Abstract

The central purpose of this ambitious book is to bring to bear theories of developmental psychology upon the liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s: Lawrence Kohlberg meets Michael Sandel. The book is based on a conceptual contrast between "individualism" and "compound individuality". Crittenden insists that his aim is not merely to split the difference between liberal autonomy and communitarian Gemeinschaft; rather, his aim is to ascend to a higher synthesis, a genuine Aufhebung that incorporates what is valuable in opposing conceptions of the self that he thinks are, by themselves and left unsynthesized, deficient.