Communitarian Liberal Watch

In the spirit of Russell Arben Fox‘s post from the other day, here are a couple of items of interest.

• “A Nation Divided: or, Ass Cleavage” from the hip new lefty mag n+1 argues that modesty in dress is something the left can get behind (no pun intended).
• This post from the New Donkey blog explores some of the tensions between “(social) libertarian liberals” and “communitarian liberals” over the issue of marketing corporate culture to kids.

The split, in a nutshell, is between those (the communitarians) who think the state, or the political community more broadly, has a stake in inculcating certain virtues in its citizens, or in restricting choices in the name of some kind of “common good” and those (the liberals) who think political intervention is justified primarily to prevent harm (where “harm” is supposed to be defined in some value-neutral way).

Liberals want the political community to remain, as much as possible, neutral between competing notions of the good life; they think the purpose of politics is to secure a framework within which people can pursue their own goals and projects, unconstrained by some socially imposed vision of the good. Communitarians think that such a “thin” notion of the aims of politics results in a society of extreme individualism and anomie.