ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the hypothesis of a correlation between two distinct crises in the human and social sciences. The one involves recent rich and vigorous attempts to articulate the set of conditions adequate and necessary to the constitution of a just society; the other attempts to account for the rise and expansion of the notion of community. We will argue that the evolution of these two discourses has always been intertwined, if not co-determinate, and that attention to this interrelation will cast light on our particular understanding of justice. The literature on rivalling theories of justice has, for the past 25 years,
sought to give an account of which principles best organize political and legal institutions relative to given social settings. The most schematic expression of this attempt is the so-called liberal-communitarian debate, reawakened in the aftermath of the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971. This terrain is well covered, and I will do no more here than sketch the contours of the controversy. In a nutshell, where liberals (the most conspicuous examples being Rawls and Dworkin), libertarians and utilitarians give the notion of individual rights a pre-eminent role in the foundation and legitimation of the notion of justice, communitarians (Taylor, Sandel, MacIntyre, Walzer) tend to reaffirm the common good as the essential foundation of the just society. It is clear that communities emerge, multiply and overlap. They produce
criss-crossing identities and loyalties. By the same token, the predicates that determine communities are not stable and the political bodies that represent them to both community members and non-members are not fixed. This sense of crisis, which emerges from variability of political community, corresponds to the rise of the idea of ‘multiculturalism’ and the notion of a multi-layered amalgamation of cultural and social identities known as ‘glocalization’. By virtue of a variety of global factors, cultural identity becomes more intermingled, making community boundaries more porous. Global awareness has given force to local legitimacy and cultural sovereignty. The local is legitimated against a wider global awareness by virtue of it being local. To what extent does this flourish in the question of community
correspond to the ascent of debate over the question of justice? In order to
reconstruct the relationship between community and justice, we begin by brief analyses of three sub-discourses of community: political, legal and moral. We will then turn to the recent debate around the concept of justice in order map its relation to the concept of community.
