ABSTRACT
Communitarians argue that the one-sided emphasis on rights in liberalism is related to the individual as a ‘disembodied self’ who has been uprooted from cultural meanings, community attachments, and the life stories that constitute the full identities of real human beings. Dominant liberal theories of justice, as well as much of economic and political theory, presume such a self (see Etzioni, 1993). Communitarians, in contrast, shift the balance and argue that the ‘I’ is constituted through the ‘We’ in a dynamic tension. Significantly, this is not, in terms of this purist form of communitarianism, an argument for the restoration of traditional community with high levels of mechanical solidarity, repressive dominance of the majority or the patriarchal
family although some on the conservative fringes do take up that position. Mainstream communitarians are, in fact, critical of community institutions that are authoritarian and restrictive and that cannot bear scrutiny within a larger framework of human rights and equal opportunities and they accept the (post)modern condition that we are located within a complex web of pluralistic communities – or organic solidarity – with genuine value conflicts within them and within selves.
