Introduction: The new liberalism and the liberal–communitarian debate

Some contemporary liberals now acknowledge, partly in response to their communitarian critics, that they must “tap neglected characteristics of the liberal tradition” if they are to revitalize liberal political theory. We seek to do just this by retrieving the new liberalism. We agree, in other words, with Stephen Macedo's claim that liberalism “contains the resources to mount a positive response to the communitarian critics.” The new liberalism, we hold, is just such a valuable resource. It transcends the discourse of dichotomies that dominated the early phase of the liberal–communitarian debate. It also has much to offer the current phase of the debate which is propelled by the widely accepted claim that, far from being opposed, communitarianism and liberalism are mutually supporting. Retrieving the new liberalism as an unjustifiably neglected strand of liberalism serves, moreover, as a timely reminder that there never has been a liberalism but rather a family of liberalisms. Hence, not only should we hesitate to identify liberalism with the contemporary dominant strand of philosophical liberalism, but we should take more seriously the richness of the liberal tradition. The first part of our Introduction suggests possible reasons why contemporary liberalism became vulnerable to the caricature that the first round of earlier communitarian criticism was prone to make of it. The second part contends that the debate between liberals and communitarians is misconceived in two fundamental ways regardless of which side deserves the greater blame.