The scene: it's the mid-1980s, and a group of politics tutors and graduate students are hunched around a table in a grotty, dimly lit college bar. The conversation is about new ideas, books, professors-academic gossip. A tutor turns to a graduate student "So, Simone, what is this about you being a Catholic? Do you really believe that stuff?" Before the student has time to speak, I, a new boy, eager to make an impression, jump in. "What Simone means is that her parents are Catholic, and in calling herself a Catholic, she is laying claim to a tradition that is constitutive of who she is." "No," said Simone, matter-of-factly, "that is not right. I believe God became Jesus Christ, who died for our sins."
"She is laying claim to a tradition that is constitutive of who she is." It seems incredible now, but that is how a lot of us talked then. We were, you see, "communitarians."
Communitarianism and I came of age at about the same time. My favourite communitarian, Charles Taylor, had published my favourite communitarian book, Hegel and Modern Society, early in 1979, in my last year at school. It had an overwhelming effect on me when I first read it. This was followed by Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981, Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), and Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983), the last two appearing while I was an undergraduate. It was exciting to find books that spoke to me, even more exciting to find that they spoke to leading thinkers as well-suddenly everyone was talking about "the liberal-communitarian debate." I still have a thick red box folder, bulging with articles, and several books with that name.
What was their-our-creed? It remained oddly elusive, but the communitarians defined themselves against liberals, who, it was claimed, undervalued community. By this they meant that liberals failed to understand how important communal identification was to people; they were forever surprised by the survival of such "irrational" forces as nationalism and religion. But there was more to it than that. Communitarians claimed that in making individual rights sovereign, liberals undermined community. We believed that liberals were, whether wittingly or not, agents of "atomisation"-they generated an "instrumental" view of the relation of the individual to the state. Liberals like Rawls, Dworkin and Kymlicka replied that they did not undervalue community-they merely believed that communal practices should meet certain basic liberal requirements.
The liberal-communitarian quarrel eventually petered out, although not before some high-ranking participants in it, invariably from the communitarian side, were invited to the White House and other powerspots, to air their views. I had lost interest by then. For, in the tradition of the ugly duckling, I woke up one day and realised that I was not a communitarian at all but a liberal. I can't quite account for my conversion. Doubtless, communitarianism's liberal critics had influenced me, but I flatter myself that I also learned from experience. My communitarianism had been, like that of most communitarians, a very abstract thing, and I found it pretty helpless in telling me how to think about concrete political issues. Indeed, I could not help noticing that on most of the issues that might have divided communitarians from liberals, I was on the side of the liberals. I did not think that the Christian "community" in the west, or Muslim "communities" elsewhere, had any right to tell gays or women how to live; I did not think that children should be educated in a slavish respect for tradition. I did believe that minority groups, like American Indians, or Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, had important claims against certain governments, but I came to believe that they could be justified on liberal grounds. Though like the communitarians, I was opposed to the development of a "litigious culture," I found I could see the point to many individual litigations, especially when they advanced the position of the weak. More than anything, I discovered that even if one permitted an appeal to "community" it did not, generally, get one very far. Most of us are members of myriad communities that make conflicting demands. How does the injunction, "Live in accordance with the traditions of your community," help the man advertised as "black, gay, Christian, likes city walks, cooking pasta," in the back of Time Out.
The issues are more complicated than this-and there is much I have learned from Charles Taylor and associates. Liberals have, historically, failed to appreciate the importance of national and communal belonging-they are still inclined to dream, although more sheepishly now, of a world without nations, religions or irrational traditions. But I look back on my communitarian phase with a twinge of embarrassment.
What was it that made me, and my friends, feel the attraction of this romantic creed? It had something to do with the times. Thatcherism was heartless, socialism discredited and communitarianism filled the gap. It had something to do with our age. And it had something to do with the laws of intergenerational conflict. We thought of liberalism as the creed of our parents' generation. We associated it with the optimistic, permissive values of the 1960s, or rather with their progeny-with tower blocks, divorce, and pollution. We thought we could do better.
