Against Liberalism

After falling out of favor with those on the Left over the circumcision debate, Giles Fraser explains why he doesn't consider himself a liberal:

All of which presents an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I'm not a conservative either. I'm a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods. But I don't buy this. What we need is a much more robust commitment to the common good, to the priority of community. It is intellectual laziness and a form of cheating to think we can always have both.

Norman Geras doesn't buy it:

He either doesn't know what he's saying or else he's underwriting a sinister form of precedence that could be used to justify any form of trampling on the interests of human individuals. For, unless one recognizes that individual freedom, personal autonomy, more generally, the fundamental needs and interests of individual persons, are themselves the proper and original source for conceiving any type of 'common good', one leaves no restraints upon what the common good may be said to be.