Amerykańska wspólnotowa filozofia polityczna

Abstract

The work is devoted to the discussion of those distinguished figures of the American political philosophy after 1945 whose thinking is strongly saturated with the communitarian postulate. The following thinkers belong to this group: 1. Robert Nisbet — eminent conservative sociologist and philosopher. The main motif of Nisbet’s thought is the necessity of resisting the omnipotence of the state which has been increasing throughout the history of modem Europe. The author presents the Nisbet’s typology of the most important kinds of communes and discusses its details. 2. Michael Novak - liberal Catholic political philosopher. This philosopher puts together liberal individualism and trust in capitalism with the Anglo-Saxon culture of social coexistence and the Catholic communitarianism, metaphysics, and ethics. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre - an ethicist. Aiming at an explanation of the chaos in the contemporary moral culture MacIntyre reaches back to Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He constructs a model of ethics consisting in the dialectical co- -operation of the ethics of virtues and the ethics the law. The ethics of virtues is connected with the communitarian character of human existence and the demands of efficacy. The ethics of the law has a strong universal coloring and individualizing bearing. The author undertakes an evaluation of the style of the intellectual output of the American ethicist. 4. Michael Sandel. This figure opens a group of philosophers using the watchword of communitarianism beginning from the end of the 1970s. The common denominator of this group is, in addition to the watchword of community, their leftist position. The main ideas of Sandel’s philosophy are: situated „1”, superiority of the notions of good and evil (empirically and communally rooted) over the notions of the law and legitimacy (notions of universal character discovered by individual reason), pluralist dispersion of power. The author undertook the criticism of Sanders intellectual skills and of the exaggeratedly leftist elements of his writings. 5. Michael Walzer - liberalist, socialist and communitarianist. The author discusses and critically comments the principal for Walzer’s thought tendency to egalitarianism. 6. Charles Taylor - Canadian philosopher. This thinker perceives individualism as „narrowing of life horizons”, links individualism with the limitations of ethical relativism, wants to construct social life on the democratic principle of „direct participation”. The author has criticized the leftist moral oversensitivity and the lack of the internal dynamics of the leftist ideals which characterize Taylor. 7. Amitai Etzioni - American sociologist, co-creator of the organizational foundations of the intellectual communitarian movement. This philosopher looks for a balance between the values of order and autonomy. The work of the philosopher mentioned above is discussed from the authors own theoretical basis which he expressed by means of the notions of: „heroic empiricism”, „dialectical nature of reality”, „vitalism” and „perfectionism”. The author deeply identifies himself with the conservative optics and its perception of communalism. In order to overcome some deficiencies of the conservative position he postulates a dynamic conservatism.