Abstract

Communitarianism is one of the main critics of moral-political theory of liberalism. According to communitarians, liberalism presupposes an image of human identity which does not do justice to the collective ties between human being. It ignores altruist duties and common loyalties to traditional, historical values by inappropriately insisting on priority of justice from an individualist point of view, culminating in advent of ignoble, egoist characters unfamiliar with collective values. In this essay, firstly, I would elaborate these critiques and then try to answer them from Richard Rorty's point of view. Though Rorty agrees with the communitarians' claim that community makes a constitutive contribution to the identity of individuals, he believes that the pragmatist pole of contemporary liberalism is not subject to the communitarian objections. He tries to show that 20th century political liberalism, best formulated by John Dewy and John Rawls, is immune to communitarian critiques because of its consistency with historicism and ethnocentrism.