New Conventions for Old 201universalism led to a general search for a political alternative, which combined both
the demands for some form of ‘rational universalism’, with the recognition of the
inevitable conventionalism of human thought and value. This elusive compound, as
suggested earlier, was already intimately part of the Idealist theoretical framework,
being ably rendered by, for example, Michael Oakeshott, or earlier in the twentieth
century by Bernard Bosanquet. In communitarianism, this generic search, for various
reasons, reached a much wider audience, generating an unexpected cheering chorus in
more recent postcolonial theory and Asian values arguments.^29 Communitarianism
provided a ready-made answer to the doubts and anxieties concerning thin universal-
ism. It also provided an unwitting answer to the anxieties that many had concerning
the ‘loss of community’. Communitarianism was, though, not a simple-minded cri-
tique. It was a deeper-rooted philosophical and ontological challenge. This made
conventionalism (in general) a more acceptable political option and gave a broad
philosophical credibility to the challenge to procedural liberalism in the last two
decades of the century.
One problem with communitarianism (as noted earlier) was that it did not
adequately clarify its own conception of community. Further, one important implica-
tion of the communitarian critique of liberalism was that it unwittingly facilitated a
more widespread conventionalist drift in political theory. One ramification of this
drift was the unanticipated recovery of nationalist political theory in the 1990s. In
many ways, nationalism was a reconstitution of an older vocabulary of conventional-
ism, which had fallen on thinner times in mid-twentieth century thought—although
it wasneverabsent from political practice. However, the fears of liberals, particularly
concerning the bellicose and politically unpredictable character of nationalism, were
magically accommodated, during the 1990s, with an ungainly tumble of political
theorists trying to synthesize nationalism and liberalism under the political neolo-
gism ‘liberal nationalism’. However, communitarianism never adequately resolved
its relation with liberal nationalism. Many theorist still looked with trepidation on
the state of political theory in the 1990s. They were equally dissatisfied, on the one
hand, with procedural liberalism and thin universalism, and, on the other hand,
with the potentially suffocating consensual identity-based conventionalist politics
of both communitarianism and nationalism. The upshot of this dissatisfaction was
again a renewed search for ‘past’ theories, which could incorporate the convention-
alist insightswithsome form of ‘stretched’ or chastened universalism. This was the
ethos that characterized many (although not all) of the arguments of both neo-
Aristotelianism and civic republicanism. The prevailing assumption was that older
expressions of universalism—that is, the richer universalism of older metaphysic-
ally inclined theories, and the thinner universalism of procedural liberalism—were
both inadequate. The conventionalist premise was accepted, insofar as the idea of
universal, external, extra-social, or transhistorical metaphysical foundations, were
no longer seen as plausible. However, a chastened vague notion of universal good
was still assimilated within the conventional structures of republicanism and neo-
Aristotelianism. In this sense, foundations for theory had not been abandoned,