Introduction: Strangers

Abstract

We have a very deep belief that the bond of community must be understood primarily in terms of agreement about morality and the good life. As Chandran Kukathas writes, ‘it is the understandings people share that make them into a community’ (Kukathas, 2003, 170). Disagreements and the conflicts they inspire, by contrast, are thought to be destructive of the possibility of community. Where we lack a shared conception of morality and the good life, we are liable to be as the strangers MacIntyre portrays: each pursuing his or her own interests with no non-instrumental regard for others. In this book, I shall argue that this belief is false. Conflict is no barrier to community. On the contrary, disagreement and mutual disapproval may even serve to provide important routes into political association with one’s fellow citizens.

Modern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. (Alasdair MacIntyre, 1985, 250–1)