Equality and difference

Based on TONNIES and WEBER, the author discusses three variants of a post-traditional concept of community. All three are characterized by the fact that they substitute the dichotomy of community and society by a far more complex network of concepts. While all attempts to revitalize Aristotelism have a hard time bringing into line a necessarily elitist Republican ideal of virtuosity with the egalitarian premises of a functionally differentiated society, pragmatism operates, from the start, with an egalitarian concept of community. It is, however, characterized by a juridical-theoretical deficit. This may be rectified by going back to the paradigmatic connection between Democratic communal power and the state's legal power, as was characteristic of the democratization of the concept of sovereignty in the era of enlightenment, starting with Spinoza.