Defending the liberal community

Abstract

Recent writing in Anglo-American analytical political philosophy has been dominated by the debate between liberals and their communitarian critics. During the first phase of this discussion in the early 198Os, the two camps were presented as being diametrically opposed. Liberals responded to the pluralism and individualism of modern societies by seeking to devise a set of abstract and universal rules capable of regulating social interaction in an equal and even handed manner that was neutral between the diverse aspirations of different groups and persons. Justice was a matter of fairness rather than the promotion of a particular conception of the good life. Communitarians, in contrast, disputed the coherence of the liberal attempt to separate notions of the right from conceptions of the good. They argued that our understanding of justice follows from the values we derive from membership of a particular social order and the form of life it embodies. These two ways of characterising the nature of our moral and political principles were held to have important social and political consequences. Communitarians contended that whereas the abstraction of liberal theorising threatened to plunge modern societies into an anemic anarchy characterised by the clash of asocial, atomistic, egoists, its aspiration towards universality, far from promoting diversity, led to the imposition of a uniform pattern of behaviour upon all spheres of life. Liberals, in their turn, countered that communitarianism was inherently reactionary and even totalitarian in its implications. In its relativist versions, they contended, communitarianism appeared to justify the right of a self-styled moral majority to outlaw minority practices, such as homosexuality, for no better reason than that a number of people find them distasteful. In its more rationalist versions, the communitarian call for the complete subordination of personal interests to the good of the community legitimised a tutelary state of awesome power. In response to these charges and counter-charges the debate now seems to have entered a second phase, with liberals and communitarians seeking to escape the criticisms each has made of the other by injecting a measure of the rival theory