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Two-axis political spectrum chart with an economic axis and a socio-cultural axis, and ideologically representative colors
Communitarianism is a
philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the
individual and the
community.
Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person's
social identity and personality are largely molded by community
relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on
individualism. Although the community might be a
family,
communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical
sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a
given place (geographical location), or among a community who share an
interest or who share a history. Communitarianism usually opposes extreme
individualism and disagrees with extreme
laissez-faire policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.
Terminology
The philosophy of communitarianism originated in the 20th century, but the term "communitarian" was coined in 1841, by
John Goodwyn Barmby, a leader of the British
Chartist movement, who used it in referring to
utopian socialists and other idealists who experimented with
communal styles of life.
However, it was not until the 1980s that the term "communitarianism"
gained currency through association with the work of a small group of
political philosophers. Their application of the label "communitarian"
was controversial, even among communitarians, because, in the West, the
term evokes associations with the ideologies of
socialism and
collectivism;
so, public leaders — and some of the academics who champion this school
of thought — usually avoid the term "communitarian", while still
advocating and advancing the ideas of communitarianism.
The term is primarily used in two senses:
- Philosophical communitarianism considers classical liberalism to be ontologically and epistemologically
incoherent, and opposes it on those grounds. Unlike classical
liberalism, which construes communities as originating from the
voluntary acts of pre-community individuals,
it emphasizes the role of the community in defining and shaping
individuals. Communitarians believe that the value of community is not
sufficiently recognized in liberal theories of justice.
- Ideological communitarianism is characterized as a radical centrist ideology
that is sometimes marked by leftism on economic issues and conservatism
or centrism on social issues. This usage was coined recently. When the
term is capitalized, it usually refers to the Responsive Communitarian
movement of Amitai Etzioni and other philosophers.
- Historical roots of collectivist projects from Plato, through Babeuf, Proudhon, Bakunin, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen to Karl Marx
- Contemporary theoretical communitarianism (Michael J. Sandel, Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre), originating in the 1980s
- Pro-liberal, pro-multicultural (Walzer, Taylor)
- Anti-liberal, pro-national (Sandel, MacIntyre)
- The vision of practical, self-sustaining communities as described by Thomas More (Utopia), Tommaso Campanella (Civitas solis) and practised by Christian Utopians (Jesuit Reduction) or utopian socialists like Charles Fourier (List of Fourierist Associations in the United States), Robert Owen (List of Owenite communities in the United States). This line includes various forms of co-operatives, self-help instititutions, or communities (Hussite communities, The Diggers, Habans, Hutterites, Amish, Israeli kibbutz, Slavic community; examples: Twelve Tribes communities, Tamera (Portugal), Marinaleda (Spain), monastic state of Mount Athos, Catholic Worker Movement).
Origins
While
the term communitarian was coined only in the mid-nineteenth century,
ideas that are communitarian in nature appear much earlier. They are
found in some classical socialist doctrine (e.g. writings about the
early commune and about workers' solidarity), and further back in the
New Testament. Communitarianism has been traced back to early
monasticism.
A number of early sociologists had strongly communitarian elements in their work, such as
Ferdinand Tönnies in his comparison of
Gemeinschaft
(oppressive but nurturing communities) and Gesellschaft (liberating but
impersonal societies), and Emile Durkheim's concerns about the
integrating role of social values and the relations between the
individual and society. Both authors warned of the dangers of
anomie
(normlessness) and alienation in modern societies composed of atomized
individuals who had gained their liberty but lost their social moorings.
Modern sociologists saw the rise of a mass society and the decline of
communal bonds and respect for traditional values and authority in the
United States as of the 1960s. Among those who raised these issues were
Robert Nisbet (Twilight of Authority),
Robert N. Bellah Habits of the Heart, and Alan Ehrenhalt (The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues Of Community In America).
In his book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam documented the decline
of "social capital" and stressed the importance of "bridging social
capital," in which bonds of connectedness are formed across diverse
social groups.
In the twentieth century communitarianism also began to be formulated as a philosophy by
Dorothy Day and the
Catholic Worker movement. In an early article the
Catholic Worker clarified the dogma of the Mystical Body of Christ as the basis for the movement's communitarianism. Along similar lines, communitarianism is also related to the
personalist philosophy of
Emmanuel Mounier.
Responding to criticism that the term 'community' is too vague or cannot be defined,
Amitai Etzioni,
one of the leaders of the American communitarian movement, pointed out
that communities can be defined with reasonable precision as having two
characteristics: first, a web of affect-laden relationships among a
group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce
one another (as opposed to one-on-one or chain-like individual
relationships); and second, a measure of commitment to a set of shared
values, norms, and meanings, and a shared history and identity – in
short, a particular culture.
Further, author David E. Pearson argued that "[t]o earn the appellation
'community,' it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion
and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is,
communities are necessarily, indeed, by definition, coercive as well as
moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they
stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they
don't."
What is specifically meant by "community" in the context of
communitarianism can vary greatly between authors and time periods.
Historically, communities have been small and localized. However, as the
reach of economic and technological forces extended, more-expansive
communities became necessary in order to provide effective normative and
political guidance to these forces, prompting the rise of national
communities in Europe in the 17th century. Since the late 20th century
there has been some growing recognition that the scope of even these
communities is too limited, as many challenges that people now face,
such as the threat of nuclear war and that of global environmental
degradation and economic crises, cannot be handled on a national basis.
This has led to the quest for more-encompassing communities, such as the
European Union. Whether truly supra-national communities can be developed is far from clear.
More modern communities can take many different forms, but are
often limited in scope and reach. For example, members of one
residential community are often also members of other communities – such
as work, ethnic, or religious ones. As a result, modern community
members have multiple sources of attachments, and if one threatens to
become overwhelming, individuals will often pull back and turn to
another community for their attachments. Thus, communitarianism is the
reaction of some intellectuals to the problems of Western society, an
attempt to find flexible forms of balance between the individual and
society, the autonomy of the individual and the interests of the
community, between the common good and freedom, rights and duties.
Communitarian philosophy
In moral and political philosophy, communitarians are best known for their critiques of
John Rawls' political liberalism, detailed at length in his book
A Theory of Justice.
Communitarians criticize the image Rawls presents of humans as
atomistic individuals, and stress that individuals who are
well-integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in
responsible ways than isolated individuals, but add that if social
pressure to conform rises to high levels, it will undermine the
individual self. Communitarians uphold the importance of the social
realm, and communities in particular, though they differ in the extent
to which their conceptions are attentive to liberty and individual
rights. Even with these general similarities, communitarians, like
members of many other schools of thought, differ considerably from one
another. There are several distinct (and at times wildly divergent)
schools of communitarian thought.
The following authors have communitarian tendencies in the
philosophical sense, but have all taken pains to distance themselves
from the political ideology known as communitarianism, which is
discussed further below:
Academic communitarianism
Whereas the classical liberalism of the
Enlightenment
can be viewed as a reaction to centuries of authoritarianism,
oppressive government, overbearing communities, and rigid dogma, modern
communitarianism can be considered a reaction to excessive
individualism, understood as an undue emphasis on individual rights,
leading people to become selfish or egocentric.
The close relation between the individual and the community was discussed on a theoretical level by
Michael Sandel and
Charles Taylor,
among other academic communitarians, in their criticisms of
philosophical liberalism, especially the work of the American liberal
theorist
John Rawls and that of the German Enlightenment philosopher
Immanuel Kant.
They argued that contemporary liberalism failed to account for the
complex set of social relations that all individuals in the modern world
are a part of. Liberalism is rooted in an untenable ontology that
posits the existence of generic individuals and fails to account for
social embeddeddness. To the contrary, they argued, there are no generic
individuals but rather only Germans or Russians, Berliners or
Muscovites, or members of some other particularistic community. Because
individual identity is partly constructed by culture and social
relations, there is no coherent way of formulating individual rights or
interests in abstraction from social contexts. Thus, according to these
communitarians, there is no point in attempting to found a theory of
justice on principles decided behind Rawls'
veil of ignorance, because individuals cannot exist in such an abstracted state, even in principle.
Academic communitarians also contend that the nature of the
political community is misunderstood by liberalism. Where liberal
philosophers described the polity as a neutral framework of rules within
which a multiplicity of commitments to moral values can coexist,
academic communitarians argue that such a thin conception of political
community was both empirically misleading and normatively dangerous.
Good societies, these authors believe, rest on much more than neutral
rules and procedures—they rely on a shared moral culture. Some academic
communitarians argued even more strongly on behalf of such
particularistic values, suggesting that these were the only kind of
values which matter and that it is a philosophical error to posit any
truly universal moral values.
Social capital
Beginning
in the late 20th century, many authors began to observe a deterioration
in the social networks of the United States. In the book
Bowling Alone,
Robert Putnam
observed that nearly every form of civic organization has undergone
drops in membership exemplified by the fact that, while more people are
bowling than in the 1950s, there are fewer bowling leagues.
This results in a decline in "
social capital", described by Putnam as "the collective value of all '
social networks'
and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for
each other". According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a
key component to building and maintaining democracy.
Communitarians seek to bolster social capital and the institutions of
civil society. The Responsive Communitarian Platform described it thus:
"Many social goals require partnership between public and private
groups. Though government should not seek to replace local communities,
it may need to empower them by strategies of support, including
revenue-sharing and technical assistance. There is a great need for
study and experimentation with creative use of the structures of civil
society, and public-private cooperation, especially where the delivery
of health, educational and social services are concerned."
Positive rights
Important to some supporters of communitarian philosophy is the concept of
positive rights,
which are rights or guarantees to certain things. These may include
state-subsidized education, state-subsidized housing, a safe and clean
environment, universal health care, and even the right to a job with the
concomitant obligation of the government or individuals to provide one.
To this end, communitarians generally support social security programs,
public works programs, and laws limiting such things as pollution.
A common objection is that by providing such rights, communitarians violate the
negative rights of the citizens; rights to
not
have something done for you. For example, taxation to pay for such
programs as described above dispossesses individuals of property.
Proponents of positive rights, by attributing the protection of negative
rights to the society rather than the government, respond that
individuals would not have any rights in the absence of societies—a
central tenet of communitarianism—and thus have a social responsibility
to give something back to it. Some have viewed this as a negation of
natural rights.
However, what is or is not a "natural right" is a source of contention
in modern politics, as well as historically; for example, whether or not
universal health care, private property or protection from polluters
can be considered a birthright.
Alternatively, some agree that negative rights may be violated by
a government action, but argue that it is justifiable if the positive
rights protected outweigh the negative rights lost. In the same vein,
supporters of positive rights further argue that negative rights are
irrelevant in their absence. Moreover, some communitarians "experience
this less as a case of being used for others' ends and more as a way of
contributing to the purposes of a community I regard as my own".
Still other communitarians question the very idea of natural
rights and their place in a properly functioning community. They claim
that instead, claims of rights and entitlements creates a society unable
to form cultural institutions and grounded social norms based on shared
values. Rather, the liberalist claim to individual rights leads to a
morality centered on individual emotivism, as ethical issues can no
longer be solved by working through common understandings of the good.
The worry here is that not only is society individualized, but so are
moral claims.
Responsive communitarianism movement
In
the early 1990s, in response to the perceived breakdown in the moral
fabric of society engendered by excessive individualism, Amitai Etzioni
and William A. Galston began to organize working meetings to think
through communitarian approaches to key societal issues. This ultimately
took the communitarian philosophy from a small academic group,
introduced it into public life, and recast its philosophical content.
Deeming themselves "responsive communitarians" in order to
distinguish the movement from authoritarian communitarians, Etzioni and
Galston, along with a varied group of academics (including Mary Ann
Glendon, Thomas A. Spragens, James Fishkin, Benjamin Barber, Hans Joas,
Philip Selznick, and
Robert N. Bellah, among others) drafted and published The Responsive Communitarian Platform
based on their shared political principles, and the ideas in it were
eventually elaborated in academic and popular books and periodicals,
gaining thereby a measure of political currency in the West. Etzioni
later formed the Communitarian Network to study and promote
communitarian approaches to social issues and began publishing a
quarterly journal,
The Responsive Community.
The main thesis of responsive communitarianism is that people
face two major sources of normativity: that of the common good and that
of autonomy and rights, neither of which in principle should take
precedence over the other. This can be contrasted with other political
and social philosophies which derive their core assumptions from one
overarching principle (such as liberty/autonomy for libertarianism). It
further posits that a good society is based on a carefully crafted
balance between liberty and social order, between individual rights and
personal responsibility, and between pluralistic and socially
established values.
Responsive communitarianism stresses the importance of society
and its institutions above and beyond that of the state and the market,
which are often the focus of other political philosophies. It also
emphasizes the key role played by socialization, moral culture, and
informal social controls rather than state coercion or market pressures.
It provides an alternative to liberal individualism and a major
counterpoint to authoritarian communitarianism by stressing that strong
rights presume strong responsibilities and that one should not be
neglected in the name of the other.
Following standing sociological positions, communitarians assume
that the moral character of individuals tends to degrade over time
unless that character is continually and communally reinforced. They
contend that a major function of the community, as a building block of
moral infrastructure, is to reinforce the character of its members
through the community's "moral voice," defined as the informal sanction
of others, built into a web of informal affect-laden relationships,
which communities provide.
Influence
Responsive
communitarians have been playing a considerable public role, presenting
themselves as the founders of a different kind of environmental
movement, one dedicated to shoring up society (as opposed to the state)
rather than nature. Like environmentalism, communitarianism appeals to
audiences across the political spectrum, although it has found greater
acceptance with some groups than others.
Although communitarianism is a small philosophical school, it has
had considerable influence on public dialogues and politics. There are
strong similarities between communitarian thinking and the Third Way,
the political thinking of centrist Democrats in the United States, and
the Neue Mitte in Germany. Communitarianism played a key role in Tony
Blair's remaking of the British socialist Labour Party into "New Labour"
and a smaller role in President Bill Clinton's campaigns. Other
politicians have echoed key communitarian themes, such as Hillary
Clinton, who has long held that to raise a child takes not just parents,
family, friends and neighbors, but a whole village.
It has also been suggested that the
compassionate conservatism
espoused by President Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign was a
form of conservative communitarian thinking, although he did not
implement it in his policy program. Cited policies have included
economic and rhetorical support for education, volunteerism, and
community programs, as well as a social emphasis on promoting families,
character education, traditional values, and faith-based projects.
President Barack Obama gave voice to communitarian ideas and ideals in his book
The Audacity of Hope,
and during the 2008 presidential election campaign he repeatedly called
upon Americans to "ground our politics in the notion of a common good,"
for an "age of responsibility," and for foregoing identity politics in
favor of community-wide unity building. However, for many in the West,
the term communitarian conjures up authoritarian and collectivist
associations, so many public leaders – and even several academics
considered champions of this school – avoid the term while embracing and
advancing its ideas.
Reflecting the dominance of
liberal and conservative politics
in the United States, no major party and few elected officials openly
advocate communitarianism. Thus there is no consensus on individual
policies, but some that most communitarians endorse have been enacted.
Nonetheless, there is a small faction of communitarians within the
Democratic Party; prominent communitarians include
Bob Casey Jr.,
Joe Donnelly, and
Claire McCaskill. Many communitarian Democrats are part of the
Blue Dog Coalition. A small communitarian faction within the Republican Party also exists.
Rick Santorum is an example of a communitarian Republican. It is quite possible that the United States'
right-libertarian ideological underpinnings have suppressed major communitarian factions from emerging.
Dana Milbank, writing in the
Washington Post,
remarked of modern communitarians, "There is still no such thing as a
card-carrying communitarian, and therefore no consensus on policies.
Some, such as
John DiIulio and outside Bush adviser
Marvin Olasky, favor religious solutions for communities, while others, like Etzioni and Galston, prefer secular approaches."
In August 2011, the right-libertarian
Reason Magazine
worked with the Rupe organization to survey 1,200 Americans by
telephone. The Reason-Rupe poll found that "Americans cannot easily be
bundled into either the 'liberal' or 'conservative' groups".
Specifically, 28% expressed conservative views, 24% expressed
libertarian views, 20% expressed communitarian views, and 28% expressed
liberal views. The margin of error was ±3.
A similar Gallup survey in 2011 included possible
centrist/moderate
responses. That poll reported that 17% expressed conservative views,
22% expressed libertarian views, 20% expressed communitarian views, 17%
expressed centrist views, and 24% expressed liberal views. The
organization used the terminology "the bigger the better" to describe
communitarianism.
The
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, founded and led by
Imran Khan, is considered the first political party in the world which has declared communitarianism as one of their official ideologies.
Comparison to other political philosophies
Early communitarians were charged with being, in effect, social
conservatives. However, many contemporary communitarians, especially
those who define themselves as responsive communitarians, fully realize
and often stress that they do not seek to return to traditional
communities, with their authoritarian power structure, rigid
stratification, and discriminatory practices against minorities and
women. Responsive communitarians seek to build communities based on open
participation, dialogue, and truly shared values.
Linda McClain,
a critic of communitarians, recognizes this feature of the responsive
communitarians, writing that some communitarians do "recognize the need
for careful evaluation of what is good and bad about [any specific]
tradition and the possibility of severing certain features . . . from
others."
And R. Bruce Douglass writes, "Unlike conservatives, communitarians are
aware that the days when the issues we face as a society could be
settled on the basis of the beliefs of a privileged segment of the
population have long since passed."
One major way the communitarian position differs from the social
conservative one is that although communitarianism's ideal "good
society" reaches into the private realm, it seeks to cultivate only a
limited set of core virtues through an organically developed set of
values rather than having an expansive or holistically normative agenda
given by the state. For example, American society favors being religious
over being atheist, but is rather neutral with regard to which
particular religion a person should follow. There are no
state-prescribed dress codes, "correct" number of children to have, or
places one is expected to live, etc. In short, a key defining
characteristic of the ideal communitarian society is that in contrast to
a liberal state, it creates shared formulations of the good, but the
scope of this good is much smaller than that advanced by authoritarian
societies."
Authoritarian governments often embrace extremist ideologies and
rule with brute force, accompanied with severe restrictions on personal
freedom, political and civil rights. Authoritarian governments are overt
about the role of the government as director and commander.
Civil society and democracy are not generally characteristic of authoritarian regimes.
Criticism
Liberal theorists such as Simon Caney
disagree that philosophical communitarianism has any interesting
criticisms to make of liberalism. They reject the communitarian charges
that liberalism neglects the value of community, and holds an "atomized"
or asocial view of the self.
According to Peter Sutch the principal criticisms of communitarianism are:
- that communitarianism leads necessarily to moral relativism;
- that this relativism leads necessarily to a re-endorsement of the status quo in international politics; and
- that such a position relies upon a discredited ontological argument
that posits the foundational status of the community or state.
However, he goes on to show that such arguments cannot be leveled against the particular communitarian theories of
Michael Walzer and
Mervyn Frost.
Other critics emphasize close relation of communitarianism to
neoliberalism and new policies of dismantling the
welfare state institutions through development of the third sector.
Opposition
- Bruce Frohnen – author of The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism (1996)
- Charles Arthur Willard – author of Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
