Communitarianism: The Good, the Bad & the Muddly

What follows may sometimes sound an irritated note. I am sorry about that, but have to admit that it is one of the objects of this essay to express a certain irritation with the terms in which some recent debates have been handled—terms that make it much harder than it need be to size up the attraction of appeals to “community” and associated ideas.

The meaning of that proposition may be obscure to anyone who has not spent the past decade acquiring the same irritation at the way academic political theory has revolved around the so-called “liberal- communitarian debate.”(Anyone who has moved in these circles should proceed swiftly to the paragraph after next.) Academic political theory has for two decades operated under the shadow of John Rawls’s wonderful book, A Theory of Justice; that book provides a sustained and often moving defense of welfare-state liberalism, a liberalism committed to a conception of distributive justice that seeks...