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North America, it be impossible to find a way to allow groups to develop their own
personality as if the State did not exist? Communitarians who have never taken up the
concept of group life aside from the State perhaps recognize that the in order to
accommodate real community life we must not leave to much outside the reach of the
State while still rejecting the isolation of the liberal unencumbered self. Of liberal writers
the one, who on the surface seems most attuned to Figgis, is William Galston. In his book
Liberal Pluralism he attempts to reconcile a pluralism not totally unlike Figgis’ with
liberalism. I will end by suggesting that a fruitful direction for exploring the impact of
medieval ideas on modern thinking may lay in the direction of relating such ideas as
political pluralism and the kind of liberalism being explored by thinkers such as Glaston.
Convention