2—
Liberalism

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice, and Charles Taylor's writings on "atomism," there has arisen a quite stimulating controversy over the deficiencies or otherwise of contemporary liberalism. This altercation has, on the whole, been a friendly affair as academic controversies go, for the protagonists on both sides of the argument tend to be what I think one can fairly label liberal social democrats.^[1] What this amounts to, so we are told, is a debate between liberals and so-called communitarians. Perhaps in reaction to the ascendant individualism of the Reagan years, it has become fashionable to argue that the problem of liberalism as a philosophy of social life is that it lacks the conceptual resources to appreciate the constitutive communal attachments that give the lie to an individualist self-understanding. If that is the case, the solution to the deficiencies of liberalism lies in embracing, once again, the joys of family, neighborhood, and ethnic or national existence that individualism endangers. But does this analysis penetrate deeply enough into the sources of liberal and postliberal malaise? In what follows, I wish to explore the question of whether the very character of the communitarian "solution," far from resolving the discontents of liberalism, perhaps confirms at a more funda-

[1] The meaning of this label is nicely summarized by Richard Rorty in "Thugs and Theorists," Political Theory 15, no. 4 (November 1987): 565-567. Amy Gutmann certainly exaggerates the antiliberalism of critics like Sandel and Taylor when she ends an article by urging them to "improve" liberal justice rather than "replace" it—presumably with something militantly illiberal. "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 322; cf. p. 32 n. 52. Far from being revolutionaries rushing to dismantle the liberal social order, it might be thought that Sandel and Taylor err on the side of being too modest in their critique of liberalism rather than on that of being overbold.

mental level the really intractable dilemma at the heart of the liberal dispensation.

The Antiliberal Challenge

To begin, let me quickly summarize the main lines of communitarian argument.^[2] Sandel, in his justly celebrated book, argues that the fatal flaw of liberal theory is an incoherent theory of the self. The liberal vision of the individual as the autonomous chooser of his or her own purposes presupposes that the chooser is sufficiently sovereign over, and therefore distanced from, the choices that compose his or her identity that none of them must be regarded as binding. However, this conception of the self is incoherent, for a self that is as open-ended as the liberal conception requires would be not so much free as identityless. Only a "thickly constituted self" shaped in its very being by traditions, attachments, and more or less irrevocable moral commitments can actually make choices that count.

Walzer, in Spheres of Justice, argues that we cannot talk about justice (which is what liberal discourse is centrally about) without an appropriate awareness of the sorts of goods that a particular

[2] Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Charles Taylor, "Atomism," in Powers, Possessions, and Freedom, ed. Alkis Kontos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 39-61. A recent article questions whether Walzer belongs in the communitarian camp: "Michael Walzer is sometimes categorized as a communitarian, but does not clearly fit the designation." Patrick Neal and David Paris, "Liberalism and the Communitarian Critique: A Guide for the Perplexed," Canadian Journal of Political Science 23, no. 3 (September 1990): 419n. I find this statement most puzzling since, for reasons set out in this chapter, Walzer seems to me the most consistently communitarian of these authors; indeed, as I suggest later, perhaps he is the only one to whom the communitarian label properly applies.

It is surprising that commentators on the liberal-communitarian debate have not drawn attention to its religious dimension. It is hard to appreciate the full contours of the debate without being aware of the degree to which it involves a Jewish-Catholic challenge to the "Protestantism" of contemporary Kantianism (even if some of the spearheads of this Kantian revival are themselves non-Protestant).

society distributes among its members. But these goods are not merely given, they are themselves socially constituted by shared experiences, communal meanings, and traditions of self-understanding that evolve through history. Therefore liberal justice cannot presume to maintain neutrality toward ends and goods at the disposal of individuals, for the precise ends and goods at stake are made available to individuals through a process of communal selfdefinition that is not at the disposal of individuals.

According to MacIntyre's arguments in After Virtue, which develops insights of a very profound Aristotelian and Hegelian kind, possibilities of virtue and moral character are not simply contingent on individual choice but are historically embodied, reflecting more encompassing realities. That is, they require some manner of sociological account. Every moral theory, he argues, presupposes a sociological and historical story that fills out the conditions of possibility of a given range of moral experiences, such as the virtues to which one aspires within a certain culture.

Taylor's "Atomism" essay argues that even the extreme libertarian acquires his or her uncompromising passion for individual autonomy by virtue of participating in a civilization that has learned, over the course of many centuries, to put a premium upon such aspirations. Abstracted from such a global social-historical context, the very desire for command of one's individual destiny would be inaccessible, void of meaning. Therefore, precisely those aspirations that define the atomist perspective are the expression of a debt to one's society, and in turn the source of social obligations, that the libertarian himself or herself overlooks.

These critiques of liberal individualism are perfectly valid, as far as they go. But do they penetrate to what is really problematical about liberal theory and practice? And do they offer a satisfying exit from the deepest quandaries of liberalism?

The Anti-Antiliberal Rejoinder

The ensuing debate between critics of individualist liberalism and the critics' own critics has made clear, I think, that there are a variety of ways in which defenders of liberalism can incorporate communitarian insights without relinquishing the central tenets of liberal social philosophy. First of all, it is open to the liberal simply

to concede that liberal ideals are historically generated, the product of a particular, specifically modern culture and of a shared liberal tradition. Many liberal theorists, including Rawls in his more recent writings, have quite happily embraced this more historicized, and therefore less individualistic, rendering of their liberal commitments. It is all too easy for the defender of liberalism to reply to the communitarian critique as Amy Gutmann does: "The unencumbered self is . . . the encumbrance of our modern social condition."^[3] As I noted, Rawls himself, of course, has increasingly resorted to this line of defense: justice as fairness "is the most reasonable doctrine for us. We can find no better charter for our social world."^[4]

In this respect, some communitarian arguments serve merely to help liberal theory give a better or clearer account of itself. For instance, if, as Taylor argues, the very awareness or perception of oneself as an individual choice maker is itself socially constituted, this means that membership in a liberal society is in fact less individualist than may appear from its own theoretical self-understanding. But as soon as this fact is recognized, the critique of liberal individualism is defused or loses a significant measure of its force. It is only against the most extreme type of rights theorist, like Nozick, that Taylor's atomism thesis can retain any critical bite at all. Any other liberal can readily circumvent Taylor's critique by allowing, or even insisting, that conceptions of individual rights, liberty, and autonomy are by necessity socially constituted. It is not surprising that liberal theory has moved in this direction in response to Taylor and Sandel. But of course the best versions of liberalism have never been guilty of the atomistic fallacy. It seems clear that classic liberals like Tocqueville, J. S. Mill, and T. H. Green were no less distressed than contemporary communitarians by the prospect of modern atomism. Merely to convict Nozick of an atomistic selfmisunderstanding hardly suffices as a serious challenge to liberalism as a theory of society.

I find it puzzling that Taylor's "Atomism" essay has been identified by many as a source of communitarian theory, since Taylor

[3] Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," p. 316.

[4] John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures," The Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): 519; my italics.

nowhere in that essay challenges the commitments of most liberals; he limits himself to the modest task of showing how the liberal aspiration to autonomy presupposes certain cultural and political conditions—again, not something that appears remotely controversial or provocative. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to conceive Taylor's "Atomism" essay as a critique of liberalism at all, since no sane liberal would deny the claims Taylor makes in that essay. Taylor's argument is really addressed to what he calls the "ultraliberal,"^[5] who also would have to be insane to admit to being an atomist.

Is it possible for a liberal such as Rawls to recast his liberalism within a communitarian framework? In order better to appreciate with what ease the liberal can deflect the communitarian challenge, let us consider a line of thought suggested by Rawls himself. Toward the end of A Theory of Justice Rawls conjures up the picture of a society in which his principles of justice themselves furnish the substantive basis of shared membership in the society.^[6] Let us suspend skepticism and suppose that this proposal were actually realized in exactly the way that Rawls imagines to be possible. In that case, the liberal vision of the just society that Rawls describes would be a communitarian theory. It would describe a society founded on the shared communal attachment to a particular set of moral commitments. Allegiance to these principles would be constitutive of the identity of its members. Such a theory would fully satisfy the demand for "constitutive community." But it would not be any less a liberal theory. Indeed, precisely these principles express our established identity because they alone are consistent with the pluralistic conditions of a liberal society, whereby different individuals

[5] Taylor, "Atomism," p. 48. Taylor's substantive communitarianism is expressed in "Alternative Futures," in Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society, ed. A. Cairns and C. Williams (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 183-229; the argument of "Atomism," by contrast, is not positively communitarian, merely antiatomist.

[6] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), §§ 79, 96; e.g., "To appreciate something as ours, we must have a certain allegiance to it. What binds a society's efforts into one social union is the mutual recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice; it is this general affirmation which extends the ties of identification over the whole community. . . . Individual and group accomplishments are no longer seen as just so many separate personal goods" (pp. 571-572).

find their constitutive identity in different, and perhaps conflicting, subgroups. It is exactly this that Rawls intends in referring to his idea of a well-ordered society as "a social union of social unions."^[7]

Rawls in fact goes further. He not only claims that it is possible for there to be a society in which there is a constitutive commitment to these principles; he claims that this is actually the case in liberal society. In A Theory of Justice he declares that "a common understanding of justice makes a constitutional democracy" (on express analogy with Aristotle's notion that the polis is founded upon a common understanding of justice).^[8] That is, existing liberal democracy already embodies a concrete community of understanding, and furthermore this community of understanding can be enhanced and given added substance insofar as its underlying shared conception of justice can be supplied with a more explicit articulation (which is just what Rawls aims to do).

What is shaping up now is something of a convergence between communitarian liberals, who are no less conscious than Walzer or Sandel of how ideals of life are socially constituted,^[9] and on the other side, liberal communitarians, who, it appears, were never all that remote from liberalism to begin with. Perhaps this convergence is less surprising than the original debate would have suggested, since of course all of the protagonists, as noted at the outset, are good social democrats whose disagreements at the level of metaethics in no way disturbed their basic consensus on the level of policy. Here, it strikes me, Maclntyre's critique of liberalism opens up deeper possibilities of reflection than the liberalism/communitarianism debate could permit.

The Liberal Dispensation:
An Ethosless Ethos

What is liberalism? And what is the relation between liberal theory and liberal practice? Some communitarians seem to assume that the

[7] Ibid., pp. 527, 529.

[8] Ibid., p. 243.

[9] See, for instance, Ronald Dworkin, "Liberal Community," California Law Review 77, no. 3 (May 1989): 479-504; other semicommunitarian liberals that may be mentioned are Joseph Raz and Will Kymlicka. Dworkin in the article cited assumes, as liberals typically assume, that the only alternativeto liberalism is illeberalism, and that therefore the communicatarians, as critics of liberalism, are defenders of illiberalism. But of course the communitarians Dworkin has in mind, for instance Sandel and Taylor, are no more committed to the persecution of homosexuals than he is.

practices of liberal society are the "expression" or "embodiment" of ways of thinking articulated in liberal theory, so that if the major failing of liberal theory is excessive individualism, this must provide the key to understanding the correlative failings of liberal practice. (Perhaps, too, the correction of liberal theory's errors will herald a better practice.) The questionableness of this presumption has been highlighted in a very acute way in a recent essay by Bernard Yack.^[10] We may be burdened with a bunch of rotten theories intended to justify what are really a set of wonderful practices and institutions, or, equally, we may be presented with wonderful theories matched up against a rotten liberal reality. Richard Rorty has argued the same point: "Communitarians . . . often speak as if political institutions were no better than philosophical foundations."^[11] In reply, Rorty draws upon Dewey and the "political not metaphysical" Rawls to contend that "liberal democracy can get along without philosophical presuppositions."^[12] But clearly this point can cut in two opposite directions: if liberal practices and institutions are distinct from their supposed philosophical foundations, liberal practice may be either more or less sound than the liberal philosophy that is the target of communitarian critics. And even if we could come up with a perfectly satisfactory formulation of liberal theory, this in itself would certainly not put to an end our worries about liberal society itself.

Rorty celebrates the historicized Rawls who views the principles of justice as limited in their validity to "we liberals."^[13] He says that

[10] Bernard Yack, "Does Liberal Practice 'Live Down' to Liberal Theory? Liberalism and Its Communitarian Critics," in Community in America: The Challenge of 'Habits ofthe Heart ,' ed. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 147-169.

[11] Richard Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, ed. Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 260.

[12] Ibid., p. 261.

[13] Ibid., p. 278 n. 22: "The only 'theory of the person' we get is a sociological description of the inhabitants of contemporary liberal democracies."

on the basis of Rawls's later writings we must learn to reread A Theory of Justice as no longer "committed to a philosophical account of the human self, but only to an historical-sociological description of the way we live now."^[14] But this of course invites the further challenge: Does this redescription of the Rawlsian enterprise exonerate the theory, or does it indict "the way we live now"? Perhaps it is even the case that liberal practice is in far worse shape than either liberals or communitarians imagine.

Rorty is quite right, in my view, that one doesn't need a public philosophy "to hold a free society together."^[15] But it certainly doesn't follow from this that there are no conditions necessary for the social cohesion of a liberal society. The "glue . . . required to hold a community together"^[16] is ethos, not shared metaphysics. So while the absence of an adequate philosophy may well not be fatal to liberal society, it cannot necessarily be assumed that liberal society is therefore in good health. Aristotle's most powerful insight is that in every society, moral life is based upon ethos, that is, character formation according to socially bred customs and habit. (One finds the same insight in many modern political thinkers, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.) Every society has an ethos. One that didn't would not just fail to be a moral community, it would fail to be a society at all. So liberal society does have an ethos. Under the liberal dispensation, the ethos is—lack of ethos; individuals in this society are habituated to being insufficiently habituated. That is the liberal paradox. Incoherent as it may appear, it goes to the core of what liberalism is and what it attempts to be.

The starting point for an understanding of liberalism is the notion that there is a distinctive liberal way of life, characterized by the aspiration to increase and enhance the prerogatives of the individual; by maximal mobility in all directions, throughout every dimension of social life (in and out of particular communities, in and out of socioeconomic classes, and so on); and by a tendency to turn all areas of human activity into matters of consumer preference; a way of life based on progress, growth, and technological dyna-

[14] Ibid., p. 265.

[15] Ibid., p. 264.

[16] Ibid., p. 260.

mism. The fact that nonliberal societies in the developed world share some features of this way of life shows that Eastern and Western societies are closer cousins than they have generally been willing to acknowledge. In particular, both types of societies are expressions of the modern drive toward universal "freedom" and mastery, as evidenced in the furious rivalry for high-technological supremacy, both civilian and military.

This liberal mode of existence is marked by tendencies toward pluralistic fragmentation, but paradoxically it is also marked by tendencies toward universalism and even homogenization. It is important to see why these two seemingly opposing tendencies are compatible—why indeed they are two sides of the same coin. The distinctiveness of liberalism is not, I think, refuted by its tendency to invade and overrun other ways of life, for the dialectic of liberal existence encompasses both diversity and sameness, pluralism and uniformity, privatization and planetarization. The official ideology of liberal society, endlessly expounded by liberal theorists, is of course diversity—the rich multiplicity of different conceptions of the good or of the ends of life. But when one actually surveys the liberal reality, what one sees is more and more sameness—of tastes, of clichéd perceptions of the world, of the glum ennui with which one reconciles oneself to the monolithic routines of our world. Needless to say, it is all too common for a rhetoric of robust individuality to obscure a reality of dreary conformism.^[17] Such is liberalism, with its shopping mall culture—where one has hundreds of shops to choose from, all of which sell the same junk. This dialectic of superficial pluralism and underlying conformity is nicely summarized by George Grant: "As for pluralism, differences in the technological state are able to exist only in private activities: how we eat; how we mate; how we practise ceremonies. Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches,

[17] Cf. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 247. See also Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 147-149, 162. It is in respect of this central insight that, despite their very different angles of vision, both of these books are Tocquevillean.

motels, restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific."^l8

Another deep paradox of the modern liberal dispensation is that while it enforces a highly contracted vision of the dignity and uniqueness of the individual within his or her particular subgroup, it simultaneously offers a collective way of life ("Americanism") that is rapidly expanding to encircle the globe. (The Europeans are even naming themselves after the United States!) North America is history's great experiment in a cosmopolitan way of life. Thus far, this civilization has obviously been an enormous practical success, for its efforts to export its own brand of rootless cosmopolitanism to every other part of the Earth have met with little resistance.^[19] What is more difficult to judge is whether this grand experiment can be considered a moral success. Perhaps the great conservatives and romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were closer to the mark when they anticipated with deep consternation a world such as ours, in which the businesspeople of every nation speak English, every written word is recorded on computer discs, and everyone's kids, from Paris to Peking, are fed on hamburgers from McDonald's.

Liberalism, no less than socialism, feudalism, or any other social order, is a global dispensation—that is, a way of life that excludes other ways of life. It does no good for the liberal to say that the liberal state is neutral between the diverse life-choices of individuals. Is it neutral about continual growth and higher productivity? Is it neutral about scientific progress? Is it neutral about the market as a means of maximizing consumer choices? The fact that all of this supposedly enhances the prerogatives of individuals in the design of their life-options is what actually defines this dispensation rather than showing that there is none.

If it is true, as I believe it is, that all social theory is addressed to the question of what is good, and if, as Walzer argues, all politically relevant goods are communal goods (including even salvation as a social good), then it follows that liberalism itself is unavoidably a

[18] George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), p. 26.

[19] A recent public opinion poll in the Soviet Union reported that 65 percent of the respondents preferred the American lifestyle over other possibilities. The Asian-Japanese lifestyle came in second at 23 percent

communitarian theory. It makes available a determinate set of social goods that excludes rival goods. The task of social theory is to weigh and compare the worth of these different goods. However, as we shall now go on to see, even those defenders of liberalism who discount the deontological pretensions of recent liberal theory stop well short of rising to this challenge.

My argument is that liberalism itself instantiates one particular vision of the good, namely, that choice in itself is the highest good. This comes into view when we look at what liberals tend to get exercised about, such as restrictions on pornography. Amy Gutmann takes Sandel to task for entertaining the prospect of a communitarian ban on pornography within a local community (as if this were somewhat comparable to witch burning in Salem).^[20] This illiberalism, she argues, underestimates the complexity of our diverse aspirations toward the good. But what claim of good can be made on behalf of the consumers of hard-core smut, except that of choice itself? In fact the liberal invocation of the language of rights in this instance merely serves as a device to avoid having to give an account at the level of what is good. Gutmann argues that the liberal need not be committed to an absolute priority of right to good (as Rawls seems to be in A Theory of Justice); liberalism is merely an acknowledgment of the rich articulation of possible conceptions of the good. But this stance is betrayed by the pornography example, where the presumption of a putative good that is supposedly being upheld (cloaked by the slogan "right of free speech") cannot sustain even minimal scrutiny. Here the notion that there is a good at stake, rather than the pure right of a sovereign individual, turns out to be hollow. In this case at least, the appeal to rights, such as the right of free speech, betokens the absence of a good.

According to Richard Rorty, writing in defense of Rawls, political philosophy ought to recommend that citizens of a democratic polity forsake a quest for "the good independently defined" not "because a capacity for choice is the essence of personhood" but simply "because we—we modern inheritors of the traditions of religious tolerance and constitutional government—put liberty ahead of perfec-

[20] Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," pp. 318-319, 321.

tion."^[21] Yet it may surely be asked why we put liberty first—unless we do believe that "choice is the essence of personhood." As always, the liberal surreptitiously inserts the tacit philosophical anthropology, the underhandedly concealed conception of "the good independently defined." For of course it would be impossible for us to make sense of why we put liberty ahead of perfection if we disregarded the fact that we had already defined liberty (meaning freedom of choice) as the good.^[22]

Rorty states that a liberal social order is one which, for the sake of political freedom, is willing to content itself with producing human beings that are "bland, calculating, petty and unheroic."^[23] But this is an acknowledgment of precisely that global or collective decision at the level of philosophical anthropology that liberals generally, and very implausibly, disavow. Far from liberalism allowing us to abstain on the question of how human beings should be, it represents one particular answer: The human good reposes on public justice and private perfection, rather than on the public pursuit of perfection. To say, as liberals are committed to saying, that justice is to be preferred to perfection is to choose a particular way of being human as a member of a particular social order, within a global destiny of a particular kind.

Here the liberal will typically counter that sharing in an established way of life, whether high or low, is unobjectionable provided that it is not imposed by the state. After all, liberalism is principally a doctrine of the limitation of state power. But here again, all kinds of important questions are begged. Liberals stubbornly adhere to the view that the state alone poses a threat to the freedom of otherwise self-governing individuals. If we can merely secure the neutrality of the state with respect to diverse opposing ends of life then, it is assumed, the individual is sufficiently free and self-determining. But of course the very fact of life in society (any society) puts this in question. How can we know, prior to substantive inquiry into the whole fabric of life within a given society, whether individ-

[21] Rorty, "Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," p. 265.

[22] Taylor, "Atomism," p. 48, where it is argued that even the "ultraliberal" (e.g., Nozick) smuggles in a normative standard of "self-realization."

[23] Rorty, "Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," p. 269.

uals are self-determining or are brainwashed, manipulated in subtle and incalculable ways, and locked into forms of false consciousness by social forces (aside from the coercive powers of the state). It is unclear why the state alone should be conceived as threatening the autonomy of its citizens—an autonomy that may turn out to be highly illusory. In fact the state might be needed to render individuals more autonomous—for instance, by removing or inhibiting the power of other social forces to captivate and bewitch individuals without directly coercing them.^[24] The general liberal assumption that state coercion is the exclusive threat to individual freedom presumes that individuals are as a matter of course free. However, as Taylor argues in "Atomism," autonomy is not a given but an achievement—something that is very much a function of the general culture and historical evolution of the society that shapes our identity. Even if the state is or tries to be neutral (which is likely to prove impossible), the wider social order in which the individual is nourished is not. Liberal neutralism is therefore a mirage. It is hard to see why the state is constrained to be neutral (whatever that might mean) if social life as a whole is and must be strongly partial toward a particular way of life.

As soon as one begins to examine the content of the common good of a liberal social order, one sees much that is admirable but also much that is dismaying: The suburbs in which more and more of us live are a spiritual wasteland; our city cores are a disgrace; our children are culturally illiterate; much of the energies of our society go into producing and consuming goods that no reasonable person would choose to produce or consume.^[25] All of these considerations, and others of a like kind, are relevant to the evaluation of liberalism

[24] For an argument of this kind, see, for example, Jennifer Nedelsky, "Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possibilities," in Law and the Community, ed. A. C. Hutchinson and L. J. M. Green (Toronto: Carswell, 1989), pp. 219-252. Relevant here is Matthew Arnold's opposition of Humboldtian practice (statist) to Humboldtian theory (antistatist); see Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 126-127.

[25] Consider, for instance, the estimated three million women in the United States who have felt obliged to equip themselves with cosmetic breast implants, one-quarter of which, it now turns out, may be carcinogenic.

as a substantive way of life. Unfortunately, none of them are even up for consideration within the horizon of liberal theory as it has been articulated within the last twenty years.

Why I Am Not a Communitarian

The ultimate challenge that faces liberalism is whether it yields the intellectual resources to pass judgment on individuals—and indeed whole societies of individuals—who exercise their presumed autonomy by opting for ways of life that are banal, empty, and stultifying. If we go by Dworkin's definition of liberalism ("political decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life"^[26] ), it is clear that liberalism on principle offers no such intellectual resources. It denies itself the possibility of such critical judgment on account of its guiding conception of what is morally and politically right. Now with the decisive challenge to liberalism framed in these terms, we can see that the communitarian critique does not necessarily provide much help in exposing what is wrong with liberalism. We can easily imagine a warm sense of community based on mutual participation in the decrepit ways of life opted for by our postulated autonomous individuals. In fact these individuals may actually draw their constitutive identity from communal membership in these very ways of life (e.g., one's identity as a yuppie, or as the citizen of a condo community). It may even be possible to describe liberal society in precisely this way. But if so, the communitarian criterion is satisfied much too easily. We can see this, for instance, in the case of Walzer's communitarianism in Spheres of Justice. On his view, the only standard of critical judgment is the internal standard of whether a concrete community remains true to the traditions, practices, and shared understandings that compose its communal identity. But if we conceive liberal society as a

[26] Ronald Dworkin, "Liberalism," in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 127; cf. p. 142. To judge by Considerations on Representative Government, ed. C. V. Shields (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 25-28, the criticism here offered against Dworkin could not be made against John Stuart Mill, nor could it be made against Tocqueville and various other great figures of the liberal tradition.

community dedicated to a relentlessly pluralistic way of life, then that society, on Walzer's account, would be obliged only to pursue consistently the moral incoherence to which it had historically committed itself. What is absent here is any independent, external standard that sheds light on whether identity-constituting communities confer worth upon their members beyond the bare fact of possessing something shared. The mere presence of community furnishes no such standard, and therefore fails to make good the default of liberalism. The pluralistic communitarian, in common with the pluralistic liberal, abstains from specifying the content of the good life for individuals or communities. In his clear avowal of pluralism, Walzer himself acknowledges that, for all his credentials as a communitarian, he remains a liberal first—which, again, confirms that communitarianism can be consistent with a fundamental allegiance to liberalism.^[27]

The question I am raising is this: Is lack of community the central deficiency of liberalism? Or is a certain experience of community part and parcel of liberalism? At the moment, there are millions of North Americans passionately committed to a shared vision of a Christian evangelical community. Is their communitarian commitment in itself an answer to the ills of liberal individualism, or is it rather an expression of those ills? Surely, communitarianism of this sort is the consequence, not the cure, of the moral emptiness of liberal culture. If this is what the situated self looks like, then, as liberal countercritics argue, by all means give us back the "disencumbered self"! This is the standard liberal rebuttal of community, and to be sure there is much truth in the liberal's case that there is nothing intrinsically good in the experience of community as such. But the liberal rebuttal fails to recognize how deeply implicated the liberal and the communitarian are in each other's dilemmas.

There are at least two ways in which one can embrace community consistent with a commitment to liberalism. First, one can base

[27] What is confusing about the liberal/communitarian taxonomy comes out clearly in the fact that Rorty, who is a defender of Rawlsian liberalism, is actually more of a communitarian than critics of liberalism like Taylor and Sandel (though not more of a communitarian than Walzer). See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 3.

communitarianism on liberalism. Here we may recall the account given earlier of Rawls: Rawlsian community can in theory be constitutive, except that, owing to the thinness of the theory, the kinds of selves that it would constitute might tend to live vapid, atrophied lives. Alternatively, one can view the attachment to a particular ethnic or civic community as itself an expression of liberal autonomy: I choose to live in this neighborhood, with these neighbors who share my "values"; or I choose to become a Zionist within a community of Zionists dedicated to affirming our shared identity. Or even: I choose to become a Jew—like Sammy Davis, Jr.! Now liberal society on the whole embodies both of these kinds of communitarianism without ceasing to be liberal. Indeed, this kind of communitarianism defines liberalism. That's what liberalism is.

Much of the initial force of the communitarian critique was directed against the privileging, central to deontological liberalism, of right over good. To this it was possible to counter that what underlies liberal philosophy is not so much a repudiation of the good in favor of the right, as an acknowledgment of the plurality of goods to which citizens of liberal society are committed (as defenders of liberalism like Gutmann and Galston^[28] have suggested). But if this statement of the problem is accurate, it is not clear whether the communitarian option surmounts the problem or compounds it. For, as Walzer, Taylor, and Sandel each in their own way recognize, the affirmation of community is at the same time an affirmation of pluralism. These theories exalt not just community but communities, the blossoming of which may result in a further impetus to the centrifugal tendencies of liberal society.^[29] MacIntyre puts his finger on the basic problem, in a way that places him in contradistinction to other commonly cited communitarians, when he refers to "the great pluralist mishmash of the shared pub-

[28] William Galston, "Defending Liberalism," American Political Science Review 76 (1982): 621-629.

[29] Cf. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, pp. 192-193: "The 'new ethnicity' or 'roots' is just another manifestation of the concern with particularity, evidence not only of the real problems of community in modern mass societies but also of the superficiality of the response to it. . . . The blessing given the whole notion of cultural diversity in the United States by the cultural movement has contributed to the intensification and legitimization of group politics."

lic life of liberal societies."^[30] This is the real predicament, one which does not admit of a communitarian solution, for the withdrawal into particularistic communities merely confirms what defines the problem in the first place.

Here the communitarian is landed in a quandary that exactly matches that of the liberal. If what is required is a truly national community, the communitarian promise would seem to be a hopeless one, for clearly no modern industrial state can sustain this sort of community without stoking up the very hazardous fires of nationalism. On the other hand, if what is sought is the autonomy of local communities as such, there is no assurance that this will not give further momentum to the relativization of tastes and morals that mandated liberal neutralism in the first place. So the appeal to community, far from resolving the quandaries of liberalism, merely confirms them in another guise.

The same problem may also be formulated from a slightly different perspective. One of the main stumbling blocks of liberalism, at least in its official professions, is its formalism. To uphold the prerogatives of the autonomous, choice-making individual means that, politically speaking, one abstains from judgment about the substantive character of these choices. One can exercise one's autonomy just as well by choosing X as by choosing Y—whatever X and Y happen to be. But the communitarian affirmation is beset by the same formalism.^[31] To affirm community as such is to abstain from judgment about the substantive attributes of a given community. Communal autonomy, like individual autonomy, abstracts from judgments of substance. It is this formalism that renders the language of communitarianism so confusing and that prompts disquiet both among liberals and among many critics of liberalism.

[30] Alasdair MacIntyre, "Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?" Monist 67, no. 4 (October 1984): 511.

[31] This may be illustrated by the pornography issue debated by Sandel and Gutmann. Sandel defends the prerogative of any local community "to ban pornographic bookstores, on the grounds that pornography offends its way of life." "Morality and the Liberal Ideal," New Republic, 7 May 1984, p. 17. But suppose we are presented with a local community whose way of life is not violated but buttressed by pornography; such a possibility is not entirely fanciful. By itself, the appeal to community can as easily sanction the desirability of pornography as its undesirability. Here again, thecommunitarian ideal points toward not the repudiation of pluralist liberalism but the confirmation of it.

As I stated at the beginning of this section, the basic question is whether liberal philosophy can furnish the intellectual resources to investigate whether the way of life in which we all today participate is fundamentally satisfying. Once again, if we accept Dworkin's definition of liberalism, the answer to this question must be no. Liberals and communitarians are both wrong here. Liberals are wrong because we are not essentially choosers, autonomous agents, or framers of our own individual destiny, but members of an established dispensation. Communitarians are wrong because the fact that liberalism offers a constituted identity (for instance, that of autonomous consumers) within a larger social dispensation fails to redeem liberalism. And here, needless to say, it is a question not so much of the failings of liberalism as a social philosophy, but of liberalism as a way of life.

The liberal way of life, upheld by a particular dispensation, a particular ethos, is one where the liberal self draws its constitutive identity from its capacity to choose autonomously how and where it will work, who it will marry, where it will live, how and where it will seek means of leisure, where it will drive in its car; in short, what it will be. This is a way of life centered on choice, mobility, and maximal personal freedom.^[32] Now is this a vision of human life that any of the communitarians can straightforwardly repudiate?^[33] Or to which they can suggest, by way of contrast, a convincing alternative? And if not, isn't the appeal to existing or possible or imaginary communities rather pointless? Of course the liberal

[32] For an excellent statement by Walzer of the decisiveness of the question of mobility, and of the limited extent to which communitarians can repudiate this central feature of modern life (in respect of which liberal societies form merely the vanguard of a global movement), see "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism," Political Theory 18, no. 1 (February 1990): 6-23, especially pp. 11-13.

[33] Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," pp. 317, 320, observes that Sandel's communitarianism is more qualified than appears at first glance. This is hardly surprising. By contrast, Stephen Holmes suggests that "a balanced and fair assessment of their thought" requires that communitarians be seen as cagey and irresolute rehabilitators of fascism. "The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought," in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 228, 234.

dispensation undermines traditional communal attachments. How could it be otherwise?

Republican Community

It strikes me that the very label "communitarian" has introduced an unfortunate and wholly unnecessary degree of confusion into recent debates about liberalism. It suggests, misleadingly, that the major failing of liberalism is that it deprives its citizens of the satisfactions of communal life, as if the latter were an end in itself. I do not believe that this is the true concern of the communitarians themselves, and in the remainder of this chapter I want to urge that their own case would be both strengthened and clarified by forgoing the communitarian label.

In order to alleviate some of these confusions, it may be helpful to avail ourselves of a distinction drawn by Robert Paul Wolff in The Poverty of Liberalism between "affective community" and "rational community." Wolff defines affective community as "the reciprocal consciousness of a shared culture."^[34] Rational community, by contrast, is defined as "that reciprocity of consciousness which is achieved and sustained by equals who discourse together publicly for the specific purpose of social decision and action."^[35] Specifically, we need Wolff's distinction (or one like it) to render more precise whether what we are after is the raptures of Gemeinschaft or a more effective sense that citizens in a democratic society inhabit a shared world of political concerns that affect all in common, and that should be addressed in common. It is clear that the latter is what is decisive for theorists like Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel, who are better described as republican than as communitarian thinkers.^[36] It is clear as well that the same problem was no less

[34] Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 187.

[35] Ibid., p. 192.

[36] In "Alternative Futures," pp. 213-214, Taylor very usefully distinguishes between republican and communitarian concerns. Elsewhere, however, communitarians, no less than their critics, conflate the two, or treat them as synonymous. See, for instance, Sandel, "The Political Theory of the Procedural Republic," in The Rule of Law: Ideal or Ideology, ed. A. C. Hutchinson and P. Monahan (Toronto: Carswell, 1987), pp. 85, 92.

important for classical liberal philosophers like Tocqueville and J. S. Mill. In this context, one might be quite struck to discover that a certain sort of liberal individualism (for instance, that articulated by Mill) is in fact remarkably compatible with civic republican concerns. The basic point is this: If our world succumbs to nuclear or ecological catastrophe, we all suffer the same fate; if injustice, inequality, and political oppression run rampant in our world, we are all diminished as human beings; if the absence of a common culture leads to a new, postliterate barbarism, we are all the worse for it. The minimum notion of community required to cope with these grave political realities is the sense that our fate, for good or ill, is a shared one, from which no one can sensibly retreat into a private domain of either pleasures of consumption or burdens of conscience. The great mistake of liberalism is to pretend that modernity forces us to regard private morality as reigning supreme and public morality as limited to the business of negotiating "successful accommodation" between ourselves as rational individuals.^[37] The problem with liberalism is not that it deprives us of the delights of communal attachments, whether national, ethnic, sectarian, or whatever, but that it tends to cause us to forget that our destiny in this dangerous world of ours is a collective destiny, and that the perils of insufficient citizenship are likewise shared.

The problem is not lack of Gemeinschaft. Often, modern societies succumb to too much ethnic, linguistic, cultural-national particularism—naturally, in the context of a more general social fragmentation. Modern societies, of course, are hardly impervious to the curse of nationalism, or to outbursts of ethnic chauvinism. What is the problem then? Typically, we find ourselves barbarized by an empty public culture, intimidated by colossal bureaucracies, numbed into passivity by the absence of opportunities for meaningful deliberation, inflated by absurd habits of consumption, deflated by the Leviathans that surround us, and stripped of dignity by a way of living that far exceeds a human scale. We live in societies that embark upon the grandest and most hubristic collective projects, while granting their citizens only the feeblest opportunities for an effective say over the disposal of their own destiny. To

[37] Rorty, "Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," p. 264.

speak of autonomous moral agency and the ethical prerogatives of free, choice-making individuals in this context is a grotesque insult.

To my mind, the only communitarianism that allows us to escape the pluralist quandary that I have described is the idea of a community of discourse, where the very possibility of public talk about a world we share confers an experience of substantive citizenship. According to this conception, it is the public world itself as a locus of shared concern that rescues us from the fragmentation and moral anarchy of a liberal-pluralist universe. In other words, it is the "republican" ideal developed most notably among recent theorists by Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas that offers a genuine alternative to liberalism. In particular, we may recall Hannah Arendt's brilliant account in The Human Condition of what it means to lose a shared world and how, as modernity gathers pace, public objects become dissolved in subjectivity. However, as that account intimates, the experiences that render republican community possible have been so deeply attenuated by liberalism that the very idea of a community of this kind is barely intelligible. Indeed, even to conceive of richer possibilities of citizenship has become so difficult for us that it is questionable whether pluralism as we know it today can be surpassed without revolutionary upheavals in the character of our world. It is not for nothing that MacIntyre concludes his book with a cry of despair, suggesting that moralists alive to the dimensions of our crisis retreat to some contemporary version of medieval monasteries in order to wait out the dark ages that have already commenced. What makes MacIntyre unique among commonly cited communitarians is that for him the problem is not merely individualism or liberalism but modernity as such.^[38] Therefore he includes even Marxism within the scope of his critique.

[38] By contrast, Taylor, like Habermas, seeks a redemptive potentiality within modernity itself; see "Alternative Futures," pp. 206, 222-223. In order to locate this potentiality, Taylor has to argue that civic republican aspirations are already significantly present in contemporary liberal society, and that therefore the flourishing of republican citizenship requires no major change of direction within our civilization but merely the accentuation of certain strains already operative, or at least latent, in the modern identity. Ibid., pp. 194, 223; "The Diversity of Goods," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. A. Sen and B. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 143. This claim is not terribly persuasive.

The problem with liberalism is not that it exalts the idea of what is right to the exclusion of notions of the good, for (however strenuously this is disavowed by liberal theorists) liberal society in fact instantiates a subterranean yet tacitly shared conception of the good, or a set of such conceptions. And the problem is not that it treats individuals in complete abstraction from community, for (whether liberal theorists are aware of it or not) liberal society, like every other society, offers a community of experience that identifies its members as inhabitants of the same social order.^[39] Nor is the problem that the liberal self is ahistorical and lacking in tradition, for liberal individualism itself constitutes a considerable tradition.^[40] The problem is quite simply that the liberal good, as defined by the bourgeois civilization of the last few centuries, is not good enough, and that liberal community defeats the possibility of a sense of meaningful collective purpose.

The communitarian insight, properly understood, reveals not merely conceptual errors or oversights in liberal theory but, more concretely, deficiencies in the character-building capacities of liberal culture (the liberal ethos). Allan Bloom shares this insight with communitarian radicals like Sandel and MacIntyre, perhaps against his will, when he writes that "a young person today . . . begins de novo, without the givens or imperatives that he would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of him and provides well for him, his religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and . . so are his sexual involvements. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding."^[41] MacIntyre points toward a similar predicament, with an intention that is at once radical and conservative, when he observes:

One of the crucial failures of the Enlightenment ideology has been in respect of the kind of ground for protest and rebellion and the kind of hope that it offers to those systematically excluded from the practices and the institutions which make the good life possible. For

[39] For elaboration of these points, see Yack, "Does Liberal Practice 'Live Down' to Liberal Theory?"

[40] See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), chap. 17.

[41] Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, p. 109.

it has fatally infected much of modern protest and rebellion with the idiom of abstract universality. And so it has not focused upon the tasks of creating practices and institutions which will actually enable the children of the hitherto deprived and the hitherto arbitrarily excluded to learn how to read Greek and to play baseball or cricket and to listen to and to play string quartets and to value excellence in all these areas. It has instead encouraged them to pursue fictions of rights and of equality so that everybody in the end will have equal right to an education that it is worth nobody's while to have.^[42]

What the communitarian is getting at is not that liberal autonomy is a bad thing, but that without the "thick" attachments provided by the kind of ethos that builds meaningful character, free choice between abstractly posited alternatives hardly seems worth the bother.^[43]

Liberalism at its best is characterized by certain great virtues that no society ought to wish to forfeit. But it should be possible to acknowledge this without paying the intellectual price that liberal theorists do when they make their peace with modernity. Nietzsche, in one of his last letters, wrote a century ago to Jacob Burckhardt, like himself one of the towering nineteenth-century critics of modernity: "I pay twenty-five francs, with service, make my own tea, and do my own shopping, suffer from torn boots, and thank heaven every moment for the old world, for which human beings have not been simple and quiet enough."4 Nietzsche, perhaps philosophy's greatest enemy of liberal civilization, was able to observe, even in the last century, the relentless draining away of dignity and nobility in the frenzied new world that was arising before his eyes. His forebodings have been uncannily borne out by the experience of the past hundred years.

[42] Alasdair MacIntyre, "Bernstein's Distorting Mirrors," Soundings 67, no. 1 (1984): 40.

[43] Will Kymlicka speaks of "the freedom to choose which of the culture's narratives to adopt as the most valuable for me." "Liberalism, Individualism, and Minority Rights," in Law and the Community, ed. Hutchinson and Green, p. 190 n. 21; the context is a criticism of MacIntyre. But if we all exercise this freedom to pick and choose among possible cultural memberships, it is difficult to see how any particular culture can continue to sustain itself. This precisely is the quandary of liberal community.

[44] Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 347.

The defender of liberal modernity will of course reply that we are no more likely to be able to turn the clock back on the pluralism, dynamism, and scale of modern societies than we are likely to recapture the Gemeinschaft of preliberal societies. Both the communitarian and the republican visions are therefore equally mired in nostalgia (worse, nostalgia for societies that never actually existed!). Liberal pluralism is our fate, and it would require either ignorance of or blindness to historical realities to yearn for some radically different dispensation. To this inevitable rejoinder I reply that it would be depressing indeed to think that the only possible function of theoretical reflection is to resign us to our historical fate; it would also be a betrayal of the traditional vocation of theory, which is to offer critical reflection on the given state of affairs. It seems highly improbable that Plato and Aristotle conceived with any seriousness the possibility of arresting the decline of the polis by their theoretical exertions, yet that did not deter them from assuming a critical posture toward their own society. Nor should we be deterred from surveying the discontents of our civilization.