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Communitarianism is a critique of liberal political philosophy — especially Rawlsian liberalism — that argues individuals are constituted by their communities, traditions, and social roles in ways that liberal theory ignores. Michael Sandel argues that Rawls's 'unencumbered self' behind the veil of ignorance is a fiction: we cannot bracket our deepest commitments and identities when reasoning about justice. Alasdair MacIntyre contends that liberal morality has lost its narrative coherence and that virtuous practice within traditions is the proper framework for ethics. Charles Taylor argues for the recognition of collective identities and cultural communities as preconditions for individual self-realization.
Read Sandel's critique in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice Ch. 1 and MacIntyre's After Virtue Ch. 14–15. Identify what each thinker finds missing in liberal theory, then ask: does communitarianism collapse into conservatism? Can it accommodate social criticism of one's own community?
To understand communitarianism, you need to hold Rawls's framework clearly in mind. Rawls asks you to imagine people behind a veil of ignorance — stripped of knowledge about their race, class, religion, talents, and conception of the good. From this "original position," they choose principles of justice that are fair because they are chosen without self-interested bias. The result is the difference principle and a conception of the self as prior to its ends: you are, fundamentally, a free and equal chooser who can assess any conception of the good from a neutral standpoint.
Michael Sandel's critique targets exactly this picture of the unencumbered self. His claim is that Rawls's person behind the veil of ignorance is a fiction — a self that has been stripped of everything that makes it a particular person. In reality, Sandel argues, we cannot separate ourselves from our deepest commitments, communal memberships, and social identities as if we were choosing them from the outside. If you are deeply Catholic, a member of a particular ethnic community, or committed to a particular set of virtues through a long tradition of practice, those aren't preferences you picked up after becoming a self — they partly *constitute* who you are. A liberal theory that asks you to bracket those commitments in the name of neutrality is asking you to be no one in particular.
Alasdair MacIntyre sharpens this with a focus on narrative. In *After Virtue*, he argues that modern liberal ethics has become incoherent because it has detached moral language from the practices and traditions that gave it meaning. Virtues are intelligible only in the context of a practice — a form of cooperative activity with internal standards of excellence — and a life is intelligible only as a narrative that extends from birth through death within a community. Moral agents are not isolated choosers but characters in ongoing stories that began before they were born. To understand what I should do, I must understand my role in a tradition, not what a stripped-down rational agent would choose behind a veil.
Charles Taylor contributes a different but related strand: the politics of recognition. Taylor argues that individual identity is dialogically formed — we become who we are through relationships with others who recognize us. This means that collective identities — being Québécois, belonging to a particular religious tradition, participating in a culture with its own language and practices — are not merely preferences but preconditions for authentic individual self-realization. A liberal state that insists on strict neutrality between ways of life fails to protect the communal contexts that make individual identity possible.
What should you notice about this debate? First, communitarianism is fundamentally a critique of liberal *assumptions*, not a fully worked alternative theory. Second, the communitarian challenge generated a serious response from Rawls: in *Political Liberalism*, he dropped the metaphysical claim that the original position reveals a deep truth about the human self and recast it as a political device for a pluralistic society. Whether this response fully answers the communitarian critique — or whether it simply concedes the metaphysical ground while preserving the political structure — remains contested, and that contest is the live edge of contemporary political philosophy.
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