Saving the self?

• Author: Ortiz, Daniel R.
• Position: Response to Stephen A. Gardbaum, Michigan Law Review, vol. 90, p. 685, 1992

In a recent article, Law, Politics, and the Claims of Community,(1) Stephen A. Gardbaum accurately diagnoses one of the greatest problems in contemporary political and legal theory: the "complete confusion"(2) about what communitarianism means. Not only do its critics disagree about its content, but, as Gardbaum shows, communitarians themselves fail to comprehend that communitarianism makes several different kinds of claims. Most important, communitarians often fail to see that some communitarian claims can actually underwrite liberalism and defend it from other traditional communitarian critiques. Simply put, Gardbaum argues that much of the communitarian-liberal debate, probably the central debate in political and legal theory for the past twenty years, is no debate at all. Much of the participants' disagreement, though sharp, is only apparent and stems from conceptual misunderstanding. Instead of arguing about the nature, source, and character of human political identity, we have simply been talking past one another all these years.(3)

Gardbaum's basic insight is, I think, both powerful and correct.(4) We have been seeing contradiction and conflict where there often is none at all. As important and salutary as his account is, however, it deserves response. His taxonomy of communitarianism, the heart of his piece, well shows that communitarianism makes fundamentally different types of claims. It does not, however, make as many different kinds of claims as he suggests; it makes two different types of claims, no more than that. This disagreement may appear a quibble, but by proliferating the claims of community Gardbaum threatens to confuse further the very debate he seeks to clarify and, more important, to undercut some of his own quite powerful insights.

To see the dangers to which this proliferation leads, we must first understand each of the different types of communitarian claims Gardbaum identifies and how he believes they relate to one another. To Gardbaum, communitarianism encompasses three very different claims. These are "(1) community as a causal factor in the constitution of personal identity (antiatomism); (2) community as a particular substantive value (strong communitarianism); and (3) community as the source of value (metaethical communitarianism)."(5) The deep confusion of communitarianism stems from people's not realizing that "the[se] three communitarian claims are independent of each other and are not . . . necessarily...