ABSTRACT
Seeking satisfaction and realization away from society, the liberal individual, according to Emile Durkheim, is an anomic individual and, as such, amoral, for, Durkheim argued, morality is acquired only in society, in the very institutions and communitarian interdependencies diminished by the driving forces of liberalism. For liberals, the liberal individual is the quintessential moral individual. Liberal democratic capitalist societies, Durkheim claims at the end of the nineteenth century, are threatened by moral crisis, the most telling sign of which is the already prominent and growing presence of anomie. At the pre-conventional and conventional levels then, moral guides are drawn from external forces—from older, stronger, or more esteemed others, from peers, friends, teachers, and parents, and from the established conventions of the group or the society. The morality of care is the morality of the person in society, the person squarely situated in ongoing social relations, the maintenance of which is a primary moral task.
