Introductory

One major way of capturing the liberal–communitarian debate is in terms of Sandel's dichotomous classification of “politics of rights” as opposed to “politics of the common good.” Liberal politics of rights is premised on the Kantian claim that the right is prior to the good. Communitarians question that claim and ground the politics of the common good in a conception of the good life while claiming Hegel and Aristotle as their intellectual resources. According to this classification liberals fail to (and indeed cannot) recognize a genuine shared common good.

In a vigorous response to communitarian criticism Holmes argues that liberals hold “an emphatic conception of the common good.” Because they are pluralists, liberals, he holds, do not provide a definition of “the good life” as opposed to “the bad life”; but they do provide an obligatory distinction between “right action” and “wrong action”: “Rightness … defines the liberal conception of the common good.” Though pronounced in response to communitarian criticism, that liberal conception of the common good is not entirely new.

Interestingly, Taylor makes a similar claim from a communitarian-republican standpoint. He recognizes that because “[t]he ethic central to liberal society is ethic of the right, rather than the good,” “procedural liberalism” cannot recognize “a socially endorsed conception of the good;” but liberalism can and does endorse a conception of common good in terms of the right.

The liberal–communitarian dualism is, therefore, no longer between politics of rights and politics of the common good, but rather between two rival, liberal and communitarian-republican, conceptions of the common good.