Antidote and Utopia. An approach to the communitarian dimension in classic liberalism

Abstract

This paper proposes a “communitarian” interpretation of two key authors of classical liberalism: Alexis de Tocqueville and John Locke. Building from that argument, we question that the link between "community" and "liberalism" corresponds to a singularity of neoliberal government of populations.

The paper is organized into four sections, the first one introduces the general terms of the problem, the second one, looks into Alexis de Tocqueville's diagnosis on " social question ", in order to analyze, in the third section, the communitarian “antidotes” proposed by the author. In the fourth section, we approach the Utopian dimension that supports these proposals, and extend our analysis to include the work of John Locke. Finally, we expose some brief concluding remarks, which take up the questions outlined in the introduction.