Communitarian Defenses of National Particularity

Communitarian political philosophy emerged in the 1980s largely as a critical response to the abstract, ahistorical individualism of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), and its arguments were quickly extended into the nationalism-cosmopolitanism debate to defend the moral significance of particular national and communal attachment against cosmopolitan universalism. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) and his 1984 Lindley Lecture "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" argue that moral reasoning is never conducted from a standpoint outside all particular traditions and communities, since the very concepts and standards by which we reason morally — what MacIntyre, drawing on Aristotle, calls the "narrative unity" of a life embedded within socially inherited "practices" and traditions — are themselves inherited from a specific historical community with its own language, history, and moral vocabulary; MacIntyre thus argues that patriotism, properly understood as loyalty to the particular community that constitutes one's very capacity for moral agency, is not merely permissible but a genuine virtue, one that a rootless, purely universalist cosmopolitan ethic cannot adequately explain or accommodate.