Communitarian thinkers have identified important deficiencies in liberal thought, in particular the limits of the account of justice given in liberal theories. This book makes transparent for the reader the implications that the liberal account of justice has for our ways of thinking about education. Citing the work of John Rawls as the principal expression of contemporary liberal thought, Keeney argues that there are certain intractable tensions between the view of the individual given in rights-based theories of justice and a certain valuable conception of education, which in the West has traditionally been termed a "liberal" or "general" education and concludes that ideals of a liberal education are only available to a political ethic which is capable of articulating a public conception of virtue and the good.

Patrick Keeney is an independent scholar