Equality and difference

Based on TONNIES and WEBER, the author discusses three variants of a post-t raditional concept of community. All three are characterized by the fact th at they substitute the dichotomy of community and society by a far more com plex network of concepts. While all attempts to revitalize Aristotelism hav e a hard time bringing into line a necessarily elitist Republican ideal of virtuosity with the egalitarian premises of a functionally differentiated s ociety, pragmatism operates, from the start, with an egalitarian concept of community. It is, however, characterized by a juridical-theoretical defici t. This may be rectified by going back to the paradigmatic connection betwe en Democratic communal power and the state's legal power, as was characteri stic of the democratization of the concept of sovereignty in the era of enl ightenment, starting with Spinoza.