Essay On Communitarianism

In many ways, Hegel's criticism of the universal notion of rights is shared by the communitarian philosophers. These thinkers hold that the problem with modern society is that people are estranged and fragmented from their communities and reduced to a series of competing individuals. This alienation of the individual from their community is precisely known as alienation, and is used by communitarian philosophers to critique the notion of economic and social liberalism. The individual in the communitarian model is not a pre-social given and the individual needs a relationship to society in order to gain a proper sense of identity at all. The division of a person from her community is percisely what leads to the series of political, moral and …show more content…
It it is entirely possible to have both the critical thinking, rational and autonomous individual coexisting with a society where one has an immediate identification with the community they find themselves within. For the Greeks, the individual's identity and the society he lived in were necessarily connected, our current society contains individuals and a collective that could potentially be reconciled. While communitarianism and Hegelianism share core similarities, communitarianism tends to reduce the individual to an aggregate of the …show more content…
By avoiding the extremes of both radical individualism and radical communitarianism, a more Hegelian approach could allow us to articulate a way in which the freedom of the individual is brought together with an overall sense of community. While it is unlikely that this has happened now, Hegel has given us the tools to allow us to articulate how something like this could occur. By providing a solid ontological basis for liberal values, we have a bulwark against the increasing threat of those who would like to destroy