The Shape of a Shared Life

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I set the central challenge of this book: to show how a substantive sense of liberal political community might coexist with the pronounced moral diversity of a modern democratic society. In this connection, I questioned the deeply ingrained assumption that disagreement constitutes a barrier to community. With Michael Ignatieff, I suggested that our language of community and belonging might actually blind us to the ‘real possibilities of solidarity in modern society’. But this claim leaves in its wake a residual problem: how are we now to proceed? How can we articulate an account of liberal community when our vocabulary is ‘nearly useless’? Ignatieff advises a turn to literature. There we might find ‘a language for the joy of modern life, its fleeting and transient solidarity’ (Ignatieff, 1984, 141). In this chapter I want to pursue this suggestion. I want to develop a new vocabulary for the discussion of political community which draws on the insights of literature. In so doing, I shall elaborate and defend the method I intend to deploy in the following three chapters in which I shall seek to articulate three distinct accounts of liberal community the outlines of which are informed by the outlines of three different kinds of fictional journey narrative.

Words like fraternity, belonging and community are so soaked with nostalgia and utopianism that they are nearly useless as guides to the real possibilities of solidarity in modern society. Modern life has changed the possibilities of civic solidarity, and our language stumbles behind like an overburdened porter with a mountain of old cases. (Ignatieff, 1984, 138)