ABSTRACT
There is an affinity between communitarianism and several other current intellectual-political tendencies, for they are influenced by the same Zeitgeist. Social conservatives bewailing the alleged moral decline of the nation since the sixties strike some of the same notes, although the communitarians have avoided their more rabid jeremiads. The neo-Tocquevillian advocates of “civil society” are also plowing much the same furrow as the communitarians in voicing alarm over the decline of civility in America and in the membership of voluntary associations. And on the left the partisans of multiculturalism, in their commitment to a politics of identity, also extol community-albeit at the level of racial, ethnic, and gender subgroups within the larger society. As for identity politics, its partisans have specifically asserted the primacy of social identities shaped by membership of groups into which one is bom, at the expense of “universalist” commitments to the larger heterogeneous society.
