Abstract

The main goal of this essay is to bring the works of Merleau-Ponty to bear on the liberal/communitarian debate. His works antedate and in many ways anticipate the themes currently being raised by this debate. I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty comes between liberalism and communitarianism. On the one hand, he supports liberalism’s claim about the importance of individual rights, yet on the other hand, he supports communitarianism by claiming that without certain social and political communities, to which we owe allegiance, these rights would be non-existent.