” Liberalism ‘desocializes’ the individual, in other words, drawing a veil over his inherently social qualities and treating them as purely individual possessions instead. A consequence is that it becomes much more difficult to see why people should have any responsibility for each other’s welfare, and thus to engage in collective action within the group. If people do not depend on each other for their identities then each is ‘his own man’ and by implication owed nothing to his fellows except perhaps to leave them alone. Self-interest is thereby constituted as the appropriate relationship of Self to Other, which in effect creates the collective action problem, but to do so it must forget the Self’s dependence on the Other’s recognition of his rights and identities. Thus, since that dependence could be threatened by being self-interested all the way down, liberalism arguably contains a deep tension between its legitimation of self-interest and the fact that individuals have an objective interest in the group which makes their individuality possible. This tension may underlie some of the worry today in the West about the erosion of community values in favour of individual self-interest. “

       From Social Theory of International Politics.

       Thoughts?