ABSTRACT
As we have seen, the appeal of community is extremely strong, and since the late
eighteenth century many social and political theorists have invoked one or another
conception of community to throw into relief what they have taken to be the baleful
effects of the economic market, the growth of the commercial spirit and the atomism of
liberal capitalist society. They have sought to articulate a vision of a way of life in which
individuals could be bound by more effective ties and more intimate relationships than
the predominant forms of social relationship within capitalism seemed to allow. It is
widely seen as a central failure of the liberal tradition of social and political thought that
it has failed, despite the efforts of Green and others, to provide an adequate conception of
overall community. In his widely read tract on ‘The Poverty of Liberalism’ (1970) Robert
Paul Wolff has argued that this failure to provide an adequate theory of community is one
of the roots of the poverty of the liberal tradition, and one that calls into question not just
liberal social theory but also its attenuated conception of human nature. Even as
sympathetic a critic as Kenneth Arrow has pointed to this gap in liberal theory (1972, p.
