Abstract
A significant amount of attention was given in English-speaking philosophy in the 1980s to a body of work called communitarianism whose essence was a radical critique of liberal individualism. The authors of this work were said to be communitarian because they believed that the interests and identities of individuals were constituted by their embeddedness in particular communities, or cultural traditions, while liberals were held to affirm the contrary: that ‘communities’ were constructed out of the independent interests and self-standing identities of individuals.1
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Notes
The main communitarian theorists and their writings are standardly held to be M. Sandel (1982), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
A. MacIntyre (1981), After Virtue (London: Duckworth)
C. Taylor (1985), Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language; 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
M. Walzer (1983), Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books)
Rawls’s book, Political Liberalism, is often appealed to in justification. In this work he denies that his theory is an elaboration of a comprehensive ideal of universal validity. It is rather the articulation of ‘fundamental ideas viewed as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society’ and hence of ideas that can be regarded as constituting our values. J. Rawls (1993), Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press), 223.
S. Mulhall and A. Swift (1996), Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), 157–64
W. Kymlicka (1990), Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 207–30.
Sandel, Liberalism, 15–24, 150, 161–5, 175–83; MacIntyre, Virtue, 103–13, 204–5; C. Taylor (1979), Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 157
Sandel, Liberalism, 49–53: Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1: 20–33; C. Taylor (1986), ‘Alternative Futures: Legitimacy, Identity and Alienation in Late Twentieth Century Canada’, in A. Cairns and C. Williams (eds), Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 211–3.
R. Nozick (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell), 3–25.
I. Kant (1965), Metaphysical Elements of Justice, tr. John Ladd (Indianopolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company), 70.
Margaret Moore in her critical study of the foundations of liberalism accepts the notion of the potentiality of a communally constituted self to adopt a reflective and critical standpoint on its community’s cultural beliefs and practices but claims that the articulation of such a position would still necessarily be only a development of the cultural tradition itself. M. Moore (1993), Foundations of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 183–8.
R. Dworkin (2011), Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
J. Searle (2002), ‘Animal Minds’, in his Consciousness and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 61–70.
J. Griffin (1986), Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
D. Parfit (1984), Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
M. Nussbaum (1993), ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’, in M. Nussbaum (ed.), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
R. Crisp and B. Hooker (eds) (2000), Well-being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
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© 2013 John Charvet
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Charvet, J. (2013). Communitarianism, Old and New. In: The Nature and Limits of Human Equality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329165_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329165_5
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