ABSTRACT
The objectives of this chapter are twofold. First, I will outline the central tenets of communitarian thought in sociology (and related disciplines), and I will look at whom the communitarians are debating and why. In articulating the communitarian agenda I consider some of their contributions to social and moral theory and to our empirical understanding of contemporary American society. Second, I will evaluate critically the communitarian effort from two interrelated vantage points—one, the failure of communitarians to address the issues of human rights and, the other, the neglect of major empirical issues confronting members of U.S. society and humankind at large. This second objective requires that we introduce the human rights (in contrast to the ethicist) perspective and that we outline some of the major trends in the global setting that moral theory must come to address.
