For over a decade – say, since Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice – communitarians have attacked John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness. Yet communitarian writers have said almost nothing about what kind or kinds of relationships among citizens or between citizens and the state a communitarian should advocate. In this essay I sketch a picture of communal relationships and use it to examine the nature of community in Rawls's work. In the first section I extract a picture of communal relationships from Karl Marx's 1844 Comments on James Mill, Élémens d'économie politique; in the second section I argue for this picture's distinctiveness; finally, in the last section I look at a shift in the nature of community between A Theory of Justice and Rawls's more recent book, Political Liberalism. In that last section I argue that a picture structurally similar to that in Marx is exhibited by the well-ordered society of Theory, although not by that of Political Liberalism. In the end the communitarian charge – that Rawls's view is at odds with an emphasis on community – turns out to be legitimate, but not with respect to Theory, the standard communitarian target. However, seeing this depends on seeing the possibility of different conceptions of community. And that points to the need for development of and debate about such conceptions. My larger goal is to take a step toward such development and debate.

1. “Suppose,” Marx says in the Comments, “we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and the other person.”