ABSTRACT
My title is meant to suggest two things about communitarianism. The first is that there is a lot of it around. I am not sure which political philosopher was the first to say ‘I am a communitarian’ in the way that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon founded the (self-conscious) anarchist tradition when he wrote, in 1840, ‘I am an anarchist’, but what is certain is that by the mid-1980s it was becoming common to speak of communitarianism as an ideological rival to liberalism; 1 soon after that, indeed, with the political collapse of socialism, and the passage of most conservatives into the libertarian New Right, as the main or only ideological rival. In political philosophy we learnt to talk of a liberal-communitarian debate—an idea that I shall be looking at critically in a moment. Not long after, there appeared a political movement of communitarians. There was the Communitarian Network founded by Etzioni, with threads stretching outwards from Washington to connect to chapters in European and other liberal democracies. 2 Politicians of the centre-left—Clinton and Blair, for instance—began regularly to invoke community in their speeches. And this seemed to catch the spirit of the age, which was preoccupied with issues such as crime and social order, drug abuse, homelessness, problems for which ‘more community’ in some sense seemed to offer a solution.
