Value Pluralism and Communitarianism
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Value Pluralism and Communitarianism George Crowder School of Political and International Studies, Flinders University, Sturt Road, Bedford Park, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
Some theorists have argued recently that Berlinian value pluralism points not to liberalism, as Berlin supposed, but, in effect, to some form of communitarianism. To what extent is this true, and, to the extent that it is true, what kind of communitarianism fits best with the pluralist outlook? I argue that pluralists should acknowledge community as an important source of value and as a substantial value in itself, but they should also be prepared to question traditions and to respect values other than community. In particular, pluralism points to personal autonomy as playing a special role when we must choose among incommensurable goods in conflict. Consequently, the pluralist outlook is at odds with conservative communitarianisms that tend to place existing traditions beyond question, and with radical variants of communitarianism, such as Marxism and classical anarchism, which look forward to future communities in which the need to cope with hard public choices has largely been eliminated. Rather, Berlinian pluralism fits best with a liberal or moderate kind of communitarianism that balances community with other goods, especially personal autonomy. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 405–427. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300249 Keywords: value pluralism; communitarianism; liberalism
Pluralism in Isaiah Berlin’s sense is the idea that fundamental human values are irreducibly multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes incommensurable.1 Berlin believed that pluralism has a natural affinity with liberalism. Pluralism, he thought, obliges us to confront hard choices among conflicting incommensurable values, choices best made in the spaces of personal liberty that liberals’ universal principles guarantee. More recently, however, thinkers like John Gray have argued, in effect, that pluralism suggests an approach to politics that is closer to the themes of communitarian writers than to those of liberal universalists (Gray, 1993, 1995a, b, 2000a, b). The hard choices of pluralism, Gray has sometimes insisted, can be resolved rationally only within the context of an existing moral or cultural tradition. This emphasis on local context (present to some degree in Berlin too) seems to intersect with the familiar communitarian stress on the ‘situated self’ and the role of the particular community as the principal source from which people derive their values. This contextualism, in turn, might be taken to imply that we should be concerned
George Crowder Value Pluralism and Communitarianism
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for community not only as a source but also as an object of value, the matrix within which people form the understandings and commitments they need to negotiate clashes among incommensurable goods. Perhaps, then, it is communitarianism rather than liberalism that is the better political expression of a pluralist v
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