Alison Jaggar, in her treatment of feminist discourse ethics, expresses worries about using “idealized and imaginary communities” as elucidatory tools for discursive ethics. In response, this paper presents the history of 924 Gilman (an all-ages punk rock collective in the San Francisco Bay area) as a case study of a non-imagined and real discursive community. While the example of 924 Gilman, with its overtly feminist agenda and democratic ethos, bolsters Jaggar’s claims about the need for “closed communities” within discourse ethics, it also challenges some of her basic assumptions and raises important pragmatic and theoretical criticisms against discourse ethics.

The “Occupy Wall Street!” movement has stimulated a long listing of other candidates for radical “occupation.” In this paper, I suggest the occupation of liberalism itself. I argue for a constructive engagement of radicals with liberalism in order to retrieve it for a radical egalitarian agenda. My premise is that the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized, given the way the dominant varieties of liberalism have developed. Ten reasons standardly given as to why such a retrieval cannot be carried out are examined and shown to be fallacious.