Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- 25 Capabilities
- 26 Care
- 27 Catholicism
- 28 Chain connection
- 29 Circumstances of justice
- 30 Citizen
- 31 Civic humanism
- 32 Civic republicanism
- 33 Civil disobedience
- 34 Close-knitness
- 35 Cohen
- 36 Cohen, Joshua
- 37 Common good idea of justice
- 38 Communitarianism
- 39 Comprehensive doctrine
- 40 Conception of the good
- 41 Congruence
- 42 Conscientious refusal
- 43 Constitution and constitutional essentials
- 44 Constitutional consensus
- 45 Constructivism: Kantian/political
- 46 Cooperation and coordination
- 47 Cosmopolitanism
- 48 Counting principles
- 49 Culture, political vs. background
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
38 - Communitarianism
from C
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- 25 Capabilities
- 26 Care
- 27 Catholicism
- 28 Chain connection
- 29 Circumstances of justice
- 30 Citizen
- 31 Civic humanism
- 32 Civic republicanism
- 33 Civil disobedience
- 34 Close-knitness
- 35 Cohen
- 36 Cohen, Joshua
- 37 Common good idea of justice
- 38 Communitarianism
- 39 Comprehensive doctrine
- 40 Conception of the good
- 41 Congruence
- 42 Conscientious refusal
- 43 Constitution and constitutional essentials
- 44 Constitutional consensus
- 45 Constructivism: Kantian/political
- 46 Cooperation and coordination
- 47 Cosmopolitanism
- 48 Counting principles
- 49 Culture, political vs. background
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The term “communitarianism” refers to the writings of a number of political theorists who, in the 1980s and early 1990s, sought to critique what they saw as the excessively individualistic aspects of liberal theory in general, and of Rawls’s arguments in particular.
Beyond this very general characterization, it is hard to identify a core set of substantive claims to which all of the theorists who have been described as communitarians subscribe. The claims of communitarians are addressed at diverse dimensions of the liberal project, from the putative metaphysical assumptions that lie at the basis of the liberal project, to the substantive policy prescriptions to which liberalism allegedly gives rise.
While it is clearly not exhaustive, the following list of claims is at the heart of what came in the 1980s to be known as the “liberal/communitarian” debate.
(1) The metaphysics of the self. According to some communitarians, most notably Michael Sandel (Sandel 1982), liberals go wrong by placing a deicient conception of the moral and political agent at the core of their theories. Liberals, the argument goes, see the self as “unencumbered,” that is as related to its cultural and historical entanglements in a contingent rather than a constitutive manner. According to the view attributed to liberals by communitarians, the self is metaphysically “prior” to its ends, and to the conceptions of the good that are prevalent in its community.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 119 - 125Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014