ABSTRACT
Social critics in the United States have begun only recently to discuss seriously the lack of common obligation. Community of choice, of social obligation to selected strangers, is a reality for many upper- and middle-class individuals in North American society, who participate actively in voluntary groups and sub-cultural activities unconnected with their family lives, their ethnicity, or their religion. Social democracy demands all those aspects of civil and political rights that both right and left communitarians disregard as socially divisive and inherently individualistic. Canada lies between the United States and Western Europe in the extent of its commitment to social democracy. The extremist varieties of communitarianism—right and left—threaten the liberal basis of North American society. The liberal stress on individual rights therefore remains the appropriate basis for the entire conception of human rights. In liberal human rights practice culture is a matter of individual choice.
