Critic of Amy Gutmann - The Constructive Potential of Communitarian Values for Liberalism

The view of Amy Gutmann is that communitarians have been unsuccessful in undermining liberalism. However, she thinks that their work presents a welcome challenge to it. In her opinion, the communitarian criticism, rather than giving good reason to abandon liberalism, is of use in an attempt to discover a liberalism that successfully combines communitarian with liberal values. This paper examines the extent to which Gutmann successfully shows that communitarian values, like kinship, affection, or a sense of common purpose, have the latent but unrealized capacity to serve to improve liberalism.