Community's Tribulations

Paper Summary:

This paper contends that communitarians take issue with the liberal orientation of securing individual liberty and the just distribution of resources. The paper claims that they emphasize the importance of tradition and community, and yet their notion of community is inadequately conceptualized. Communitarians question the nature of modern liberalism's "unencumbered" individual, who is abstracted from community and who defines obligation in terms of universal duties (abstract rights) or voluntary obligations (contracts). In contrast, the communitarian will argues for the civic republican ideal of an informed and active citizen, participating in and valuing community. But their attempts to reconstitute community betray a lack of understanding of the very nature of the concept from classical sociology. The paper illustrates how the communitarian project only reintroduces problems that disrupt community.

From the Paper:

"Liberal theory wants to delineate the principal task of government to that of securing individual liberty and of distributing economic resources equitably, so that those individuals can lead their freely chosen lives. In contrast a cluster of thinkers, labeled communitarian, have taken issue with that orientation, and one point of deliberation has been their emphasis on the importance of tradition and the value of community. However, it may very well be that although the communitarian's critique is decisively relevant, their notion of community will not do the heavy labor that they will want it to do."

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