ABSTRACT
Such has been the influence of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice,1 that any discussion of contemporary liberalism must start with his contractarianism and its communitarian critiques.2 In this chapter I want to trace the impact of the communitarian critique on liberal political theory after Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The chapter will begin by rehearsing the standard communitarian objection to liberalism. But in the second section I will also be focusing on Ronald Dworkin’s liberal critique of Rawls’s strategy in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism3 which claims that the continued adherence to the social contract renders Rawls’s theory incapable of grounding liberal political principles. I will be concentrating on the recent work of two key liberal thinkers, John Rawls4 and Ronald Dworkin,5 because they represent the main strands of response to communitarianism within contemporary liberal theory.6 Rawls attempts to accommodate the communitarians’ rejection of the atomistic individual while maintaining a contractarian theory, whereas Dworkin argues that the moral schizophrenia implicit in Rawls’s revised contractarianism undermines the possibility of justifying a genuinely liberal political theory. These attempts to accommodate what is of value in the communitarian critique have given rise to a distinction between political and philosophical or ethical versions of liberalism. Therefore, I will be arguing that whilst the communitarian critique has not provided much by way of a positive agenda for normative political theory it has changed the terms of debate within contemporary liberalism. In conclusion I will provide an assessment of this debate and argue that any adequate liberal theory must abandon contractarianism.7
