Liberal political philosophy presupposes a moral theory according to which the ability to assess and choose conceptions of the good from a universal and impartial moral standpoint is central to the individual's moral identity. This viewpoint is standardly understood by liberals as that of a rational human (not transcendental) agent. Such an agent is able to reflect on her ends and pursuits, including those she strongly identifies with, and to understand and take into account the basic interests of others. From the perspective of liberalism as a political morality, the most important of these interests is the interest in maximum, equal liberty for each individual, and thus the most important moral principles are the principles of justice that protect individuals' rights to life and liberty.

According to the communitarian critics of liberalism, however, the liberal picture of moral agency is unrealistically abstract. Communitarians object that moral agents in the real world neither choose their conceptions of the good nor occupy a universalistically impartial moral standpoint. Rather, their conceptions of the good are determined chiefly by the communities in which they find themselves, and these conceptions are largely “constitutive” of their particular moral identities. Moral agency is thus “situated” and “particularistic,” and an impartial reflection on the conception of the good that constitutes it is undesirable, if not impossible. Further, communitarians contend, the good is “prior” to the right in the sense that moral norms are derived from, and justified in terms of, the good. An adequate moral and political theory must reflect these facts about moral agency and moral norms.

Philoctetes was a good man and a good soldier. When he was on his way to Troy to fight alongside the Greeks, he had a terrible misfortune. By sheer accident he trespassed in a sacred precinct on the island of Lemnos. As punishment he was bitten on the foot by the serpent who guarded the shrine. His foot began to ooze with foul-smelling pus, and the pain made him cry out curses that spoiled the other soldiers' religious observances. They therefore left him alone on the island, a lame man with no resources but his bow and arrows, no friends but the animals who were also his food.

Ten years later, according to Sophocles' version of the story, they come to bring him back: for they have learned that they cannot win the war without him. The leaders of the expedition think of Philoctetes as a tool of their purposes; they plan to trick him into returning, with no empathy for his plight. The Chorus of soldiers, however, has a different response. Even before they see the man, they imagine vividly what it is like to be him– and they enter a protest against the callousness of the commanders:

For my part, I pity him– thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no resources to meet his daily needs. How in the world does the poor man survive?

Let me begin with what should be a reassuring thought, and one that may serve as a corrective to presumptions that sometimes characterize political philosophy. The possibility, which Aquinas and Madison are both concerned with, of wise and virtuous political deliberation resulting in beneficial and stable civil order, no more depends upon possession of aphilosophical theory of the state and of the virtues proper to it, than does the possibility of making good paintings depend upon possession of an aesthetic theory of the nature and value of art.

The primary concern of this essay is with the question “What is a political community?” This question is important in its own right. Arguably, the main purpose of political philosophy is to provide an account of the nature of political association and, in so doing, to describe the relations that hold between the individual and the state. The question is also important, however, because of its centrality in contemporary debate about liberalism and community.

Around the world, multiethnic states are in trouble. Many have proven unable to create or sustain any sense of solidarity across ethnic lines. The members of one ethnic group are unwilling to respect the rights of the members of other groups, or to make sacrifices for them, and have no trust that any sacrifice they might make will be reciprocated.

Recent events show that where this sort of solidarity and trust is lacking, the consequences can be disastrous. In some countries, the result is violent civil war, as in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and various parts of the former Soviet Union. In other countries, the state has dissolved in a more peaceful way, as in Czechoslovakia, albeit with significant economic and psychological costs. In yet other countries, particularly in Africa, the state has stayed together, but is little more than a shell, a loose confederation of more or less hostile groups who barely tolerate, let alone cooperate with, each other.

Is capitalism inimical to community? Yes, say communitarians, a large part of whose body of writing is given over to the elaboration and defense of various forms of this thesis. The aim of the present essay is to contest this answer. Not only, I will argue, is there no good reason for supposing capitalism inimical to community, but there is reason to think it more conducive to community than are the feasible alternatives to it.

Richard Rorty is one of the principal architects of a new way of thinking about liberalism. He calls his way “liberal ironism”: it is a postmodern liberalism, without Enlightenment rationalism, without the hopeless and finally enervating aspiration to discover an a historical philosophical foundation (“natural rights”) for liberal principles and practices. The postmodern liberal ironist, unlike the classical liberal rationalist, “faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” says Rorty, including the characteristic liberal belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Such postmodern liberals frankly admit the apparently unhappy consequence of that essential “contingency,” that “there is no neutral, noncircular way to defend” liberal ways, no good argument to deploy against “Nazi and Marxist enemies of liberalism”; but no such argument is needed, says Rorty, since loyalty to one's own community is morality enough, even where that loyalty is without foundation. Here, I begin with a few words about Rorty's postmodern liberalism, as preface to a discussion of the effects of postmodern doctrines on liberal moral psychology.

My purpose in this essay is to give an account of the kind of robust social criticism that I associate with the very enterprise of theory and to explain why the liberal philosophy that prevails in the contemporary academy is averse to this sort of social criticism. My purpose, then, is both to explore a certain conception of radical socialtheory and to defend this conception against familiar objections posed by those who represent the dominant liberal political philosophy.

In recent years many people have suggested that rights come from traditions. More particularly, many people interested in American constitutional law have said that constitutional rights should be developed with close reference to American traditions. In this essay, I mean to challenge these claims. I argue that the enterprise of defining rights, including constitutional rights, should not be founded on an inquiry into tradition. Traditions should be assessed, not replicated. I also try to unpack some of the complexities in the idea that rights should be based on traditions.

The topic is highly relevant to the debate over “communitarianism.” Manycommunitarians appear to be traditionalists, at least implicitly; they are concerned to defend social practices against abstract, acontextual claims about what is to be done, or about “rights.” It is important to ask why and when communitarians believethat a community's practices deserve insulation from rights–based claims. Often the best or most interesting answer has a Burkean dimension. It involves the extent to which a community—perhaps a local community resisting national efforts, perhaps a nation resisting international goals—owes its practices to long traditions that, precisely because of their longevity, might seem to make special sense. Ideas of this sort might be thought to have special strength when we think about rights in general or about constitutional rights in particular.

For people to live together in pluralistic communities, they must find someway to cope with the practices of others that they abhor. For that reason, tolerance has always seemed an appealing medium of accommodation. But tolerance also has its critics. One wing charges that the tolerant are too easygoing. They are insensitive to evil in their midst. At the same time, another wing attacks the (merely) tolerant for being too weak in their sentimentsof respect. “The Christian does not wish to be tolerated,” as T. S. Eliot said; and by this he meant to claim, presumably, that the Christian desires respect and acceptance, and not merely the forbearance suggested by “tolerance.”

To make the case for tolerance, we must engage in a three-front campaign: first, against intolerance; second, against the moral failing of indifference; and third, against the desirability of respecting and accepting everyone. The central claim in making this case will be that unlike these three competing sentiments, tolerance is a complex attitude toward the behavior and beliefs of others. Its complexity consists in both moral disapproval (or atleast cultural rejection) and the avoidance of interference. If there is a case to be made for tolerance, it must derive from this peculiar complexity. After surveying its alternatives, I will argue that the complex sentimentof tolerance is more readily praised than its alternatives.

Although liberals too often forget it, the health of the liberal publicorder depends on our ability to constitute not only political institutions and limits on power, but appropriate patterns of social lifeand citizen character. Liberal character traits and political virtuesdo not, after all, come about “naturally” or by the deliverance of an “invisible hand.” Even Adam Smith did not think that, as we will see below. Harry Eckstein gets closer to themark by suggesting that “stable governments…are the productof 'accidental' (extremely improbable) conjunctions of conditions which do sometimes, but rarely, occur in actual societies.”

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed.

Americans do not much like either one. President Clinton's callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how America's decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector (well represented in Congress) against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates.

With the development of the division of labor, the household has declined in importance as a unit of economic production. Yet even as the individual wage earner has assumed a central place in modern exchange economies, the household has still been seen as an important unit of distribution, in which wage earners provide for their non-income-producing family members. With the breakdown of the family in recent decades, however, the communal income-sharing function of the family has, in significant part, been taken overby the state.

In this essay, I examine this fundamental change in the structure of production and distribution in modern exchange economies. Going beyond this, I propose a new structure of markets–markets for rights to influence collective decision-making within a society. Such markets, I suggest, wouldprovide a source of income for each member of the society.