ABSTRACT
Stanley Hauerwas's challenge to what is commonly known as the liberal or Enlightenment Project is therefore fundamental to the development and plausibility of his theology and ecclesiology. As a means of illustrating the pathological and contradictory character of liberalism, this chapter first explores Hauerwas's treatment of medicine in liberal societies. Thereafter it places Hauerwas's perspective within the wider post-Enlightenment debate to determine whether his own agenda escapes the former's limitations, inadequacies and carceral qualities. Hauerwas's treatment of medical themes runs throughout his work, but is most explicitly expressed in Suffering Presence and Naming the Silences. Hauerwas asserts that Western medicine emerged from within a society which respected the community-specific character of caring and hence of medicine. This is precisely where liberalism's stress on individualism and tradition-free autonomy makes it very difficult for such medicine to survive with the internal moral goods that generated it.
