Motivated by a deep sense that injustice and inequality are wrong, liberals and reformers in the Western political tradition have focused their energies on policies and programs which seek inclusion: extending the suffrage to those without property; seeking to treat women the same as men, and blacks the same as whites; trying to ensure that as few as possible are excluded from economic opportunity due to lack of resources. Under current conditions, such demands for inclusion take two primary forms, especially in the United States. One is a commitment to using the state to equalize the life chances of individuals. The other is a call for treating groups which have experienced discrimination with full respect. The former leads to the welfare state, while the latter is produced by, and in turn produces, what is commonly called identity politics, the politics of recognition, or the politics of presence.

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Economics, political science, and sociology are, in this paper, understood to be not only scientific but also moral languages. An economic approach to moral obligation emphasizes that obligations to the self automatically. cover obligations to others A political approach, by contrast, argues that some kind of centralized coercive authority is necessary so that people will carry out their obligations to each other satisfactorily Sociology has always understood itself in opposition to both the market and the state, but it has never been clear about its alternative. Many of the classical thinkers in the sociological tradition wished to preserve both modernity (in the form of markets and states) and morality (in the form of strongly inscribed norms and community obligations) This balance is best resolved by emphasizing morality as a learning process requiring 'civil society' - not as an end in itself, but as a place in which the learning of moral obligation can be carried out.