 Communitarians have sought to deflate the universal pretensions of liberal theory. The main target has been Rawls description of the original position as an “Archimedean point” from which the structure of a social system can be appraised, a position whose special virtue is that it allows us to regard the human condition “from the perspective of  eternity”,[3]  from all social and temporal points of view. Whereas Rawls seemed to present his theory of justice as universally true, communitarians argued that the standards of justice must be found in forms of life and traditions of particular societies and hence can vary from context to context. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor argued that moral and political judgment will depend on the language of reasons and the interpretive framework within which agents view their world, hence that it makes no sense to begin the political enterprise by abstracting from the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs, practices, and institutions (Taylor 1985, ch. 1; MacIntyre 1978, chs.18–22 and 1988, ch.1; Benhabib 1992, pp. 23–38, 89n4). Michael Walzer developed the additional argument that effective social criticism must derive from and resonate with the habits and traditions of actual people living in specific times and places. Even if there is nothing problematic about a formal procedure of universalizability meant to yield a determinate set of human goods and values, “any such set would have to be considered in terms so abstract that they would be of little use in thinking about particular distributions” (Walzer 1983, 8; Young 1990, 4). In short, liberals who ask what is just by abstracting from particular social contexts are doomed to philosophical incoherence and liberal theorists who adopt this method to persuade people to do the just thing are doomed to political irrelevance.