Editing Communitarianism (section)

== Comparison to other political philosophies ==
[[File:Political-spectrum-multiaxis.png|thumb|A variant of the [[Nolan chart]] using traditional political color coding ([[Red (political adjective)|red leftism]] versus [[Blue#Politics|blue rightism]]) with communitarianism on the top left]]
Early communitarians were charged with being, in effect, social conservatives. However, many contemporary communitarians, especially those who define themselves as responsive communitarians, fully realize and often stress that they do not seek to return to traditional communities, with their authoritarian power structure, rigid stratification, and discriminatory practices against minorities and women. Responsive communitarians seek to build communities based on open participation, dialogue, and truly shared values. [[Linda McClain]], a critic of communitarians, recognizes this feature of the responsive communitarians, writing that some communitarians do "recognize the need for careful evaluation of what is good and bad about [any specific] tradition and the possibility of severing certain features . . . from others."<ref>[[Linda McClain|McClain, Linda, C]], "Rights and irresponsibility," Duke Law Journal (March 1994): 989–1088.</ref> And R. Bruce Douglass writes, "Unlike conservatives, communitarians are aware that the days when the issues we face as a society could be settled on the basis of the beliefs of a privileged segment of the population have long since passed."<ref>Douglass, R. Bruce. "The renewal of democracy and the communitarian prospect." The Responsive Community 4.3 (1994): 55–62.</ref>

One major way the communitarian position differs from the social conservative one is that although communitarianism's ideal "good society" reaches into the private realm, it seeks to cultivate only a limited set of core virtues through an organically developed set of values rather than having an expansive or holistically normative agenda given by the state. For example, American society favors being religious over being atheist, but is rather neutral with regard to which particular religion a person should follow. There are no state-prescribed dress codes, "correct" number of children to have, or places one is expected to live, etc. In short, a key defining characteristic of the ideal communitarian society is that in contrast to a liberal state, it creates shared formulations of the good, but the scope of this good is much smaller than that advanced by authoritarian societies."<ref>Etzioni, Amitai, What is Political? (2003). CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, 2006. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2157170</ref>