Depth: Foundation
Shared questions
- How do communities, practices, and traditions shape agency and judgments about justice?
- Can political principles remain neutral among competing accounts of the good life?
Internal disagreements
- The label gathers distinct arguments and is contested by some associated thinkers, especially MacIntyre; they also disagree about whether critique points toward civic renewal, tradition, or a more radical rejection of the modern state.
Key texts
- After Virtue · 1981 — MacIntyre diagnoses modern moral argument through practices, traditions, and emotivism.
- Liberalism and the Limits of Justice · 1982 — Sandel challenges the conception of the person he finds in Rawlsian liberalism.
Scholarly notes
A retrospective and disputed grouping · resolved
Communitarianism names a debate more reliably than a shared program. MacIntyre has rejected the label, while Sandel's early critique is commonly placed within the liberal-communitarian debate.