Communitarian Critiques: Sandel, MacIntyre, and Walzer

Michael Sandel, in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982, Cambridge University Press), mounted an influential communitarian critique of Rawls's theory by attacking its underlying conception of the person. Sandel argued that the original position presupposes an "unencumbered self," a subject that exists prior to and independent of any particular ends, attachments, or communal ties, capable of standing back from all of its values and commitments in order to choose principles of justice from behind the veil of ignorance. Sandel contended that this picture of the self is incoherent, since real persons are partly constituted by their communal attachments — family, religious community, nation, tradition — such that some ends and commitments are not merely chosen objects the self happens to hold, but are constitutive of who that self is, an "encumbered self" that Rawlsian liberalism, Sandel argued, cannot properly accommodate.