and Alasdair MacIntyre ( 1981 ) leading the way. The communitarian challenge
that Rawlsians could not ignore, however, was delivered by Michael Sandel in
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice( 1982 ). Sandel argued that Rawls depended
upon a Kantian metaphysic of the person he had not redeemed, and he
contended that Rawls’ own agenda pressed him to move closer to a commu-
nitarian conception of the good:
Liberalism teaches respect for the distance of self and ends.... But by seeking to
secure this distance too completely, liberalism undermines its own insight. By
putting the self beyond the reach of politics... it misses the pathos of politics and
also its most inspiring possibilities... ; it forgets the possibility that when
politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.
(Sandel 1982 , 183 )
Sandel almost singlehandedly motivated Rawls to redeWne his theory in
an attempt to remove metaphysical elements from it (Rawls 1992 ). For
many theorists the pressing question became whether liberal individualism
was self-suYcient or the ideal of community provided necessary corrections
to it.
During the late 1970 s and early 1980 s some of us thought that the liberal-
communitarian debate closed oVas many important issues as it opened.
Critical theory conveyed that sense in one way. The turn to Foucault ( 1970 )
and Derrida ( 1974 ) expressed it in another. Committed to the project of
‘‘theoretical self-consciousness,’’ in which you enter the thought of reXective
adversaries to test the conceptual contours of your own theory, I decided to
test my left-Hegelian perspective through an engagement with Foucault’s
thought. At Wrst things went well for me, as I readThe Order of Things
through a neo-Hegelian lens (Foucault 1970 ). That lens began to crack,
however, when I engaged Herculin Barbin( 1980 ), Foucault’s collection of
early nineteenth-century journalistic, ecclesiastical, juridical, bio-scientiWc,
and popular judgments of Alexina, a youngster whose anatomy did notWt
either prescribed category of gender. He joined these accounts to his/her
autobiography of a life ending in suicide. In his brief commentary he asked,
‘‘Do wetrulyneed atruesex?’’ suggesting that the very demand for truth in
sexual identity oppressed something in us and engendered intense suVering
for many deemed by the regime of truth of the day to be abnormal, perverse,
or biologically unWt. I gradually became convinced that I, too, projected
profoundly contestable concepts of nature, biology, identity, and ethics into
political thought. I started to rethink the shallow ideal of pluralism
participant-observation in political theory 831