Christian J. Emden advances a contentious thesis at the outset of this book: a powerful current in recent political theory, across the spectrum from the religious right to the post-Marxist left, has sought to remedy the shortcomings of liberal democracy, or to move beyond it, by shifting emphasis from autonomy and freedom to community and the common. Liberalism is often cast as the source of the alienation and inequality that fuel populism and democratic backsliding, while community is invoked as part of the remedy. Yet, for Emden, this nostalgia for community is misplaced. It looks back to a lost world that never existed in the first place and undervalues the conditions that sustain political equality. In the face of this ‘political romanticism’, he argues that ‘liberal constitutional democracy must be defended’ (3).

Emden sets out to do so by foregrounding what he, along with Rainer Forst and Cristina Lafont, conceives to be modern democracy’s core strength: the mediation of difference among diverse populations by enabling citizens to justify binding norms to one another. He turns the familiar criticisms of liberal government around. Feelings of powerlessness before bureaucratic administrative regimes and capitalist economies are to some degree unavoidable. But the demand to make politics accommodate moral authenticity places an impossible burden on law and institutions. Democratic politics requires compromises and decisions that do not conform to any one person’s idea of justice. But this form of political order enables a greater degree of dignity and freedom than the various neo-communitarian alternatives are likely to provide.

The book advances these arguments through an engaging blend of history and theory. Chapter 1 links the revival of community in political thought to the legitimation crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, brought about by the rise of neoliberal capitalism. Chapter 2 traces a lineage from earlier conservative communitarian ideas to recent work on the far right by Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Alain de Benoist. Chapter 3 surveys attempts by Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben to formulate pluralist forms of community as alternatives to capitalist alienation. Chapter 4 turns to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of the ‘common’, while Chapter 5 argues that the elevation of constituent power over established constitutional institutions is tantamount to what Carl Schmitt called ‘sovereign dictatorship’.

Emden notes at the outset that he is not seeking to relitigate the communitarian debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Nor does he seek to minimize the importance of community within civil society, which thrives on associations, movements, friendships, and solidarities. His concern is with community as a model for political order, or as the basis for democracy’s normative foundation.

This distinction becomes especially useful in Chapter 2, where Emden contrasts the earlier communitarian critique of liberalism in Taylor, Sandel, and Walzer with the ‘authoritarian drift’ (53) in recent conservative thought. Placed in this light, Mary Ann Glendon’s arguments, offered contemporaneously with Taylor and others, against the discourse of rights, together with her privileging of family and religious community as sources of civic virtue, emerge as an important precursor to a line leading to Vermeule and Deneen in the present. Emden outlines how Vermeule’s ‘common good constitutionalism’ and Deneen’s ‘postliberal’ politics vastly exceed the aims of the earlier communitarian critique and advance a fully authoritarian political programme. Both subordinate individual autonomy and constitutional limits to a public authority with the power to legislate morality based on family, church, and nation. The French Nouvelle Droite theorist Alain de Benoist presents a close parallel, advocating a politics premised on a homogeneous identity, whose genealogy Emden traces through apartheid and the German far right. Emden is persuasive on the larger point that grounding political legitimacy in a shared identity rather than in rights, pluralism, and justification moves inexorably toward a politics of outcasting and exclusion.

But can community be thought without identity? To highlight the argument in one further chapter, Emden turns to Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben to assess their attempts to imagine a normative order based on community that somehow avoids ending up in a variation on the Nazi-era Volksgemeinschaft. Nancy sought to do so by conceiving of community as ‘being-with’, a network of singular individuals whose commonality consists in relations rather than identity; for Esposito, it lies in reciprocal debts and obligations; and in Agamben, the ‘coming community’ is one without fixed belonging and is centered on the figure of the refugee who stands in permanent opposition to state sovereignty. Emden argues that Nancy’s solution drains community of normative content, leaving no basis for binding political claims; Esposito’s network is so diffuse as to be indistinguishable from human relationality itself; and Agamben loses sight altogether of the value of rights and constitutional limits. These efforts from the left to save community come, for Emden, at too high a price.

Emden’s broader thesis in this book, that the turn to community amounts to a form of ‘political romanticism’ (184) or nostalgia, brings to mind earlier work by Mark Lilla and Corey Robin. In The Shipwrecked Mind (Reference Lilla2016), Lilla sketched a reactionary strain in conservative thought that conceives of the present as a kind of historical catastrophe produced by a rupture with an earlier, more coherent but illusory order. In The Reactionary Mind (Reference Robin2017), Robin portrays the conservative tradition from Burke onwards as a fundamentally reactionary effort to preserve hierarchy and authority by resisting movements demanding greater freedom and equality – pointing backwards out of nostalgia for what was indeed a period of greater power and privilege.

Read alongside these works, the novelty and importance of Emden’s contribution in Democracy and the Limits of Community become clearer. By widening the lens to include figures on the left and right, he shows how the turn to community as a solution to what ails liberal democracy in the present involves a more pervasive tendency that takes different political forms. Although the book pursues these arguments at a level of detail that may make it less accessible to general readers, scholars of political theory will find the story it tells by drawing together divergent thinkers and traditions provocative and insightful.