Abstract

The rallying cry of the French Revolution – ‘liberté, egalité, et fraternité’ – lists the three basic ideals of the modern democratic age. The great ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – socialism, conservatism, liberalism, nationalism and republicanism – each offered its own conception of the ideals of liberty, equality and community. The ideal of community took many different forms, from class solidarity or shared citizenship to a common ethnic descent or cultural identity. But for all of these theories, and for the philosophers who helped defend them, community was one of the basic conceptual building blocks to be shaped and defined.