The Problem of Community

Abstract

Both freedom and equality give expression to the demand that community rests on a voluntary basis—freedom being set in juxtaposition to a form of organization that relies heavily on coercion and equality being in set in juxtaposition to a form of order in which various arbitrary restrictions and exclusions are incorporated. The difficulty in a reliance on freedom and equality is to be found in the failure to specify the anarchic effects of these values, unless the principles in terms of which they are to be limited are made equally clear. One cannot take them out of the social context in which man finds himself—always and eternally. For this social context will always impose limitations on the operation of freedom and equality. I have tried to show the grievous limitations of any reliance on these values in the abstract in my paper on Goldwater (who seems to think a meaningful political philosophy can be built around the concept of “freedom”) and Tannenbaum (who makes a similar mistake with regard to the concept of “equality”). The deficiency of this abstract monism has become most clear—and tragically so—in the encounter of the liberal tradition with world politics.