ABSTRACT
The theme of “community” is one that pervades much that passes for political philosophy and social (and even legal) theory. That this is so is of course abundantly clear with respect to the philosophies of conservatism and communitarianism. Conservatism as a philosophy (as distinct from a political movement) is predicated on the existence of a social morality, a set of imperatives the form and substance of which transcend the moral concerns of those comprising the community; communitarianism as a political philosophy (again, distinct from any political movement that may seek to capitalize on the term), while in some senses antithetical to conservatism, none the less also accepts the predicate of the socially constituted – non-individuated – person. Each maintains a social ontology, i.e., each holds (to some extent) that society has an existence beyond that of the individuals comprising it, that the community is an organic whole that subsumes its constituent elements, and that the social, not the individual, is the unit of account.
