The communitarians have been emerged and taken shaped itself through criticism on Rawl's $quot;A Theory of Justice,$quot; which has been posited as an outstanding position since 1970's. The controversy between liberalists and communitarians began to p...
The communitarians have been emerged and taken shaped itself through criticism on Rawl's $quot;A Theory of Justice,$quot; which has been posited as an outstanding position since 1970's. The controversy between liberalists and communitarians began to permeate into diverse areas of social norm. First of all, the core questions of this controversy are whether the liberalistic view of human being and society can normatively be accepted, and how those views can be validated. Some of the main controversial points are upon the realizability of the view that is presupposed in the concept of `original position', and its universality. Especially, the critical point is whether communitarian perspective can provide us with an alternative to overcome the defect of liberalistic viewpoint of individual and society.
In this paper, I examined what critical arguments are raised by the main communitarian theorists, Michael Sandel, Alasdair Mclntyre, and Michael Walzer. Through inquring communitarian theories, I have focused upon in what way they are developing their theories and what are their main points. Especially, this study will deal with how early communitarians criticize deontological theory that is permeated in Rawls' social theory.
Recently, some legal scholars began to apply communitarian theory to the controversial legal issues, for example, to solve the questions raising from business ethics or environmental ethics. While the main theorists of communitarian camp do not pay much attention to the legal issues, Roberto Unger is unfolding a social theory that is deeply related with communitarianism in different way. He is suggesting a radical polyarchy which is rooted in communitarianism. In this paper, I considered Unger's social and legal theory. With Unger's theory, there is not so many new ideas. But his attempt to converge legal analysis with institutional and ideological analysis would be able to make a tiny crevice to the fossilized legal arguments.