We are here to discuss a range of social and political issues which can be subsumed under the rubric of communitarianism, and which are increasingly rising to the top of various political agendas.

What is this communitarianism? While this question is undoubtedly open to a variety of possible answers, let me propose a simple working description. Communitarianism refers to those political sentiments sometimes associated with populism. It involves an attempt to recapture political control in local communities, to reconstruct the social basis to support stable family structures, i.e., to provide a totalizing context for social existence and personal identity.