Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Self-determination and community: the liberals and the
communitarians
Rawls’ liberal theory is best understood as a response to utilitarianism. Utilitarians
hold that justice consists in that which produces the greatest aggregate happiness
among the individual members of society. For liberals, utilitarianism is problematic
because it reduces society to the mere sum of individual utilities. Like Kant, they
contend that empirical principles, such as utilitarianism’s measurement of utility,
are not fit to serve as the basis of moral law. Utilitarianism does not recognize that
the individual is a rational choosing self who is always prior to the ends that she
pursues at a given moment. Human freedom depends on the individual’s ability to
stand back from her impulses and reassess her true ends through rational
deliberation. The individual must therefore be seen as an independent, autonomous
and rational rights-bearing subject, rather than the sum total of her fleeting desires.
Utilitarianism’s agnostic approach to ends goes too far for the Kantian liberals, for
it makes no distinction between those routes to aggregate happiness that respect
human rights and those that do not. The majority’s domination of a minority
could be considered the best course of action if it produced enough pleasure for
the majority.

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As a Kantian liberal, Rawls prioritizes individual rights and freedoms. Individuals
must be respected as ends in themselves; they must never be sacrificed to the
whims of the powerful. For Rawls, the best way to secure this fundamental respect
is to privilege individual rights over all other principles, including that of the
common good. His basic argument is that it is only from a position that is neutral
with respect to the common good that the primacy of individual rights can be
preserved. The citizen, from Rawls’ perspective, is a rights-bearing individual who
pursues her own self-interest within a minimal set of limits. Rawls strikes a balance
between the protection of individual rights and egalitarianism by removing only
those inequalities that disadvantage the least favored. The “social primary goods”—
liberty, opportunity, income, wealth and the bases of self-respect—are to be
distributed equally, or only unequally insofar as that inequality benefits the least
advantaged. Individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the common good, nor can
they be constructed on the basis of any substantial good. The individual cannot
be obliged to perform public service, for such an obligation would illegitimately
interfere with her personal liberty (Rawls 1971; Sandel 1984; Kymlicka 1990).
Invoking Aristotle’s conception of citizenship and Hegel’s critique of Kant,
the communitarians question the liberals’ individualism and their prioritization
of individual rights over the common good. The communitarians argue that we
cannot perceive our status as political persons without referring to our role as
citizens and participants in the life of a political community, and that we cannot
justify political frameworks without some reference to common goods and ends
(Sandel 1984:5). Because the self is at least partly constituted by the individual’s
bonds with others, these relations cannot be treated as instrumental means to an
individualistic end. Every identity is developed through dialogical relations between
the individual or social group and its communal others (Taylor 1992:31–2). Further,
some of these bonds take the form of allegiances and obligations that are inherited
by virtue of the ways in which the individual is positioned vis-à-vis her community’s
traditions. Socio-political relations therefore cannot be treated as if they were
freely chosen in a voluntaristic manner. Further, the assertion that each individual’s
network of social bonds is constitutive of identity should be understood in both
an ontological and moral sense. Allegiances and obligations are implicit in our
social bonds; we construct moral horizons out of these principles (Sandel 1982:150).
These horizons never dictate a specific outcome or demand perfect obedience,
but they nevertheless create basic reference points from which the individual
navigates her way through moral problems.
The communitarians do of course agree with the Kantian liberals insofar as the
latter attack utilitarianism’s characterization of the individual as the mere sum of
her desires. For the communitarians, however, the Kantian liberals’ critique of
utilitarianism results in the illegitimate detachment of the individual from her
political community. From the communitarians’ perspective, it makes no sense to
speak of the rational deliberations of an isolated individual, for the individual and
her goods are shaped by the roles that she plays in a specific community, and the
goods that are valued in her specific community are shaped in turn by the latter’s

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