ABSTRACT
Liberalism, as a political ideology, might be thought to have reached a kind of apotheosis in the remark (possibly apocryphal) attributed to Margaret Thatcher, that there is 'no such thing as society, only individuals and their families'.1 What makes such aremark by an active politician so striking and seemingly significant is the way it appears to distil complex liberal thought down to its purest essence and to capture the fundamental metaphysical assumption at its heart: the detached individual, the autonomous locus of interests, to be understood independently of any particular context as that to which any complex of social relations is ultimately reducible. 2 For a philosopher there is, no doubt, something intensely gratifying in such a convergence of the metaphysical and the apparently practical concems of the ordinary politician on the streets, as it were. Doubly so if that philosopher is of communitarian persuasion, since it is precisely this conception of the self wh ich has been the focus of the philosophical struggle with liberal theory.
