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.