ABSTRACT
Idealism, the philosophical position which claims that reality is not ultimately reducible to nor explicable in material terms, fell out of favour at least partly due to empirical considerations and, specifically, World War I. The kinds of philosophical projects that became popular after World War I—moral intuitionism, existentialism, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology—reacted against the systematic, speculative, and holistic nature of idealism and represented negations of that community-and metaphysics-based model. Idealism offers a middle ground to talk about a ‘common good’ that does not collapse into simple majoritarianism nor depend upon national or ethnic group identities. This chapter offers some preliminary thoughts about community inspired but not exhausted by idealism, hoping that these insights into ‘community’ as a set of relations and as the site of individuation might generate further conversation in both academic and political arenas.
