ABSTRACT
Small-town America is home to communitarian sentimentality for a mythically pleasant past; the unreality of the preharmonized community is revealed in ever-recurring stories about the fate of those deemed “other” who wander, or move into the neighborhood. Of late liberal political theory has come under sustained attack by communitarian critics for its emphasis on individual rights and civil liberties rather than community rights and civic duties or responsibilities. Communitarian concerns maintaining a community’s cultural traditions, its way of life, its moral sense, and its conception of the social-natural order which sanctifies and through the law permits and prohibits certain self-constitutions all come together in Burger’s concurring opinion. Communitarians notoriously obscure the origins of the standards they valorize, often ideologize “community,” and certainly do not have in mind communities such as Camp Sister Spirit in Ovett, Mississippi, or the gay resorts of the Russian River Valley.
