A Constitutionalist Perspective
Beau Breslan, The Communitarian Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 288.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Dale
Intended as a sustained critique of modern communitarian thought written from a constitutionalist perspective, Beau Breslin’s Communitarian Constitution is a handy primer on modern communitarian thought and a provoking consideration of the impact of communitarian thinking on contemporary politics. The book opens with three chapters that provide a genealogy of communitarian theory in the United States, beginning with a brief sketch of the communitarian’s anti-Federalist roots and then moving on to offer a sustained examination of such modern com-munitarian thinkers as Michael Walzer, Alasdair McIntyre and Amitai Etzioni. In these initial chapters Breslin points out the differences among communitarians, tracing not only the obvious divides between conservative and radical proponents of the doctrine, but also revealing the more subtle differences within those groups of communitarian thought.
