ABSTRACT
As a political theory, "communitarianism" must primarily be identified via negativa, that is less in terms of the positive social and political philosophy it offers than in light of the powerful critique of liberalism it has developed. The authors isolate two major issues of contention between communitarianism and critical social theory: The critique of the "Unencumbered Self" and the Priority of the Right over the Good; The Politics of Community and the Integrationist vs. Participatory Responses to Modernity. When Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer emphasize that the appropriate setting for justice is the political association itself, and that it is on basis of shared understandings entertained by members of such a community that the people have to proceed to think about justice, they follow the integrationist line. The distinction between these two modes of approaching the problems of modernity and politics allows the reader to see more clearly the relation between Habermas’s work and some contemporary communitarian projects.
