Do you agree with the view that liberal theories are based on ‘atomism’, whereas communitarians have a ‘social thesis’? Present your line of argument. (2005)
Both terms come from Charles Taylor‘s essay “Atomism” (1979; reprinted in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 1985). My line is that the contrast is true of one strand of liberalism but false as a description of liberal theory as a whole: most liberals accept a social thesis too, and the real quarrel lies elsewhere.
Taylor’s Contrast
- Atomism names the social-contract doctrines of the seventeenth century and their heirs, which see society as constituted by individuals for the fulfilment of ends which were primarily individual. Its political form is the primacy of rights: rights come before society; obligations to it are derivative.
- The social thesis is Aristotle’s claim, restated: the human capacities that make a person worth respecting (reflection, moral judgement, autonomous choice) develop only through language, culture and institutions. Outside society man is not self-sufficient.
- The trap: we ascribe rights because we value the capacity for autonomy, which grows only in a certain kind of society; so affirming rights commits us to an obligation to belong. The primacy of rights undermines itself.
Where the Charge Fits
The label fits Thomas Hobbes and John Locke‘s pre-social right-holders, Robert Nozick‘s rights as side constraints, and the market liberalism that led Margaret Thatcher to say (1987) that there is no such thing as society.
Why the Dichotomy Is Overstated
- Developmental liberals were never atomists: J. S. Mill saw individuality as cultivated; T. H. Green made the common good the condition of freedom.
- John Rawls described a well-ordered society as a social union of social unions (A Theory of Justice, 1971, §79). In Political Liberalism (1993) his free and equal person became a political conception of the citizen, not a metaphysics of the self.
- Joseph Raz (The Morality of Freedom, 1986) concedes that autonomy, liberalism’s core value, needs an adequate range of options supplied by social forms: a liberal social thesis.
- Will Kymlicka (Liberalism, Community and Culture, 1989) treats culture as the context of choice.
- Amy Gutmann (“Communitarian Critics of Liberalism”, 1985) called the contrast a false dichotomy between a wholly unencumbered and a wholly situated self. Communitarian nostalgia, she warned, forgets what cohesive Salem did to dissenters.
Taylor himself drew the decisive distinction in “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate” (1989):
| Individualist in advocacy | Collectivist in advocacy | |
|---|---|---|
| Atomist ontology | Hobbes, Nozick | rare |
| Holist ontology | Humboldt, Taylor | strong communitarians |
Ontology (what the self is) does not settle advocacy (what the state should protect). One can be a holist individualist.
Indian Illustration
B. R. Ambedkar was glad that the Draft Constitution had discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit (4 November 1948). He was no atomist: caste had formed Indian selves all too thoroughly, and that holist diagnosis drove his individualist advocacy. Nor is loneliness simply a liberal pathology: the WHO Commission on Social Connection (30 June 2025) finds one person in six lonely, but 24% in low-income countries against 11% in high-income ones.
Conclusion
I agree only in part. Atomism fits contract theory and libertarianism; mainstream liberalism shares the social thesis. The live dispute is about advocacy: whether a socially formed self may still claim rights against its community. On that question the liberal answer, a holist individualism, is the stronger one.