liberalism and communityby steven kautz

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Liberalism and Community by Steven Kautz Review by: Francis Fukuyama Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1996), p. 142 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047500 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 13:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Affairs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:26:37 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Liberalism and Communityby Steven Kautz

Liberalism and Community by Steven KautzReview by: Francis FukuyamaForeign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1996), p. 142Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047500 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 13:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:26:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Liberalism and Communityby Steven Kautz

Recent Books

that democracies tend toward a flabby

populism?ignoring the costly and success

fill 40-year effort of the nato alliance to

resist communism.

Elusive Peace: Negotiating an End to Civil Wars. EDITED BY I. WILLIAM

zartman. Washington: Brookings,

*995> 353 PP- $42.95 (paper, $18.95). A workmanlike effort, this book seeks to

explain why civil wars, now the dominant

form of conflict, are so hard to resolve.

As in many efforts of this type, the book's

real interest lies in the case studies of indi

vidual conflicts in Sri Lanka, Spain, Sudan,

Ethiopia, Angola, South Africa, and so

on; here they are, by and large, informative.

The general conclusions point to the asym

metry of power and objectives as a major reason for the intractability of civil wars.

The collection lays out a descriptive taxon

omy but provides no startling insights

as to

how such conflicts ought to be resolved.

Liberalism and Community, by steven

kautz. Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1995, 232 pp. $29.95. This thoughtfully written book addresses what is perhaps the central political issue

of our time: whether liberal societies can

hold together as self-sustaining communi

ties, or whether liberal ideology sows the

seeds of its own destruction in promoting an asocial individualism. The book criti

cally examines several major recent com

munitarian critiques of liberalism, includ

ing those by Michael Sandel, Richard

Rorty, Michael Walzer, and William

Galston, arguing that most of them are

unwilling to squarely confront the intoler

ance that truly communitarian societies

foster. In the end Kautz finds he shares a

good deal of ground with the communi

tarians he criticizes, insofar as he accepts the importance of virtue and the dangers of unbounded individualism. He main

tains, however, that the liberal tradition of

Locke and the American founders fully incorporates the need for virtue, arrived at

by free, rational individuals. Kautz is less

clear about his feelings on some of the irra

tional sources of virtue and community in

present-day America like religion and eth

nicity and on how liberals ought to view

the ascriptive groups into which real-world

liberal democracies are divided.

Render unto Caesar: The Religious Sphere in World Politics, by Sabrina petra

RAMET AND DONALD W. TREAD

GOLD. Washington: American

University Press, 1995, 463 pp. $69.50

(paper, $29.95). This fascinating book reflects a growing recognition that old models linking

modernization and secularization are not

correct or apply best to limited parts of

the world like Europe. Unlike other recent

volumes on the fundamentalist upsurge, this one does not presume that the intru

sion of religion into the political sphere is necessarily

a pathological condition.

Rather, it starts from the more neutral

premise that religion has been and con

tinues to be a major source of social val

ues and hence is inevitably connected to

political structures even in avowedly sec

ular societies. The cases covered in the

book will be more familiar to students of the sociology of religion than to interna

tional relations specialists, and they fill an important gap for the latter. The vol

ume begins with historical cases (the im

pact of Mithraism on the Roman Empire) and surveys regions as diverse as Western

Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Indian

[142] FOREIGN AFFAIRS -Volume 7s N0.2

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:26:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions