Commentary at the Trudy van Asperen Lecture

“In his essay ‘Atomism,’ Taylor concluded that members of liberal societies have an obligation to belong to these societies, i.e. an obligation to actively care for its social forms, its common goods, its multi-faceted practices of freedom…last week I asked the first year philosophy students in my introductory course on social and political philosophy…if they found that anything may be wrong with or problematic about the idea of an obligation to belong…and not one of them objected…If society protects the social conditions of autonomy, or agency, the most cherished social forms, then, yes, its members should recognize an obligation to belong and actively contribute to it.

“…the reaction of my student may well indicate that the communitarian project has become an integral past of the defense of a sustainable liberalism, a liberalism that has gained reflexivity with regard to the social and political conditions of individual collective freedom… it seems that many of them things of the state and government ideally as authorities that, as a good parent maybe, watches over the integrity of the community and its members. Not just conservative forces in Dutch society have that conception nowadays; it is a quite widespread image of what we call in the Netherlands ‘vaderjte staat,’ ‘father state’ and can be found throughout the political spectrum…The state foes not stand mainly for individuals, or their political participation, it rather stands for a cultural horizon in which we lead our lives together, samen, as our Prime-Minister tends to saw whenever there is trouble. This idea of political togetherness fits well with the communitarian idea of politics, and we know for a fact that the course of present Dutch government has been directly inspired by communitarian thought.”