Symposium overview This symposium critically interrogates the conditions which need to be in place for full participation in social life to become a reality for disabled people and people with learning difficulties across a range of episodes of life experience, domains of social policy, and different European national contexts. The papers draw on a series of cognate frameworks situated within the intellectual space of critical theory, including the social model of disability, socio-cultural learning theory, and the dialogical view of language associated with the work of the Bakhtin Circle. The life episodes considered are: childhood; adolescence; and young adulthood. The policy domains addressed are: school education; post-compulsory education; and adult citizenship. The national contexts represented by the authors include: Iceland; Greece; and England. Drawing on a variety of sources of current research evidence and theory development, the papers are all concerned in their different ways to explore the question of what it means to be members of a social community which is at once common (for all) and accommodating of human difference (for each). They investigate how it might be possible for all students and citizens to be provided with the cultural and material resources necessary to participate fully in the social life of the institutional and broader networks to which they belong. The symposium will re-examine the dictum of Marx and Engels that, in a truly democratic society, 'the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all' (The Communist Manifesto, 1848), suggesting that this could serve as a useful guiding principle for the struggle to create a unified system of social provision, reminding us that the end of education and other social services is not to reduce human difference but to allow individuality to flower. However, the speakers will ask whether a dialectical inversion of Marx's formulation is also necessary. The evidence of the studies reported in these papers may also suggest that the growth of the individual personality depends on our experience of meaningful social interaction with others as participants in a common culture. From this point of view, institutionalised patterns of selection between schools, colleges, and other social institutions, and of differentiation within them, impoverish and distort the individual development of every member, for they diminish our understanding of human difference. Participation in a diverse, democratically organised community is seen as a prerequisite for the growth of each individual's subjectivity in all its richness.