Sociology of Communitarianism Research Paper

1. A Brief History

The term ‘communitarian’ was first introduced in 1841, to mean ‘of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a community or communistic system; communitive.’ It has been infrequently employed since then until the middle of the twentieth century.

Among early sociologists whose work is focused on communitarian issues (but did not draw on the term) are Ferdinand Tonnies, especially his comparison of the Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft; Emile Durkheim’s studies of socially integrating role of values and the relations between the society and the person; and George Herbert Mead’s work on the self. Other early relevant sociological works are those of Robert E. Park, William Kornhauser, and Robert Nisbet.

In the 1980s communitarianism was largely advanced by Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer. They criticized liberalism for its failure to realize that people are socially ‘embedded,’ overlooking the fact that people can have a strong attachment to their societies. They lamented liberalism’s focus on the individualistic concept of self-interest.

Asian communitarians argue that to maintain social harmony, individual rights and political liberties must be curtailed. Some seek to rely heavily on the state to maintain social order (for instance, leaders and champions of the regime in Singapore and Malaysia), and some on strong social bonds and moral culture (as Japan does). Asian communitarians also hold that the West’s notion of liberty actually amounts to ‘anarchy’; that strong economic growth requires limiting political freedoms; and that the West uses its idea of legal and political rights to chastise other cultures that have inherent values of their own.

In 1990 a new school of communitarianism was founded. Among its leading scholars are William A. Galston (political theory), Mary Ann Glendon (law), Thomas Spragens Jr. (political science), Alan Ehrenhalt (writer), and sociologists Philip Selznick, Robert Bellah and his associates, and Amitai Etzioni, who wrote books that, in 1990, laid the foundations for responsive (democratic) communitarianism.

According to Selznick’s (1992) The Moral Commonwealth, communitarianism seeks reconstruction of liberal perspectives to mitigate the excesses of individualism and rationalism, and to encourage an ethic of social responsibility. In community there is an irrepressible tension between exclusion and inclusion, and between civility and piety. Thus community is not a restful idea, a realm of peace and harmony. On the contrary, competing principles must be recognized and dealt with.

Responsive communitarians, a group founded by Amitai Etzioni, took communitarianism from a small academic discipline and introduced it into public life, as well as recast its academic content. Its tools were The Responsi e Communitarian Platform: Rights and Responsibilities a joint manifesto summarizing the guiding principles of the group; an intellectual quarterly, The Responsi e Community, whose editors include several social scientists; several books; position papers covering issues such as shoring up the family, organ donation, health care, and bicultural education; and numerous public conferences, op-eds, and a web site (www.gwu.edu/ccps).

2. Basic Principles

Responsive communitarianism assumes that societies have multiple and not wholly compatible needs, in contrast to philosophies built on one core principle, such as liberty for libertarianism. Responsive communitarianism assumes that a good society is based on a balance between liberty and social order, and between particularistic (communal) and society-wide values and bonds. This school stresses the responsibilities people have for their families, kin, communities, and societies—above and beyond the universal rights all individuals command, the focus of liberalism.

While a carefully crafted balance between liberty and social order defines a generic concept of the good society, communitarians point out that the historical-social conditions of specific societies determine the rather different ways a given society in a given era may need to change to attain the same balance. Thus, contemporary Japan requires much greater tolerance for individual rights, while in US society excessive individualism needs to be curbed.

Communitarians also pay much attention to the relationship between the self and the community. Political theorists depict the self as ‘embedded’, which implies that the self is constrained by the community. Responsive communitarians stress that individuals who are well integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in responsible ways than isolated individuals, but if social pressure to conform rises to high levels, it will undermine the individual self.

Communitarians pay special attention to social institutions. Several of these form the moral infra-structure of society: families, schools, communities, and the community of communities. Infants are born into families whose societal role is to introduce values and begin the development of the moral self. Schools’ role is to further develop the moral self and to remedy moral development if it was neglected or distorted by the family.

Communitarians emphasize that children reared in well-functioning families and schools will still not be sufficiently equipped for membership in a good, communitarian society. This is a point ignored by those social philosophers who assume that once people have acquired virtue and are habituated, they will be adequately guided by their inner moral compass. In contrast, communitarians assume that commitments to moral values tend to deteriorate, unless these are continuously reinforced. A major societal role of communities is to reinforce these commitments of their members. This is achieved by the community’s ‘moral voice’, the informal sanctioning of others, built into a web of informal affect-laden relationships, that communities provide.

Studies indicate that Americans in the 1980s often avoided speaking up on moral issues. The work of Robert Bellah and his associates has been particularly influential here, demonstrating the rise of first expressive and then instrumental individualism, and their negative effects. Many Americans, and to some extent members of other Western societies, embraced the liberal ideology that what is morally sound is to be determined by each individual, and one should not judge the acts of others. Very large increases followed in crime, drug abuse, divorce, and loss of trust in public institutions and legitimate authority and fraying of social bonds.

Within this context responsive communitarians point out that if a society has communities whose social webs are intact, who share a moral culture, and whose members are willing to raise their moral voice, such a society can rest its social order largely on moral commitments rather than on the coercive state. That is, the moral voice can reduce the inevitable tension between liberty and social order and enhance both.

3. Critiques And Responses

Critics argue that the concept of community is difficult to define. In response, Etzioni defined com-munity as an amalgam of a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, who also share a commitment to a set of shared values and mores, who have a shared history and identity—in short, a particular culture.

Other critics claimed that the population of con-temporary societies is concentrated in cities and is geographically highly mobile, and thus bereft of community. Communitarians respond that communities persist in many city neighborhoods, often based on ethnic or religious ties. Moreover, communities need not be residential; members can be spread among nonmembers. For instance, homosexual groups often constitute communities even if they are not all neighbors. Also communities exist at work, among professionals and even in cyberspace.

Critics maintain that communities are authoritarian and oppressive. Communitarians respond that com-munities vary in this regard. Contemporary com-munities tend to be relatively democratic, given the relative ease in which people can relocate as well as shift their loyalties and psychic investments among various communities of which the same person may be a member, for instance, at home and at work.

Critics point out that communities tend to be homogenous and exclude people who are different. Communitarians respond that communities must respect laws that ban discrimination on racial and other grounds, but argue that given the considerable human benefit of community membership, a measure of self-segregation should be tolerated.

The fourth element of the needed institutional structure is the community of communities. Responsive communitarians have noted that communities need to be bound socially and morally into more encompassing entities, if violent conflict among them is to be avoided. Society should not be viewed as composed of millions of individuals, but as pluralism (of communities) within unity (the society). The existence of subcultures does not undermine societal unity as long as there is a core of shared values and institutions.

4. Civic And Good

Most recently, following the growing popularity of the concept of civic society, Etzioni argued that it is insufficient from a communitarian viewpoint. This is the case because civic society tends to be morally neutral on all matters other than the attributes citizens need to make them into effective members of a civic society, for instance, to be able to think critically. In contrast, a good society seeks to promote a core of substantive values, and thus views some voluntary associations and social activities as more virtuous than others.

In the same vein, communitarians argue that while everyone’s right to free speech should be respected, some speech—seen from the community’s view-point—is morally highly offensive and when children are exposed, damaging, For instance, the (legal) right to speak does not render verbal expressions of hate (morally) right.

While sociologists made numerous contributions to altered communitarian thinking, this philosophy challenged sociology to face issues raised by cross-cultural moral judgments. Sociologists tend to treat all values as conceptually equal; thus sociologists refer to racist Nazi beliefs and those of free societies by the same ‘neutral’ term, calling both ‘values’. Communitarians use the term ‘virtue’ to indicate that some values have a high moral standing because they are compatible with the good society, while other values are not and hence are ‘aberrant’ rather than virtuous.

In the same vein, communitarians reject the claim of cultural relativism that all cultures command basically the same moral standing, and do not shy away from passing cross-cultural moral judgments. Thus, they view female circumcision, sex slaves, and hudud (chop-ping off the right hand of thieves) as violations of liberty and individual rights, and abandoning children, violating implicit contracts building into communal mutuality, or neglecting the environment, as evidence of a lack of commitment to social order and neglect of social responsibilities.

5. Public Voice

The discussion up to this point focused on responsive communitarianism as a social philosophy, its social science propositions and ethical implications. Responsive communitarians also have been playing a considerable public role. They are best understood as a new environmental movement, one concerned with the well-being of society rather than nature. Like environmentalism, communitarianism appeals to audiences across the political spectrum. The record shows that their influence extends from the moderate social democratic left (especially Tony Blair and Bill and Hillary Clinton) to the moderate Tory right (including public figures such as Kurt Biedenkopf in Germany and David Willetts in the UK). Green parties are also among those who often embrace communitarian concepts.

Communitarian terms have become part of the public vocabulary in the 1990s, especially references to assuming social responsibilities to match individual rights, while the term ‘communitarianism’ itself is used much less often. The number of articles about communitarian thinking in the popular press, increased twelvefold during the last decade of the twentieth century.

Bibliography:

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