Approaches to Liberty. Outline for a “Methodological Communitarianism”*

Abstract. In this paper, the Author gives an account of the French perspective on the debate between an “individualist” and a “communitarian” conception of liberty. He argues that, despite the dominant tendency within recent French political philosophy to assume that the individualist conception of liberty is the only truly modern form of liberty, communitarian principles are present within the Enlightenment tradition. He demonstrates the inadequacies of the individualist approach in an analysis of Rawls, and also rejects the type of communitarianism developed by MacIntyre, which depends upon a substantive concept of the community. With reference to theories of communication, he describes how we can elaborate a cornmunitarian approach to individual freedom.