Sirens of community.

Abstract

Recent books by Alan Bloom and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that liberal individualism is inadequate to a full moral existence. Bloom claims that our lives could be so much richer if we recognized the creative force of 'prejudices' and acknowledged that culture needs just such a creative force if it is to flourish. MacIntyre claims that individual identity is embedded in the particular cultural tradition of which each individual is a part. He goes on to develop the argument that each person's moral understanding is necessarily bounded by his own tradition and that moral membership in some such tradition is a precondition of being able to understand the moral arguments of any tradition. MacIntyre also argues that the language of moral debate suffers from meaning incommensurability because the underlying rationale for the arguments that are framed within each tradition reflect different beliefs about rationality. Both Bloom and MacIntyre can be interpreted in a way that depicts them as complementary members of a school of thought known as 'communitarianism'. This paper takes the view that the version of communitarianism formed by the conjunction of the major premises of Bloom and MacIntyre is based on an epistemological error. It begins with a brief exploration of the genesis of the concept of modern individualism using De Tocqueville as the point of departure. The paper attempts to illustrate the Tocquevillean theme of "freedom as interdependency" of rational individuals. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)