Community and Society Research Paper

With Thomas Hobbes and Baroch Spinoza in the seventeenth century nature disappears as explanation of human collectivity. With the exception of the family all forms of socialization and communalization (collegium, corporation, craft, parish, municipality, partnership, trading company, etc.) were secondary formations within a state federation (civitas, res publica) constituted through a social convention. Hobbes talked about ‘systems of people, numbers of men joined in one interest, one business.’ Instead of the concept of society understood as synonymous with community a new concept of society emerged based on a conventional meaning identical to that of the state in the modern sense of the word.

From the middle of the eighteenth century and increasingly from the 1850s society and the social were seen as taking shape between individuals or house-holds and the political order. Almost all social thought during this period was preoccupied with conceptualizing the collective entities that emerged within the ‘social’ in order to describe and analyze their nature, stability, and ties of cohesion. Besides com-munity and society, concepts like nation, class, and culture were suggested. Societies were seen as organized by division of labor and social interests, by class struggle, or by cultural-linguistic identity. This was the more general framework of the debate on community and society.

John Locke emphasized the transformation from the traditional view on social relationships, based on natural right, to the modern thought based on rationalism and positive law, and replacing Aristotle’s teleological view with the functional idea of collective security. The emphasis on collective security should be seen in the context of the growing role of private property. This development, where in political philosophy society became the preferred concept, did not mean that community disappeared. With the exception for political economy, where ‘community’ was narrowed down to trade company, the definition of society as community remained in everyday language until the end of the eighteenth century. Immanuel Kant viewed society, in its context of being based on reason and conventions among individuals, as a dynamic totality, the elements of which acted with and against one another. The ‘unsocial sociality’ (un-gesellige Geselligkeit) of humans drove them to form societies. However, this drive towards convention-based collectivity provoked resistance, and the threat of the dissolution of the society was permanent. Kant’s view was in this respect close to the school of English-Scottish moral philosophers (Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson).

Kant’s question about a perfect society based on the free interaction among individuals was taken up by Johann Gottlieb Fichte at the beginning of the nineteenth century and put into a historical and linguistic-critical context. Although Fichte often used society and community as synonymous terms, he exposed the two concepts, and that of state, to linguistical-critical scrutiny observing the prevailing conceptual confusion.

As far as the German-speaking area is concerned, around 1800 Johann Gottfried Herder suggested a distinction between community and society. His point of departure was the state-society connection, where ‘state’ emphasized the unity and closure of the collectivity, while ‘society’ had a focus on the multiple and open forms of collectivity including those based on the individual rights. In order to describe the relationship between state and church, Herder used society, based on Enlightenment reflection on the contextuality and historicity of religious forms. In order to emancipate the spirit and the mind, the Geist, from its entanglement with the state, and to rediscover the suprahistorical core of Christianity, Herder required the separation of society and community, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, where the latter term was used to describe the community of spirits in- dependent of the state. Herder’s distinction, which again took up the old Greek and Biblical-Christian χοινωνι α concept and infused it with new meaning, failed however to go beyond a specific religious vocabulary.

Kant’s moral philosophy provoked criticism from G. W. F. Hegel, who rejected the idea of the autonomous individual. In Hegel’s view the individual is certainly rational, although rationality is historical and trans-individual. The normative and legal order of a society could not have its point of departure in the idea of its individuals as a priori free, equal, and rational. Humans are free only within a strong moral community. Society is not based on convention but on moral. Such is Hegel’s view. The human effort to be recognized as an individual results in the emergence of various communities, which are kept together by strong moral virtues, Sittlichkeit. The social com- munity was linked to an ethical dimension, which, according to Hegel, appeared in various shapes through history, which was nothing but the development towards higher forms of ethical realization. The highest stage in this historical development was the state, which gave all its citizens true freedom through the confirmation and recognition of them in a meaningful totality. The individual is emancipated through subordination in the collective realization of Sittlichkeit.

From this condensed rational-romantic version of community, inspiration could a century later be picked up in Germany for extreme versions of the concept, where it was linked to the Volk (‘people’) concept and political action orientation. The difference between the individualistically oriented Kant and the collectivistic view of Hegel is not restricted to German history but is however more general and has been discernible in two alternative world views on community and society ever since. In the years around 2000 these alternatives are expressed in the debate between liberals and communitarians.

Emile Durkheim (1933 [1893]) developed Hegel’s key question about the moral basis of modern societies in new directions. ‘Modern society’ is henceforth understood in terms of industrialization, division of labor, and democratization, processes that only had just begun when Hegel reflected on society, but were much more evident for Durkheim. His key question dealt with social solidarity, and how to bridge the distance between the state and the individual. The point of departure for Durkheim when he posed this question was the debate about the nature of the moral and political sciences. He was unsatisfied with the speculative character of political philosophy. He was convinced neither by the individualistic and utilitaristic approach developed by Kant or in the classical political economy, nor by Hegel’s holistic enlightenment-romantic and mystical view on community, where the societies had goals, which were above and beyond those of the individuals. Durkheim looked in his positivist and empiricist approach for a position between Kant and Hegel for a society that was rather different than theirs. This debate was the very foundational moment of the social sciences in the contemporary sense.

Durkheim emphasizes the role of religion in pre-modern societies, in which, beyond the family, no other functionally cohesive institution other than religion existed. Religion provided ‘mechanical solidarity,’ which functioned as a social cement. This mechanical solidarity can be related to Hobbes’s understanding of society (and nature) as clockwork. Post-Renaissance rationalism in the shape of Hobbes and others takes on new meaning when in the second half of the nineteenth century it was faced with a truly mechanical universe, i.e., the advances of physics, the division of labor, automized production, etc. In modern societies the division of labor changed the preconditions for social cohesion. A need for co-ordination of functional relationships emerged. The societies became ever more complex with growing divergence among individuals in their social orientation. Their interpretations of the world did not necessarily converge towards one collective will. The state was the only instrument for collective action when societies had developed a certain degree of complexity. Through the state organism reflexive thinking emerged. The ‘stratification’ of the ethnic nation was the modern beginning of this reflexivity, tearing the individual between instrumental-rational forms of belonging, and the organic, cultural, and social bonds. With this kind of reflection in the wake of the growing social division of labor organic solidarity arose alongside mechanical solidarity.

Durkheim problematizes the mediation between the individual and the society. The political philosophy of Enlightenment focused on concepts like people’s sovereignty and political representation and on the issue of the institutional distribution of power. With intensified industrialization, capital concentration, the rise of the labor movement, and ideas of universal suffrage, the theoretical framework provided by the Enlightenment philosophers became insufficient. New forms of relationships between the individual and the state levels had to be developed. In this context Durkheim evokes the notion of secondary institutions and develops ideas about what kind of organizational forms would fit an industrial society.

Taking his theoretical point of departure in his idea of division of labor as the basic principle of modern societies, he suggests interest-based representation through corporations rather than territory-based political representation. The corporations would reflect modern professions rather than traditional crafts and estates. In his functionalist approach Durkheim developed a moral theory in which he paid relatively little attention to questions of power and authority struc-ures and social inequality. However his view on moral based on corporate representation and related to his idea of solidarity indicated the social question. The political function of the secondary institutions was both to keep the state sufficiently free from influences from the masses, so that the state could fulfil its role as the shaper of the society, and to protect the individuals from oppression by the state.

Hegel’s problematization of the leading idea in moral philosophy and political economy, that society was based on the individuals and their agreement on conventions, constituted in the German-speaking area a step in the development from the traditional to the critical theory of society. The critical social theory, which emerged in particular in Germany around 1850, introduced new basic concepts and distinguished between society and community, between society and state, and between burgerliche (the German term connotes in English translation both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘civil’) society and society. This critical social theory must be seen in the context of the social revolutionary movement, which emerged in the nineteenth century. This movement could be seen as a response to the crisis, which since the French Revolution, and with the industrial revolution, marked the everyday experiences in Europe and gradually also beyond Europe. Critical theory was an alternative reflection on society and community with respect to Durkheim’s, based on ideas of functional differentiation and division of labor.

Politically the most long-term important element of critical theory was the conceptualization of a social history, or history of society, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, inscribed in the framework of the social sciences, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their historical materialism, and in their emphasis on the political role of the proletariat, they depreciated the concept of society (‘bourgeois’). They re-evaluated the com-munity concept with its derivative communism, where socialism, with the same etymological origin as society, was seen as a transitional phase towards communism, the final stage, where history ceased. Marx and Engels criticized the view of society in earlier French and British social history, where society was seen as a set of mutual interactions. They criticized this view of society as being a society of exchange in which every member was a merchant. The society Marx and Engels discerned was societies in plural, where each of them was determined by the specific ways in which the production was organized. In each type of society specific power relationships prevailed. They followed one another in historical phases: the original society (‘Urgesellschaft’), slave society, feudal society, bourgeois or capitalist society, socialist society, and communist community, where the merger into the old Greek χοινωνι α was fulfilled in a new action-and future-oriented utopia.

A few years after the death of Karl Marx and after ever stronger experiences of industrial change and economic concentration, Ferdinand Tonnies (1887), analyzed quite differently, but still with a utopian embedding of the community concept, the connection between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In his view community took on a social romantic meaning con-noting an archaic past based on the family and providing feelings of holism. His utopia was projected towards the past instead of the future. Society was the term used to describe the breaking-up of this past through industrialization, social disintegration, and experiences of atomism. Tonnies saw communism as a cultural system of community and socialism as the cultural system of society, i.e., communism was rather referred to as a historical or even archaic category, a kind of prototype, while socialism reflected the industrial society.

Tonnies’ subordination of society to community had long-term political impact. Community was, in his view, in all sociological conceptualizations the superior and in all historical analyses the anterior concept. Community was the dialectical womb from which society arose in historical processes. The concept of society described the law-bound normal process of the decline of all community. The same process that Marx and Engels—in accordance with Hegel’s idealistic philosophy and their critical-normative prognosis, where society became community—described as emancipation and a development towards higher stages of social organization, Tonnies analyzed as decay, as inexorable as the coming communism in the view of Marx and Engels. The only future hope that Tonnies could discern was weak: that the force of the community also within the era of society would remain although it was declining. The community could be promoted through the cooperative movement and through the union and solidarity idea in the labor movement.

Although Tonnies’ concept of society includes the totality of the relationships among the individuals mediated through exchange, and in this respect can be historically situated, this historical location involves conceptual distinctions which cannot be justified either in genetic or in linguistic-critical terms. Both Max Weber and Georg Simmel observed this inconsistency and tried to solve it through a paradigmatic change of the sociological terminology. To consider social institutions like state, church, cooperative (Genossenschaft) as independent entities preceding the in-dividual and attach them to a general society concept was in Weber’s view a metaphysic residual, which needed to be overcome. He replaced society as a basic sociological concept with the term Vergesellschaftung, ‘societalization,’ an extremely general concept containing all forms of rationally motivated interest relationships under one umbrella concept. The generalization of the sociological conceptual framework around the term Vergesellschaftung certainly described processes and social change, but was basically a historical, where the analysis of the development was deprived of historical contextualization. Historical contexts were understood as ‘cultural tragedy’ (Simmel) or ‘destiny of the rationalization of society through science’ (Weber). The process of de-historization of the concept of society that Tonnies began and Weber continued with his criticism of Tonnies had the effect of drawing growing attention to the community concept. Gemeinschaft, which can be seen as a kind of pseudo-historization, became topical. With the introduction of the concept of community in this way the sociological theory in Germany un-intentionally opened up for the reactionary opposition against the industrial society. While in other European languages society and community remained synonymous concepts, Gemeinschaft became in Germany an ideological key concept connected to another highly ideologized crucial concept: the Volk. The ideological entanglement of the two concepts became a national-conservative instrument to mobilize the olkische movement after World War I against socialism, capitalism, and industrialism.

The cult and the dogmatization of the Gemeinschaft concept were also confirmed in German philosophy at this time. Max Scheler identified community as a person sui generis, ‘a person of persons’ as opposed to society, which was nothing but the sum of its individuals. He thus reinforced Tonnies’ distinction. Community was based on blood, tradition, and historicity, while society was the waste product of internal disintegrative processes in the community. Society was synonymous with public, which continuously removed—Marx would have said alienated—the individual. Community was synonymous with personal solidarity, which reintegrated the individual.

Already before World War II, Talcott Parsons (1937) developed a view where community and society were seen as key concepts in structural-functional alternatives of value orientation, ‘pattern variables’: affectivity vs. affective neutrality, particularity vs. universalism, ascription vs. achievement, diffuseness vs. specificity. His approach was one, where, like in the German debate, the two concepts were separated, but for the rest his contribution was very different from the German debate.

In the 1950s Rene Konig (1955) was one of the leading figures in the reconstruction of the German sociology. He argued vehemently against Tonnies’ dichotomy and use of the Gemeinschaft concept. He argued for an empirically oriented sociology with the American functionalism, where Talcott Parsons was a leading figure, as a source of inspiration, and warned against any attempt to conceptualize society as a totality, which only lead to speculation and dog-matism. Community in the German form of Gemein-schaft was in the 1950s rejected from the political and sociological vocabulary and society emerged instead in the 1960s as the key concept to describe and analyze the social organization.

At the same time as Konig in Germany warned against the Gemeinschaft concept community became the name of the European integration project in the 1950s. One of the key problems when this project was formulated was how to make Germany a strong ally in the Cold War and at the same time guarantee that the strength was controllable for its allies. The main architects of this design came from France, where the concern about the key problem for historical reasons was particularly great. There, communaute, for historical reasons, in the 1950s had a much more positive value charge than Gemeinschaft in Germany. In the form of the European Community in German translation, Gemeinschaft came back in as a political concept, which guaranteed the German incorporation in the West European Alliance in the Cold War, and which, therefore, was disconnected from its historical heritage in the German speech-area. When the European integration in the 1970s was exposed to strains, the idea of a European identity emerged connected to ideas of a supranational Europe. This intensification of the European Community concept was emphasized in the 1990s when community was changed for union. This European development can be understood as part of a modernization theory which is resurfacing with a communitarian twist, where culture is constructed around the idea of a community as a homogeneous discourse that somehow provides the glue to bind societies together. Such a theory of social integration, which takes for granted that cultural cohesion exists for national societies, and then simply transfers the idea of state-formation onto a supra-national European level, built around the concept of European identity, echoes somehow Ferdinand Tonnies’ idea of a sociopsychological community. After the Cold War the European Union is searching for new meaning and legitimization replacing the original rationale behind its foundation. This search is reflected on the conceptual level, where established concepts like community lose meaning and/or are charged with new content. Society seems in this respect to have become more stable and less ideologized.

The general theoretical framework of this discourse on European unity is the debate between libertarians and communitarians in social sciences since the 1970s, which debate, in turn, in a long historical view could be seen as continuity under transformation of the bicentenary debate between Kantians and Hegelians. A point of departure for this theoretical debate was John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Erected in the tradition of contract theories and Kantian liberalism his theory bypassed the questions of political obligation and the welfare state through the idea of distributive rights in individualist terms. Utilitarian philosophers objected but in the long term the most substantive opposition to the neo-Kantian approach emerged from the ‘communitarians.’ The debate be-tween the liberals and the communitarians became one of the most important issues in political philosophy in the 1980s. Methodologically the communitarians argued that the premise of individualism such as the idea of free and rational choice is wrong or biased and neglects the social, cultural, and historical con-texts in which individuals act. In order to understand individuals one must look at their communities and communal relationships. In normative sense the communitarians argued that the premises of individualism give rise to morally unsatisfactory con-sequences. A. MacIntyre in After Virtue (1984) questioned the fundamental philosophical assumptions of liberalism. He and others questioned the claim of the priority of the right over the good and the image of the freely choosing individual. Political arrangements cannot be justified without reference to common purposes. Freedom flourished within social inter-dependence not among free-floating individuals. However, the kind of community the communitarians drafted was one that often focused on the family, the tribe, or the neighborhood rather than on the nation, the state, or the class. The communitarian community is more than a mere association; it is a unity in which the individuals are members not in artificial or instrumental terms, but within its own intrinsic value. This is a view with similarities to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit idea.

In the debate communitarianism has been dismissed both as little more than a corrective to the excesses of liberalism and as a form of old-fashioned collectivism. In the framework of the former view approaches have emerged, which can be described as a merger between liberalism and communitarianism. Michael Walzer sees communitarian thought as a permanently recurring corrective to liberalism (1983). Charles Taylor (1989) is another leading name in this approach. The trend at the end of the 1990s was that the divide that once seemed to separate communitarian and liberal theories began to close. Taylor and Walzer are often referred to as liberal communitarians. The theoretical debate has moved from the thick communitarian critique of thin liberalism to positions that combine elements of both. This trend has been nurtured not least from legal theory where a strong recent ‘re-publican’ turn aspires to hold both communitarian ideals and democratic participation together. The law is seen as sustaining community and promoting the common good to be negotiated through participation in a polity where liberal rights guarantee that the bargaining is uncoerced. Also the globalization dis-course on the emergence of a globally rather than nationally organized economic order promoted the trend of closure between liberalism and communitarianism. The attempts to re-establish community, experienced as being lost to transnational globally operating forces, resulted in liberal politics of recognition of cultural alternatives in the name of multiculturalism.

Community has in this merger with liberal ideas been linked to the concept of citizenship, which borne in the French Revolution became a political key concept in the 1980s and 1990s. This linkage of community and citizenship is a dominant element not only of political and legal theory but of much current political debate as well, where both the Left and the Right try to establish positions of strength through various views, which emphasize both community and citizenship. This development is embedded in a broader theoretical and political reflection in the same direction around concepts like collective identity, network, trust, and social capital since the 1970s where the emphasis is on the historical emergence of reciprocal reliance among citizens. This trend around 2000 can be seen as attempts to establish a new merger between community and society from points of departure, which emphasize the role of the individual and plays down that of the state. Society is emphasized as civil society (in opposition to the state). The individual rather than the state has become the counter concept of society resulting in a migration of the society concept in the direction of the community concept, although this community concept is linked not only to the nation state but increasingly also to trans-and subnational levels of social and political organization.

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