Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Idea of a Communitarian Morality

1987; UC Berkeley School of Law; Volume: 75; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3480588

1942-6542

Philip Selznick,

Political Philosophy and Ethics

During the past few years, and especially since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981, we have seen a renewed attack on the premises of liberalism.'There is nothing new about such criticism.A long list of writers-Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and many others, including several Popes-have recoiled in various ways from what seemed to be an impoverished morality and an inadequate understanding of human society.The contemporary criticism has raised some new issues and has been sparked, in no small degree, by a spate of impressive writing in legal, moral, and social philosophy-writing that has reaffirmed the liberal faith in moral autonomy and in the imperatives of rationality.I refer, of course, to the work of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin.The new critics are called communitarian, an echo of similar views expressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by English liberals like John A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, and American pragmatists, especially John Dewey.Yet the communitarian idea is vague; in contemporary writing it is more often alluded to and hinted at than explicated.Furthermore, there are communitarians on both left and right.The quest for a communitarian morality is a meeting ground for conservatives, socialists, anarchists, and more ambiguously, welfare liberals.Serious issues of social policy are at stake.It seems important, therefore, to explore what a communitarian morality may entail.For if we shoot these arrows of the spirit we should know, as best we can, where they will light.The most interesting aspect of this new writing is the tension it reveals within contemporary or welfare liberalism.Among welfare liberals-for whom Rawls and Dworkin are philosophical spokesmen-we