ABSTRACT
T he previous chapter cheerfully presupposed that collectives-in the form of the two movements described-can do things like make arguments. Although the idea squares perfectly well with our ordinary intuitions, it is theoretically controversial. Many liberal theorists are uneasy about collective actors; many others, in turn, just forget the question of the relationship between individual political agents and groups. Anti-liberals, on the other hand, have made much o f it. Evoking the Schmittian claims we saw in Chapter 2, one o f Mao Zedong’s key pieces of advice to political agents is for them to know who their friends and enemies are.1 Since it does seem intuitively obvious that communities, especially those in which we are thrown together with all sorts of characters-our scholarly colleagues, to continue the Kantian metaphor-do generate groups based on affection and dislike, but also on shared interests, shared histories, and ascription of shared characteristics, something needs to be said about those groups.
