HETEROGENEOUS COMMUNITY: BEYOND NEW TRADITIONALISM
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Recent discussions of community have often invoked a shared narrative tradition – usually a shared religious tradition or subtradition – as the defining feature. These calls for the revival of community have frequently accompanied laments over social fragmentation and atomization, particularly in Europe and North America. Alasdair MacIntyre’s attempt to articulate a political vision grounded in an Aristotelian account of shared goods and narratives constitutes one of the most significant representatives of this current. After setting out his position and its dire consequences for pluralistic societies, this essay focuses on MacIntyre’s move from practices to tradition and argues that shared practices – particularly shared political commitments – may generate and unite groups that do not share a common meta-narrative but nonetheless constitute a community with shared discursive practices. The Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez is particularly helpful in theorizing a notion of community that allows for great differences in the comprehensive narratives in terms of which participants define their lives. The result is a conception of a deeply pluralistic, arguably fragmented society composed of citizens belonging to multiple, intersecting, but not concentric, communities.