commonly put, liberalism prioritizes the “right” over the “good”: It attempts to construct a neutral or impartial framework of rights while abstaining from taking a position on the nature of the ethically good life. Liberals argue that such a framework is necessary because it ensures peaceful and fair terms of social interaction between persons who have deep disagreements about the nature of the good. The liberal state is thus an impartial umpire, enforcing individual rights but refraining from favoring one conception of the good over another. This is what makes liberal society freer and more just than nonliberal societies, in which the state bolsters one way of life at the expense of equal toleration for other ways of life.
Communitarians, however, counter that the very idea that there exists a neutral standpoint from which the right can be derived is an illusion; the right can never be prior to the good, because the function of rights is to protect certain interests (e.g., freedom of religion), which cannot be identified without an understanding of what is good for human beings (e.g., it is good for individuals to be able to choose whether and how they worship). Any scheme of rights thus always advances some conceptions of the good at the expense of others, because some conceptions will be more compatible with the scheme. For example, the liberal right to free speech supports conceptions of the good that relish the clash of ideas, but makes pursuit of the good difficult for those who believe that the censorship of certain ideas or images is morally required. As MacIntyre observes, the allegedly “neutral” starting points of neo-Kantian liberal theorizing are always liberal starting points.
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