ABSTRACT
Very different arguments, using very different concepts of community, have been used to attack liberal tolerance in different ways. Each of these arguments uses the concept of community in an increasingly more substantial and less reductive way. Some liberals have thought that liberal tolerance can be fully justified by John Stuart Mill's harm principle, which holds that the state may properly restrain someone's liberty only to prevent his harming others, not himself. The argument of paternalism begins in the attractive idea that a true political community must be more than a Hobbesian association for mutual benefits. But people depend on community in ways that go beyond these evident economic and security benefits. The illiberal argument from integration assumes that a political community has a life that includes a sex life. But people can try to make the idea of liberal community more attractive by identifying aspects of the good life that are made possible in a just state.
