Law Commons^™

Saving The Self?, Daniel R. Ortiz

Michigan Law Review

In a recent article, Law, Politics, and the Claims of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum accurately diagnoses one of the greatest problems in contemporary political and legal theory: the "complete confusion" about what communitarianism means.

Gardbaum's basic insight is, I think, both powerful and correct. We have been seeing contradiction and conflict where there often is none at all. As important and salutary as his account is, however, it deserves response. His taxonomy of communitarianism, the heart of his piece, well shows that communitarianism makes fundamentally different types of claims. It does not, however, make as many different kinds of …

Minority Cultures And The Cosmopolitan Alternative, Jeremy Waldron

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

I have chosen not to talk in this Article about the warning that Rushdie is sounding in his essay In Good Faith, but to discuss more affirmatively the image of the modern self that he conveys. Still, I hope that we do not lose sight of the warning. The communitarianism that can sound cozy and attractive in a book by Robert Bellah or Michael Sandel can be blinding, dangerous, and disruptive in the real world, where communities do not come ready-packaged and where communal allegiances are as much ancient hatreds of one's neighbors as immemorial traditions of culture.

Kitsch And Community, Kathryn Abrams

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsden, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, and Strong Democracy by Benjamin Barber, Exodus and Revolution by Michael Walzer