The Communitarian Critique of Rawls

Liberalism vs communitarianism. Liberalism: the individual is prior, liberty primary, right prior to good, the common good often the sum of individual goods. Communitarianism: the individual is situated in community, identity shaped by language, history, religion, family and culture, the good prior to right, the common good more than a sum of private interests. Will Kymlicka: “Communitarians believe that the value of community is not sufficiently recognized in liberal theories of justice, or in the public culture of liberal societies.” The core objection: Rawls imagines an isolated, abstract, unencumbered self, whereas real persons are embedded and moral choices cannot be made outside community.

“To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments…is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character.”

Michael Sandel

Michael Walzer’s definition: “Complex equality means that no citizen’s standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good.” Criticism of Walzer: no reliable method to compare income, wealth, reputation, power, education and health; a strong ethical vision but a weak political mechanism.

Assessment. The critique shows justice cannot ignore culture, that identity is socially formed and the neutral state is not fully neutral. Its limit: community norms may preserve hierarchy, patriarchy, caste or authority, so cultural recognition must still answer liberty and equality. In multicultural societies the debates on religious freedom, personal law, the Uniform Civil Code, the Shah Bano case and the Shayara Bano case show the tension between universal equality and community identity. Rawls answers in Political Liberalism through the political conception, reasonable pluralism and overlapping consensus.

Michael Walzer — complex equality

In Spheres of Justice (1983), Michael Walzer offers a communitarian alternative to universal theories of distributive justice. He rejects any single metric — welfare, resources or capabilities. Social goods carry different meanings; different goods need different principles; no single principle fits all spheres.

Complex equality “No citizen’s standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good.”

• Distinct social goods — family resources, wages and political office each follow their own logic.
• Autonomous principles — politics, economy, education, family, honour, love and rights each have a separate criterion.
• Blocked exchanges — money may buy a car but not a judge’s verdict; wealth must not buy power; votes are not for sale. “It isn’t only equality but freedom, too, that we defend when we block a large number of possible exchanges.”

Virtue: prevents tyranny (no monopoly in one sphere dominating the rest), promotes plural justice, protects equal citizenship — no citizen becomes an all-round loser.

Criticism & support

• Caste in India produces social, cultural, economic and political inequality at once — cumulative inequality defeats sphere separation; early social capital spills across spheres.
• Brian Barry — social meanings are necessary for distribution but may not be sufficient; Walzer replies that complex equality is future-oriented.
• David Miller supports it — an order in which “specific inequalities… do not crystallise into judgments of overall personal worth, and barriers of class do not stand in the way of mutual understanding and sympathy.”