ABSTRACT
Communities require the minimal conditions of justice laid down by society in order to work; but as they are in practice more emotional, historical or intimate relationships, they cannot be seen as the same thing as society. Community, and the society surrounding it, thus serve and protect the individual. For Rawls, these ideas revolve around the notion of distributive justice, which concerns how justice is organised according to the distribution of wealth, resource and opportunity within a community or society. Rawls thus argues that the purpose of community is to value liberal freedom, while maintaining a duty to the wellbeing of all. The problem with both liberalism and communitarianism, Nancy suggests, is that by reducing community to either principle, which both propose an account of community that is self-contained and undivided, author in fact undermine the basic sense of communal together-ness that relates people to each other in the first place.
