barrotta@fls.unipi.it

Around the end of the 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s communitarians such as M. Sandel, A. MacIntyre and C. Taylor put forward various criticisms against liberalism, highlighting some of its important problems. One of the most fundamental criticisms concerned the alleged notion of the self upheld by liberals (which, in its turn, is related to other typical attitudes of liberalism, such as the priority of justice over the individual conceptions of the good). Liberals, on their part, responded to such criticisms, engendering a sustained controversy.

In this paper, I will not go into details concerning the history of the controversy. Rather, my aim is to show that throughout the debate that followed the communitarians’ critique, the importance of the distinction between methodological individualism and ontological individualism was unduly overlooked. An important liberal school of thought (which includes, among others, C. Menger, L. von Mises, F. von Hayek and K. Popper) does not equate liberalism directly with various ethical values or with an ontological image of the self, but mainly with epistemological considerations. I will show that this form of liberalism can convincingly counter some of the legitimate communitarian criticisms. I will argue that the adoption of methodological individualism and its ethical and political consequences does not requires ontological individualism, namely the idea that individuals in some sense "precede" the society or community to which they belong.