Autonomy vs. Solidarity: Liberal, Totalitarian and Communitarian Traditions

Abstract

This article examines how liberal, totalitarian, and communitarian traditions attempt to balance individual autonomy with communal solidarity. Modernity has been a great liberator, freeing individuals from restrictions of tradition, cian, and place. Liberalism celebrates this freedom in market, politics, and society. But the result, according to critics, is a society of unencumbered individuals who have lost the language of cooperation and community. The totalitarian response to the failings of liberalism is to subsume the individual within the total state. Individual autonomy is suppressed so that the true social self can be discovered in solidarity with the state that is the truthbearer of culture and historical destiny. The communitarian response is to preserve the advantages of liberalism with its emphasis on human rights, universal tolerance, and free association, while attempting to revive a type of communal solidarity that is similar yet different from that found in traditional societies and totalitarian regimes. But the similarity of communitarian and totalitarian responses is problematic, as is the communitarian emphasis on romantic localism and its tendency to leave serious questions of economic power unexamined.