Abstract

Whether liberalism may incorporate a strongly situated conception of the self is the main question posed in this paper. That it may, and in so doing counter an important element of the communitarian critique of liberalism, is its central thesis. Drawing primarily upon the work of Paul Ricoeur and John Dewey, I articulate and defend a conception of the self as a narrated and self-narrating agent. Moral selfhood is properly conceived as at once socially constituted and, in keeping with liberalism, capable of critical distantiation from the traditions and forms of community life within which it stands