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Liberalism, Communitarianism, and Political Community*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Chandran Kukathas
Affiliation:
Politics, University of New South Wales

Extract

The primary concern of this essay is with the question “What is a political community?” This question is important in its own right. Arguably, the main purpose of political philosophy is to provide an account of the nature of political association and, in so doing, to describe the relations that hold between the individual and the state. The question is also important, however, because of its centrality in contemporary debate about liberalism and community.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1996

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References

1 Foucault, Michel, “Truth and Power,” in Foucault, Truth and Power: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin, Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 121.Google Scholar

2 Bell, Daniel, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 29.Google Scholar

3 See ibid., p. 30.

4 Ibid., p. 31.

5 See Macedo, Stephen, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).Google Scholar

6 Moon, J. Donald, Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 8.Google Scholar Moon distances himself from those liberals who “take autonomy, the protection of rights, or the satisfaction of individual wants, as the objectives or values that the practices and institutions of society ought to realize.”

7 The argument will be developed, in other words, both at the level of advocacy and of ontology. See Taylor, Charles, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Nancy, Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 160–82.Google Scholar

8 Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 62.Google Scholar

9 On this, see Gutmann, Amy, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 14 (1985), pp. 308–22Google Scholar; and Kymlicka, Will, “Liberalism and Communitarianism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 18 (1988), pp. 181204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Miller, David, Market, State, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 234.Google Scholar

11 Plant, Raymond, “Community,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 8890.Google Scholar

12 See Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Association, trans. Loomis, C. P. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).Google Scholar

13 The term is Plant's; see his “Community,” p. 89.

14 See, for example, Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).Google Scholar

15 This is not meant to deny that sometimes principles which are defended as vitally important are more honored in the breach than in the observance. Thus, while in principle, and officially, all Catholics may condemn (certain forms of) contraception, the practice is often to leave such matters to personal judgment.

16 See Lewis, Bernard, The Political Language of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 34.Google Scholar

17 There is insufficient space here to pursue a more detailed investigation into the relationships and differences between various types of political communities. See, however, the analysis offered by Reynolds, Susan, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar

18 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 42.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 146n.

20 On this point, see Bernard Yack's discussion of Aristotle's analysis of community in Yack, , The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch. 1, esp. p. 29.Google Scholar

21 Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, p. 4. See also Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

22 Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, p. 141.

23 For a brief typology of communitarian views, see Kymlicka, Will, “Community,” in Robert, Goodin and Philip, Pettit, eds., Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 367f.Google Scholar

24 Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 179.

25 For a more thorough examination of the dispute, see Mulhall, Stephen and Swift, Adam, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar; Frazer, Elizabeth and Lacey, Nicola, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).Google Scholar

26 Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, p. 143.

27 I have discussed this point at greater length in “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 1 (1992), pp. 112–15.

28 This is clear in Political Liberalism, where Rawls writes:

[W]e have assumed that a democratic society, like any political society, is to be viewed as a complete and closed social system. It is complete in that it is self-sufficient and has a place for all the main purposes of human life. It is also closed… in that entry into it is only by birth an d exit is only by death, (pp. 40–41)

29 For example, in “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus, “Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 7, no . 1 (1987), p. 1, Rawls writes:

In a constitutional democracy one of its most important aims is presenting a political conception of justice that can not only provide a shared public basis for the justification of political and social institutions but also helps ensure stability from one generation to the next.

30 Thus, Rawls is not upholding the value of personal autonomy as such. The

full autonomy of political life must be distinguished from the ethical values of autonomy and individuality, which may apply to the whole of life, both social and individual, as expressed by the comprehensive liberalisms of Kant and Mill. Justice as fairness emphasizes this contrast: it affirms political autonomy for all but leaves the weight of ethical autonomy to be decided by citizens severally in light of their comprehensive doctrines. (Political Liberalism, p. 78)

31 Ibid., p. 78.

32 See, for example, Amy Gutmann, who defends the “ideal of citizens sharing in deliberatively determining the future shape of their society,” and commends the democratic ideal as one of “conscious social reproduction” (Gutmann, , Democratic Education [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], p. 289).Google Scholar

33 See, for example, Sunstein, Cass, “Preferences and Politics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 20, no. 1 (1991), pp. 334.Google Scholar

34 Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).

35 For a powerful critique of Rawls on this issue, see Kymlicka, Will, “Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance,” Analyse & Kritik, vol. 14 (1992), pp. 3356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Kymlicka, Will, “The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas,” Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 1 (1992), p. 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also my “Cultural Rights Again: A Rejoinder to Kymlicka,” Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 4 (1992), pp. 674–80. Kymlicka's view is endorsed by Gutmann, Amy, “The Politics of Multiculturalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 171206.Google Scholar

37 Dworkin, Ronald, Law's Empire (London: Fontana Press, 1986), p. 214.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 214 (emphasis added).

39 Ibid., p. 211.

41 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 527.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., p. 528.

44 Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 3965.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., p. 58.

46 I leave to one side my reservations about the terminology; Young herself, in adopting the term “cultural imperialism,” is merely following a usage established by Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Woman's Voice,’” Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 6 (1983), pp. 573–81.

47 Ibid., pp. 58–59.

48 Ibid., p. 59.

50 Dworkin, Law's Empire, p. 214.

51 Madison, James, “The Federalist No. 51,” in Madison, James, Hamilton, Alexander, and Jay, John, The Federalist Papers, ed. George, Carey and James, McClellan (Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1990), p. 266.Google Scholar

52 In this regard, my sympathies are with the anti-federalists, who resisted the creation of a republic which reduced the thirteen states to one government:

In so extensive a republic, the great officers of government would soon become above the controul of the people, and abuse their power to the purpose of aggrandizing themselves, and oppressing them.… They will use the power, when they have acquired it, to the purposes of gratifying their own interest and ambition, and it is scarcely possible, in a very large republic, to call them to account for their misconduct, or to prevent the abuse of power.

See Letter I by “Brutus” to “The Citizens of the State of New York,” October 18, 1787, in The Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution, ed. Storing, Herbert J., selected by Dry, Murray from The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 116.Google Scholar

53 See President Lincoln's first inaugural address (delivered March 4, 1861, two weeks after the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as the first president of the Confederacy), in which he maintained that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in States where it exists”; that “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments”; and that “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.” See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington 1789 to George Bush 1989, 101st Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document 101–10 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Service, 1989), pp. 134–36. Note also Lincoln's acknowledgment in his second inaugural address (March 4, 1865) that, in fighting the Civil War, while both parties deprecated war, “one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish” (Inaugural Addresses, p. 142).

54 Current examples abound: consider the Russian suppression of the Chechen insurrection; the Iraqi treatment of its Kurdish minority; and the Serbian war against Bosnia.

55 Migdal, Joel, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. xxxxi.Google Scholar

56 On this, see Scott, James, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar For a discussion of the resistance of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who resist easy categorization and control by the state, see James Scott, “State Simplification,” Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming).

57 Holmes, Stephen, “Liberalism for a World of Ethnic Passions and Decaying States,” Social Research, vol. 61, no. 3 (1994), p. 605.Google Scholar

58 Indeed, much of the nationalist conflict around the world, as Will Kymlicka plausibly argues, is the result of attempts by majority nations coercively to assimilate national minorities. See Kymlicka, , “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” Dissent, Winter 1995, p. 133.Google Scholar

59 For historical accounts and analyses of the decentralized provision of law and other mechanisms of conflict resolution, see Benson, Bruce L., The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 2 and 3; and Ellickson, Robert C., Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

60 See Miller, David, “In Defense of Nationality,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 1 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar