Epilogue: Civility and Community

Abstract

The most basic principle in the theory we have been developing is an individualistic one. It requires that the material conditions for autonomy be secured for all persons. The priority of this principle rests upon the claim that the value of personal autonomy is presupposed in any attempt to govern the relations among persons by appeal to reasons embodied in a common discourse. Political relations are to be regulated by principles that all can recognise as imposing justifiable restrictions upon their liberty, in order that the conditions of liberty may be enjoyed by all. No significance, however, is attached to the goals of the political community itself. Such common goals as there are emerge from the process by which individuals form their own social identity and define their own projects and plans. No clearer example of this restricted notion of community could be found than in the place given to the notion of community within the structure of democratic control that we have defined for social policy. Within that structure community is protected only in the interstices of a rights-constrained majoritarian procedure. The concept of community did not determine our proposed structure of democratic control, except to require that some room be left for local loyalties and ties.