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Rawls and Communitarianism

The allegation that liberals neglect the value of community has a long – some would say notorious – history. Rawls's A Theory of Justice , immediately acclaimed as the most systematic and sophisticated statement of liberal theory to date, must have confirmed the worst suspicions of those predisposed to believe that liberalism's emphasis on the individual implied its neglect of the formative significance of their social context and the moral significance of relations between them. For Rawls’s invocation of a hypothetical contract, whereby rational and disembodied individuals, deprived of all particularity and characterised simply as free and equal, are to agree on principles to regulate the distribution of benefits and burdens in society, seemed perfectly to illustrate the claim that liberalism commits a number of fundamental errors: Seeking an unavailable Archimedean point from which to construct an abstract and universally applicable blueprint for society; Assuming individuals to be fundamentally self-interested; Ignoring the fact that people are socially constituted; Positing an incoherent metaphysical essence of the person; and Claiming to be neutral while sneaking in strongly individualistic premises. It is not hard to see why many of Rawls’s most influential critics formulated their objections in terms that pointed, in one way or another, to his failure to appreciate the value or significance of ‘community’, a shared line of attack that, despite important differences, earned them and their critique the label ‘communitarian’.