Communitarianism by UR Scholarship Repository

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Political Science

2001

Communitarianism Richard Dagger

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Communitarianism Bell, Daniel, Communitarianism and Its Critics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 Bellah, Robert N. et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 19 8 5 Etzioni, Amitai, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society, New York: Basic Books, 1996

Macintyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, and London: Duckworth, 1981; rnd edition 1984

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Moon, ]. Donald, Communitarianism entry in The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, edited by Ruth Chadwick, San Diego: Academic Press, 1998 Mulhall, Stephen and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992; 2nd edition 1996 Nisbet, Robert A., The Quest for Community, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1953; reissued as Community and Power, r 962; reissued under original title, 1969 Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of justice, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982; 211d edition, 1998 Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Papers, 2 vols, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 198 5 Tonnies, Ferdinand, Community and Association, translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis, London: Routledge and Paul, 19 5 5; as Community and Society, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 19 57 (German edition as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887) Walzer, Michael, Spheres of justice: A Defense of P/11ralis111 and Equality, New York: Basic Books, and Oxford: Robinson, 1983 Communitarianism has both a general sense, with a long history in social and political thought, and a specific connection to the "liberal-communitarian debate" of the r98os and 1990s. In the general sense, anyone who believes that community is somehow vital to a worthwhile life - and is therefore a good to be protected against various threats - is a communitarian. Such a person may be either left-wing or rightwing politically. Communitarianism, in this sense, began to take shape as a self-conscious way of thinking about society and politics in the late 19th century. According to one line of thought that developed at the time, the primary threat to community is the movement from the settled, family-focused life of villages and small towns to the unsettled, individualistic life of commerce and cities, which may lead to greater affluence and personal freedom, but at the cost of alienation, isolation, and rootlessness. TONNIES, with his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association or society), has been especially influential in this regard. Gemeinschaft, as he defines it, is an intimate, organic, and traditional form of human association; Gesellschaft is impersonal, mechanical, and rational. To exchange the former for the latter, then, is to trade warmth and support for coldness and calculation. A second line of communitarian thought sees the principal threat to community in the centripetal force of the modern state. NISBET provides an especially clear statement of this position, which draws more on Alexis de Tocqueville's insistence on the importance of voluntary associations of citizens than on a longing for Gemeinschaft. Community, in Nisbet's account, is a form of association in which people more-orless spontaneously work together to solve common problems and live under codes of authority that they have generated themselves. However, the free and healthy life of community is under constant pressure from the modern state, with its impulses toward centralized power and bureaucratic regulation.

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These two themes persist in the writings of the communitarian political theorists of recent years, whose main concern has been to protect community against liberal individualism. BELLAH et al. combines political theory with a sociological analysis of American life that draws on intensive interviews with more than 200, predominantly white and middle-class, Americans. The authors' conclusion is that the United States is a society in which the ideal of the "autonomous individual" leads to an estrangement from public concerns and a troubling lack of social commitment. In MACINTYRE, the worry is that conflict between the <ldvocates of incommensurable moral positions has so riven modern societies that "[mjodcrn politics is civil war carried on by other means" (p.253). The turn toward rc:1son that Macintyre calls "the Enlightcnmellt project" has proven doubly disastrous: first, because reason alone cannot provide a foundation for morality; and second, because the turn to reason has deflected attention from the importance of character and virtue. The best that people can do in such circumstances is to agree to disagree when that is possible, to engage in "civil war ... by other means" when it is not, and to try to construct "local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us" (p.26 3 ). SANDEL highlights the communitarian complaint against liberal individualism. With John Rawls' A Theory of Justice ( 1971) as his main target, Sandel objects that contemporary liberals often conceive of the individual as an "unencumbered self" that is, completely free to choose its goals and attachments. Such a conception is both false and pernicious, he argues, for individual selves arc largely constituted by the communities that nurture and sustain them. \Vhen liberals teach individuals to think of themselves as somehow prior to and apart from these communities, then they are engaged quite literally in a self-defeating enterprise. Similar claims appear in the essays collected in TAYLOR, especially the second volume, but he aims his criticisms not so much at Rawls or liberalism in general as at the "atomistic" liberalism of libertarians such as Robert Nozick. WALZER argues that attempts to devise a single theory of justice that will govern the distribution of all kinds of goods - a theory such as Rawls' - must fail because different principles of justice apply to different kinds of goods. To discover these principles requires an appreciation of how "all these differences derive from different understandings of the social goods themselves - the inevitable product of historical and cultural particularism" (p.6). Thus Walzer's emphasis on "particularism" has led many commentators to place him on the communitarian side of the liberal-communitarian debate. None of these theorists clearly and unequivocally considers himself a communitarian, however. fndeed, Macintyre and Sandel have tried to shake off that label in subsequent writings. But others have been happy to take it up. One of them, Amitai Etzioni, is the founder of a journal, The Rcsponsiuc Community, that is the organ of a self-styled communitarian movement. ETZJONJ is a clear statement of his attempt to accommodate individual rights within a theory that stresses the importance of communal ties and social responsibility. BELL offers a defence of communitarianism, in the form of a dialogue between a communitarian and a liberal, which is entertaining as well as enlightening. It has the added virtue

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of including an appendix, again in dialogical form, by a noted critic of communitarianism, Will Kymlicka. Useful introductions to the liberal-communitarian dispute are available in MULHALL & SWIFT, which includes a helpful account of Rawls' views, and MOON, which sets out the key issues in admirably lucid fashion. RICHARD DAGGER