Communitarianism Research Paper

In the 1980s, a group of political theoreticians— Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer—challenged what they perceived as excessive individualism by the insight that individuality is based and dependent on social context. The radical liberal idea of an ‘unencumbered self’ was criticized as self-refuting, because it fostered antisocial behavior with the tendency to undermine its own social preconditions.

The academic and public impact of communitarian-ism has come about for two reasons: it seemed to give a theoretical answer to the most important political philosophy of the time, for example, the individualist liberalism of the renewed contract theory of John Rawls and others. The second reason is even more important: politically, communitarianism was a criti-cal reaction against the ‘liberalism of greed’ of the Thatcher and Reagan years, so it became attractive to the New Democrats and New Labour as a rhetoric to win back the votes of the middle classes. In the early 1990s, Etzioni and others decided to take these ideas from the campus to the larger society. They founded the journal The Responsive Community and tried to establish communitarian ideas as a recognized third way of political thinking between liberalism and conservatism. Different from former communitarian ideas in the tradition of Ferdinand Tonnies (Gemein-schaft und Gesellschaft), Robert Nisbet, and Martin Buber, the new communitarians pointed out that a responsive community tries to avoid any authoritarianism and oppressiveness against the individual. The old communitarians privileged social bonds and traditional small communities over the individual. Communities in their definition were villages, small cities, some religious sects, and tribes. Asian communitarianism overemphasizes social harmony. The new American line of communitarian thinking concentrated much more on the question of balance between individual rights and social responsibilities. Individual autonomy and the common good are to be brought into a new equilibrium. It tried to add a sense of the social and communal preconditions of social integration to rights-centered liberalism and liberal neutrality.

The anthropologic key concept of modern communitarian thinking is Taylor’s idea of humans as self-interpreting animals (Taylor 1985b). Modern identity is based on inescapable frameworks of interpretation, which provides the background language for strong evaluations of right and wrong, good and evil, higher and lower. The quality of this framework is decisive for the quality of the society. Sandel radicalized this idea and transformed it into an argument against Rawlsian liberalism: the original position as a metaphor for justice, where nobody knows about his or her later social position before a decision is taken, is not only practically impossible (Rawls would agree), but also theoretically undesirable, because this conception of justice would lead to a world inhabited by morally neutral people without any character. Persons without loyalties to their family, their community, nation, or people are in Sandel’s view persons without character. MacIntyre emphasized the missing foundation of liberal theories of justice. Even more, modern concepts cannot provide any motivation to act morally, because they are not based on fully responsible persons, but only on character masks such as the manager, the therapist or the Kierkegaardian aesthete.

This anti-Rawlsian criticism was not conclusive, because his principles of justice were not meant to shape the whole person, but only their behavior in the political realm. Even more, Sandel did not take into account the possibility of a person taking a distant stand from their community. So the foundations of Sandel’s (and, as traditional virtues are concerned, MacIntyre’s) criticism seemed to be rooted in old-fashioned communitarianism without reflection of the fact that modern American society can be interpreted as the social basis for some kind of responsive individualism. Both Sandel and MacIntyre were un-comfortable with the label ‘communitarian,’ but their ideas belong to the present discussion of the concept.

A quite different kind of communitarian theory was developed by Walzer, who is also uncomfortable with the term, but refers to the same set of methods and ideas. In his Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (1983) his social criticism and his ideas for reform lean on the hermeneutic interpretation of commonly shared values. The well-known tension between shared values and social practice is sufficient to legitimize social reform. Walzer’s method differs on the one side from liberal Kantian or Rawlsian social constructionism, and on the other from conservative belief in the objectivity of traditional values (social ontology). Justice is only possible if it takes into account the differentiation of spheres. Different modes of distribution have to be applied concerning membership and citizenship, political power, security and welfare, money, office, education, recognition, kin-ship, and love. There is no general theory of justice, but a special justice for each of these spheres. What is considered as just depends on commonly shared and publicly discussed opinions about the criteria of justice.

The liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s and early 1990s seems to be over at present. Those who decided to stick to the label ‘Communitarians’ now call themselves liberal communitarians or communitarian liberals, such as Selznick (1992) and Etzioni (1996). The central idea is that, in a modern society, common values and virtues can only be developed by freely consenting individuals, not by the state or by pressure from religious movements of the fundamentalist denomination.

Selznick’s ‘communitarian liberalism’ draws on the social philosophy of John Dewey. Morality is always community based. Character and integrity are relevant for the function of large organizations, including the state. A proper understanding of communities implies diversity and pluralism as well as social integration. It has to have a strong sense of a common good. Thus, Selznick combines sociological functionalism with the value-based traditions of American pragmatism. His interpretation of the term ‘covenant’ means a self-defining commitment, and an act of faith and resolve by the individual. It is prepolitical, foundational, and consensual. Liberal neutrality misses this aspect, and is based only on institutions for the purpose of social integration. Conservatism, on the other hand, tries to overload institutional processes with value orientations. The communitarian third way tries to restore values and virtues as functional prerequisites of the civil society.

Bellah and co-workers (1991) try to describe the state of American society and to make statements about its long-term viability through insights into its mores and the climate of opinion. They lean on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835), which seems to be a key text for most communitarians. The results of the study are communicated in terms of eloquent sadness: the self-destruction of the liberation promises of modernity and the retreat from public engagement into the private sphere of the family and friends is stated by many of the interviews. Most of them articulated a profound yearning for the idealized small town, which can be interpreted as a yearning for meaning and coherence, for commitment and com-munity. The social ecology is not intact if there are no communal answers to the extreme fragmentation of modern everyday life. The ubiquitous language of individualism, in which American self-understanding normally is articulated, limits the ways in which people think and cuts off the opportunity of a broader orientation (once called ‘civic virtues,’ Bellah et al. 1985, p. 290). Because of their option for more substantive ethical identities and more active political participation Bellah and co-workers were labeled as communitarians. They preferred to describe their position in a slightly different way to avoid the risk of being misunderstood, privileging only small face-to-face groups such as families, congregations, and neighborhoods, and of being opposed to the state and all the other larger structures that dominate life at the start of the twenty-first century. They insist that freedoms and a Good Society depends on institutions, and they are critical that many individualistic Americans have trouble understanding and accepting social and political institutions (Bellah et al. 1991).

Etzioni’s main criticism of liberal political theory is the negligence of the social preconditions that enable individuals to maintain their psychological integrity, civility, and ability to reason. On the other hand, he distances himself from those communitarians who hold that as long as a community has agreed on a set of values, these are the ultimate criteria as to what is morally appropriate (Etzioni 1995, p. 17). The central problem is to establish criteria for the evaluation of the internal value system of different communities. The question is: how to avoid perspectivism and relativism, and to develop criteria to rule out authoritarian and oppressive community values. In the first place, internal democracy of the community is the criterion. But additional criteria are needed, because a majority in a specific community might violate individual and minority rights. The second criterion is a substantial process of consensus building within a community. Beyond any particular community, the values of a society as a whole are a framework within a higher order of legitimacy; that is, the application of the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The third level is the cross-societal moral dialogues, in which the societal values have to be legitimized against others. The fourth criterion is the global community. But even the global community might act oppressively, as it did when women were excluded from voting worldwide until the end of World War I. So the last resort for the dissenting individual is the clearly communicable self-evidence of some core values.

All these criteria have in common that they are based on moral dialogues of different reach, not on ontological values or on artificially constructed value systems. The communitarian approach is the support of concrete societal and, if necessary, cross-cultural moral dialogues. Of course, they have to be limited to a set of core values (Etzioni 1996, p. 237). Through these reflections Etzioni tries to overcome the restriction of traditional communitarian thinking to limited communities and to bring into discussion the notion of a global community. These are questions the world-wide discussion of communitarian ideas has made inevitable. Communitarian approaches have to solve the question: Which community? What kind of community? Who belongs and who does not? This will be important especially for further discussions on the problem of multiculturalism (cf. Taylor et al. 1992).

The discomfort with the label ‘communitarian’ seems to be a general characteristic of many authors in this field, with the exception of Etzioni. Communitarianism seems to be a permanent, accompanying phenomenon to liberalism, but can hardly stand on its own. The traditional social structures of community orientation have been dissolved by the processes of modernization, individualization, and fragmentation. Attempts to restore or invent dense forms of social integration as an answer to modernity such as communism, fascism (Volksgemeinschaft), or some forms of Islamic fundamentalism are discredited be- cause of their atrocities and their contempt for individual rights. Thus, in modern, technology-based service economies, communitarianism is only accept- able as a reflexive admonition to care more about the common good, but not as a coherent and mobilizing social ideology. So the prediction follows that communitarian ideas in a moderate form of social self-reflection and social integration programs will be a permanent subdominant melody in the chorus of further modernizing societies, because it meets a fundamental human demand for social integration on a theoretical level.

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