Communitarian theorists could not live in the societies they extol.

Evidence

Against Khaldun’s thesis we might suppose we would rather live in a society with the advantages of division of labor and scale than in one so small that there would be little division of labor (except perhaps the painfully traditional divisions by gender). Khaldun’s moral thesis is that we would be better off in a small, close-knit community. That is a staggeringly complex and contestable normative claim, one that is partially shared by communitarian theorists of our time in the West. None of those communitarian theorists would be able to live in a society such as Khaldun extolled. Nor could Khaldun, as an impressive social theorist, have fitted into that society—he would, on his own account, have been excluded by his own excellence. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 863

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between espousing small-community trust and being unable to inhabit it parallels the paradox that trust as an ideal is typically articulated from a position of social distance.