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PARTISAN REVIEW
Rawls's theory has been interpreted in various ways. Some find him
somewhat more concerned with community than he admits. Without entering
into this argument, I believe that Rawls's position remains primarily a rights–
oriented, individual-choice liberalism, although his work has become some–
what more communitarian over the years.
The rights-based ethic of liberalism, as articulated by Rawls and by
other noted CLP, including Ronald Dworkin in
Taking Rights Seriously,
and
Robert Nozick with
Anarchy, State, and Utopia,
has faced a recent, growing
challenge from the communitarian critics. Robert Thigpen and Lyle Downing,
in their essay, "Liberalism and the Communitarian Critique," for instance,
were concerned with "the presence of moral chaos and the absence of com–
mon purposes" in contemporary society, and Michael]. Sandel, in his book,
Liberalism and Its Critics,
wished to give "fuller expression to the claims of
citizenship and community than liberalism allows." They have faulted liberal
theory both for its conception of a freely-choosing, autonomous self, cut off
from all social moorings, and for its lifeless, impoverished conception ofcom–
munity and the common good.
MacIntyre, for example, in
After Virtue,
rejected the possibility of
theorizing about justice with an abstract selfas the subject:
... particularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated. The
notion of escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims
which belong
to
man as such, whether in its eighteenth-century Kan–
tian form or in the presentation of some modern analytical moral
philosophies is an illusion.
In
Liberalism and the Limits of justice,
Sandel argued that Rawls's
representative rational agent "fails plausibly to account for certain indispens–
able aspects of our °moral experience," because we are not, and cannot be,
entirely autonomous agents, "independent in the sense that our identity is
never tied to our aims and attachments." Sandel maintains that people are
always "situated" or "embedded" in a social context, and "encumbered" by
ties ofcommunity.
Communitarians are further troubled by what they see as a weak
conception of community and common good, or shared moral values. They
point out that the "strong" CLP (or libertarian) position holds that individuals'
ends are either competing or independent, "but not in any case complemen–
tary." To libertarians (among them, Nozick), social arrangements are essen–
tially "a necessary burden," and "the good ofcommunity consists solely in the
advantages individuals derive from cooperating in pursuit of their egoistic
ends."
True, for moderate CLP, the community is far more than a "necessary
