 But these conflicts cannot be resolved in the abstract. Much turns on empirical analyses of actual politics—to what extent our interest in community is indeed threatened by excess liberal politics, to what extent the state can play a role in remedying the situation, to what extent the nourishment of communal ties should be left to civil society, and so on. This is where the political communitarians of the last decade have shed some light. Let us now turn to the politics of community, the third major strand of the communitarian thought.