Individualism, communitarianism and consensus

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 105-120

  Lehrer, Keith ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Aggregation; Communitarianism; Connectedness; Consensus; Convergence; Enlightenment; Individualism; Interpersonal unity; Liberalism; Robert Gordin; Self; Weights

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950056168     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1011925405156     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Robert E. Goodin, "Review Article: Communities of Enlightenment," British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998), p. 531. All quotations from Goodin are to this article and footnotes within quotations are due to Goodin.
2. Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" The Philosophy of Kant, trans. and ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Random House, 1949; originally published 1784), pp. 132-139, esp. Section 2.
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971)
4. and "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," The Journal of Philosophy 11 (1980), pp. 515-572.
5. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso/New Left Books, 1979). The Enlightenment conception was indeed a conception of man, and man alone, however.
6. Goodin, p. 532. For some articulations of communitarianism, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
7. and "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self," Political Theory 12 (1984), pp. 81-96.
8. Alasdair C. Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989).
10. Cf. also, Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
11. The communitarian argument has been reviewed effectively in many other places already, e.g.: Amy Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985), pp. 308-322;
12. Will Kymlicka, "Communitarianism," Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 199-237;
13. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996);
14. and Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Brighton: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993).
15. See also two important compilations collecting key contributions to this debate: Michael J. Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984);
16. and Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (eds.), Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651).
18. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; originally published 1690).
19. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner and W.B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; originally published 1776).
20. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: John Noon, 1739)
21. and Aw Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London: Cadell, 1777).
22. Goodin, p. 535.
23. Taylor, Sources of the Self, Part I.
24. Goodin, p. 551.
25. Goodin, p. 554.
26. Taylor, p. 181.
27. Thus, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 175-181.
28. Goodin, p. 558.
29. For weaker sufficient conditions for convergence, see Keith Lehrer and Carl Wagner, Rational Consensus in Science and Society: A Philosophical and Mathematical Study (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel Publishing Co., 1980).