Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

particular moral tradition (Sandel 1984:5–6; Maclntyre 1981). The self is not
atomistic but a situated communal self whose ends are always shaped by communal
allegiances, obligations, traditions and values. Where Kantian liberals construct
philosophical worlds of universal maxims, in which the individual is stripped of
her socially-acquired moral compass, the communitarians dismiss those worlds as
ideal spaces that do not help us to understand actual historical conditions. Rawls’
stripped self in the original position becomes, for the communitarians, a non-self.
The communitarians insist that there would be no contradiction between
individual liberty and the obligations of the citizen in an ideal state. The individual
only realizes her self-determination insofar as she participates fully in deliberation
about the public good. This implies, in turn, that the best regime cannot be neutral
with respect to values. Given that good deliberation requires an individual who
has developed civic virtues, such as recognition of the importance of public service
and respect for the rights of others, then the best polity would be one in which
individuals were encouraged to cultivate these virtues. The neutral regime favored
by the Kantian liberals cannot safeguard individuals’ genuine freedom precisely
because “it cannot sustain the kind of political community and civic engagement
that liberty requires” (Sandel 1996:24).
For the communitarians, each member of a community is always morally
oriented with respect to communal traditions. As a member of a household, a
movement, a community or a nation at a specific historical moment, one is always
more or less positioned within their respective narratives. Every individual is in
this sense a bearer of a tradition: she inherits a set of communally-and historically-
determined debts, obligations, rights and privileges. If, for example, the individual
is placed in the role of the citizen, then her good must consist, at least in part, in
the good that is proper to a citizen. If, furthermore, citizenship in her nation-state
has been historically won through the violation of the rights of others, then she
inherits not only a set of citizenship rights, but also an obligation to the peoples
who have suffered that violation (Maclntyre 1981; Sandel 1982:150; 1984:6). An
individual may owe special responsibilities to “members of those communities
with which [her] own community has some morally relevant history, such as the
morally burdened relations of Germans to Jews, of American whites to American
blacks, or of England and France to their former colonies” (Sandel 1996:15). When
the Kantian liberals describe social duties as obstacles to individual liberty, their
communitarian critics respond by invoking the principle of republican citizenship,
namely the idea that individual liberty can be maximized through public service
and the prioritization of the common good over the pursuit of individualistic
interests (Skinner 1992:217).