Aneta Gawkowska

Taking Community Seriously Communitarian Critiques of Liberalism

The book presents an analysis of five major communitarian critiques of liberalism. Particular communitarians (A. Etzioni, M. Walzer, M. Sandel, Ch. Taylor, A. MacIntyre), though not all of them identify themselves with this label, are treated as such due to their various theoretical and/or practical attempts to restore vitality to the concept of community in contemporary social and political discourse. They managed to stimulate interesting debates about the problems of individualistic liberalism. However, despite substantial differences between their critiques, all of them fall prey to various weaknesses typical for standpoints they criticize, e.g. the assumption of the perennial conflict of values or lack of the objective moral order, which eventually makes individualism inevitable. Thus, though the communitarians take community more seriously than liberals, they do not take it seriously enough. They accept some of the fundamental liberal assumptions rather than change them on the basis of the existence of actual communities which can be observed in the social reality.