Communitarianism
Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Bell
First published Thu Oct 4, 2001; substantive revision Tue Dec 28, 2004
Modern-day communitarianism began in the upper reaches of
Anglo-American academia in the form of a critical reaction to John
Rawls' landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971).
Drawing primarily upon the insights of Aristotle and Hegel, political
philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles
Taylor and Michael Walzer disputed Rawls' assumption that the
principal task of government is to secure and distribute fairly the
liberties and economic resources individuals need to lead freely
chosen lives. These critics of liberal theory never did identify
themselves with the communitarian movement (the communitarian label
was pinned on them by others, usually
critics),[1]
much less offer a grand communitarian theory as a systematic
alternative to liberalism. Nonetheless, certain core arguments meant
to contrast with liberalism's devaluation of community recur in the
works of the four theorists named above (Avineri & de-Shalit 1992,
Bell 1993, Berten et al. 1997, Mulhall & Swift 1996, and
Rasmussen 1990) ,and for purposes of clarity one can distinguish
between claims of three sorts: methodological claims about the
importance of tradition and social context for moral and political
reasoning, ontological or metaphysical claims about the social nature
of the self, and normative claims about the value of
community.[2]
This essay is therefore divided in three parts, and for each part I
present the main communitarian claims, followed by an argument (in each
part) that philosophical concerns in the 1980s have largely given way
to the political concerns that motivated much of the communitarian
critique in the first place.
Communitarians have sought to deflate the universal pretensions of
liberal theory. The main target has been Rawls description of the
original position as an ‘Archemedian point’ from which the
structure of a social system can be appraised, a position whose special
virtue is that it allows us to regard the human condition ‘from
the perspective of
eternity’,[3]
from all social and temporal points of view. Whereas Rawls seemed to
present his theory of justice as universally true, communitarians
argued that the standards of justice must be found in forms of life
and traditions of particular societies and hence can vary from context
to context. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor argued that moral
and political judgment will depend on the language of reasons and the
interpretive framework within which agents view their world, hence
that it makes no sense to begin the political enterprise by
abstracting from the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs,
practices, and institutions (Taylor 1985, ch. 1; MacIntyre 1978,
chs.18-22 and 1988, ch.1; Benhabib 1992, pp. 23-38, 89n4).
Michael Walzer developed the additional argument that effective
social criticism must derive from and resonate with the habits and
traditions of actual people living in specific times and places. Even
if there is nothing problematic about a formal procedure of
universalizability meant to yield a determinate set of human goods and
values, ‘any such set would have to be considered in terms so
abstract that they would be of little use in thinking about particular
distributions’ (Walzer 1983, 8; Young 1990, 4). In short,
liberals who ask what is just by abstracting from particular social
contexts are doomed to philosophical incoherence and liberal theorists
who adopt this method to persuade people to do the just thing are
doomed to political irrelevance.
Rawls has since tried to eliminate the universalist presuppositions
from his theory. In Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993) he
argues in a communitarian vein that his conception of the person as
impartial citizen provides the best account of liberal-democratic
political culture and that his political aim is only to work out the
rules for consensus in political communities where people are willing
to try for consensus. In the Law of Peoples, (Rawls 1999)
he explicitly allows for the possibility that liberalism may not be
exportable at all times and places, sketching a vision of a
‘decent, well-ordered society’ that liberal societies must
tolerate in the international realm. Such a society, he argues, need
not be democratic, but it must be non-aggressive towards other
communities, and internally it must have a ‘common good
conception of justice’, a ‘reasonable consultation
hierarchy’, and it must secure basic human rights. Having said
that, one still gets the sense that the liberal vision laid out in
A Theory of Justice is the best possible political ideal, one
that all rational individuals would want if they were able to choose
between the available political alternatives. There may be justifiable
non-liberal regimes, but these should be regarded as second best to be
tolerated and perhaps respected, not idealized or emulated.
Other liberal theorists have taken a harder line against communitarian
concessions, arguing that liberal theory can and should present itself
as a universally valid ideal. Brian Barry, for one, opens his widely
cited book Justice as Impartiality by boldly affirming the
universality of his theory: ‘I continue to believe in the
possibility of putting forward a universally valid case in favor of
liberal egalitarian principles’ (Barry 1995, 3). Barry does
recognize that a theory of justice must be anchored in substantive
moral considerations, but his normative vision appears to be limited
to the values and practices of liberal Western societies. He seems
distinctly uninterested in learning anything worthwhile from
non-Western political traditions: for example, his discussion of
things Chinese is confined to brief criticisms of the Cultural
Revolution and the traditional practice of foot-binding. One might
consider the reaction to a Chinese intellectual who puts forward a
universal theory of justice that draws on the Chinese political
tradition for inspiration and completely ignores the history and moral
argumentation in Western societies, except for brief criticisms of
slavery and imperialism.
Still, it must be conceded that 1980s communitarian theorists were
less-than-successful at putting forward attractive visions of
non-liberal societies. The communitarian case for pluralism for the
need to respect and perhaps learn from non-liberal societies that may
be as good as, if not better than, the liberal societies of the West
may have been unintentionally undermined by their own use of (counter)
examples. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre defended the
Aristotelian ideal of the intimate, reciprocating local community
bound by shared ends, where people simply assume and fulfill socially
given roles (MacIntyre 1984). But this pre-modern Gemeinschaft
conception of an all-encompassing community that members
unreflectively endorse seemed distinctly ill-suited for complex and
conflict-ridden large-scale industrialized societies. In Spheres
of Justice, Michael Walzer pointed to the Indian caste system,
‘where the social meanings are integrated and
hierarchical’ (Walzer 1983, 313) as an example of a non-liberal
society that may be just according to its own standards. Not
surprisingly, few readers were inspired by this example of non-liberal
justice (not to mention the fact that many contemporary Indian
thinkers view the caste system as an unfortunate legacy of the past
that Indians should strive hard to overcome). In short, this use of
ill-informed examples may have unintentionally reinforced the view
that there are few if any justifiable alternatives to liberalism in
modern societies. Communitarians could score some theoretical points
by urging liberal thinkers to be cautious about developing universal
arguments founded exclusively on the moral argumentation and political
experience of Western liberal societies, but few thinkers would really
contemplate the possibility of non-liberal practices appropriate for
the modern world so long as the alternatives to liberalism consisted
of Golden Ages, caste societies, fascism, or actually-existing
communism. For the communitarian critique of liberal universalism to
have any lasting credibility, thinkers need to provide compelling
counter-examples to modern-day liberal-democratic regimes and 1980s
communitarians came up short.
By the 1990s, fairly abstract methodological disputes over
universalism versus particularism faded from academic prominence, and
the debate now centers on the theory and practice of universal human
rights. This is largely due to the increased political salience of
human rights since the collapse of communism in the former Soviet
bloc. On the liberal side, the new, more political voices for liberal
universalism have been represented by the likes of Francis Fukuyama,
who famously argued that liberal democracy's triumph over its rivals
signifies the end of history (Fukuama 1992). This view also revived
(and provoked) the second wave communitarian critique of liberal
universalism and the debate became much more concrete and political in
orientation.
Needless to say, the brief moment of liberal euphoria that followed
the collapse of the communism in the Soviet bloc has given way to a
sober assessment of the difficulties of implementing liberal practices
outside the Western world. It is now widely recognized that brutal
ethnic warfare, crippling poverty, environmental degradation, and
pervasive corruption, to name some of the more obvious troubles
afflicting the developing world, pose serious obstacles to the
successful establishment and consolidation of liberal democratic
political arrangements. But these were seen as unfortunate (hopefully
temporary) afflictions that may delay the end of history when liberal
democracy has finally triumphed over its rivals. They were not meant to
pose a challenge to the ideal of liberal democracy. It was
widely assumed that liberal democracy is something that all rational
individuals would want if they could get it.
The deeper challenge to Western liberal democracy has emerged from
the East Asian
region.[4]
In the 1990s, the debate revolved around the notion of ‘Asian
values’, a term devised by several Asian officials and their
supporters for the purpose of challenging Western-style civil and
political freedoms. Asians, they claim, place special emphasis upon
family and social harmony, with the implication that those in the
chaotic and crumbling societies of the West should think twice about
intervening in Asia for the sake of promoting human rights and
democracy. As Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew put it, Asians have
‘little doubt that a society with communitarian values where the
interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits
them better than the individualism of
America’.[5]
Such claims attracted international attention primarily because East
Asian leaders seemed to be presiding over what a U.N. human
development report called ‘the most sustained and widespread
development miracle of the twentieth century, perhaps all
history’.[6]
In 1997-98, however, the East Asian miracle seemed to have
collapsed. And it looks like Asian values was one casualty of the
crisis.
The political factors that focused attention on the East Asian
challenge remain in place, however. East Asian economies (with the
notable exception of Indonesia) have been slowly recovering. China in
particular looks set to become an economic and political heavyweight
with the power to seriously challenge the hegemony of Western liberal
democratic values in international fora. Thus, one hears frequent
calls for cross-cultural dialogue between the West and the East
designed to understand and perhaps learn from the other side. Failing
to take seriously East Asian political perspectives risks widening
misunderstandings and setting the stage for hostilities that could
have been avoided.
From a theoretical point of view, however, it must be conceded that
the official debate on Asian values has not provided much of a
challenge to dominant Western political outlooks. The main problem is
that the debate has been led by Asian leaders who seem to be motivated
primarily by political considerations, rather than by a sincere desire
to make a constructive contribution to the debate on universalism
versus particularism. Thus, it was easy to dismiss — rightly so,
in most cases — the Asian challenge as nothing but a
self-serving ploy by government leaders to justify their authoritarian
rule in the face of increasing demands for democracy at home and
abroad.
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that nothing of theoretical
significance has emerged from East Asia. The debate on Asian values
has also prompted critical intellectuals in the region to reflect on
how they can locate themselves in a debate on human rights and
democracy in which they had not previously played a substantial
part. Neither wholly rejecting nor wholly endorsing the values and
practices ordinarily realized through a liberal democratic political
regime, these intellectuals are drawing on their own cultural
traditions and exploring areas of commonality and difference with the
West. Though often less provocative than the views of their
governments in the sense that few argue for the wholesale rejection of
Western-style liberal democracy with an East Asian alternative these
unofficial East Asian viewpoints may offer more lasting contributions
to the debate. Let me (briefly) note three relatively persuasive East
Asian arguments for cultural particularism that contrast with
traditional Western arguments for liberal universalism (see Bell 2000,
ch. 1):
- Cultural factors can affect the prioritizing of
rights, and this matters when rights conflict and it must be decided
which one to sacrifice. In other words, different societies may rank
rights differently, and even if they face a similar set of
disagreeable circumstances they may come to different conclusions
about the right that needs to be curtailed. For example, U.S. citizens
may be more willing to sacrifice a social or economic right in cases
of conflict with a civil or political right: if neither the
constitution nor a majority of democratically elected representatives
support universal access to health care, then the right to health care
regardless of income can be curtailed. In contrast, the Chinese may be
more willing to sacrifice a civil or political liberty in cases of
conflict with a social or economic right: there may be wide support
for restrictions on the right to form independent labor associations
if they are necessary to provide the conditions for economic
development. Different priorities assigned to rights can also matter
when it must be decided how to spend scarce resources. For example,
East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage will place great
emphasis upon the value of education, and they may help to explain the
large amount of spending on education compared to other societies with
similar levels of economic development.
- Cultural factors can affect the justification of rights.
In line with the arguments of ‘1980s communitarians’ such
as Michael Walzer, it is argued that justifications for particular
practices valued by Western-style liberal democrats should not be made
by relying on the abstract and unhistorical universalism that often
disables Western liberal democrats. Rather, they should be made from
the inside, from specific examples and argumentative strategies that
East Asians themselves use in everyday moral and political debate. For
example, the moral language (shared even by some local critics of
authoritarianism) tends to appeal to the value of community in East
Asia, and this is relevant for social critics concerned with practical
effect. One such communitarian argument is that democratic rights in
Singapore can be justified on the grounds that they contribute to
strengthening ties to such communities as the family and the nation
(see below, section III).
- Cultural factors can provide moral foundations for
distinctive political practices and institutions (or at least
different from those found in Western-style liberal democracies). In
East Asian societies influenced by Confucianism, for example, it is
widely held that children have a profound duty to care for elderly
parents, a duty to be forsaken only in the most exceptional
circumstances.[7]
In political practice, it means that East Asian governments have an
obligation to provide the social and economic conditions that
facilitate the realization of this duty. Political debate tends to
center on the question of whether the right to filial piety is best
realized by means of a law that makes it mandatory for children to
provide financial support for elderly parents as in mainland China,
Japan, and Singapore or whether the state should rely more on indirect
methods such as tax breaks and housing benefits that simply make
at-home care for the elderly easier, as in Korea and Hong Kong. But
the argument that there is a pressing need to secure this duty in East
Asia is not a matter of political controversy.
Thinkers influenced by East Asian cultural traditions such
Confucianism have also argued for distinctive as-yet-unrealized
political practices and institutions that draw on widely-held cultural
values for inspiration. For example, Korean scholars Hahm Chaihark and
Jongryn Mo argue for the need to revive and adapt for the contemporary
era such Choson dynasty institutions as policy lectures and the
Confucian censorate, traditional institutions that played the role of
monitoring the dealings of the Emperor (Hahm 2003, Mo 2003, Bell
2000, ch. 5).
In contrast to 1980s communitarian thinkers, East Asian critics of
liberal universalism have succeeded in pointing to particular
non-liberal practices and institutions that may be appropriate for the
contemporary world. Some of these may be appropriate only for societies
with a Confucian heritage, others may also offer insights for
mitigating the excesses of liberal modernity in the West. What cannot
be denied is that they have carried forward the debate beyond the
implausible alternatives to liberalism offered by 1980s communitarian
thinkers.
It is worth emphasizing, however, that contemporary communitarians
have not been merely defending parochial attachments to particular
non-liberal moralities. Far from arguing that the universalist
discourse on human rights should be entirely displaced with
particular, tradition-sensitive political language, they have
criticized liberals for not taking universality seriously enough, for
failing to do what must be done to make human rights a truly universal
ideal. These communitarians — let us label them the
‘cosmopolitan critics of liberal universalism’ —
have suggested various means of improving the philosophical coherence
and political appeal of human rights.
In fact, there is little debate over the desirability of a core set
of human rights, such as prohibitions against slavery, genocide,
murder, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, and systematic racial
discrimination. These rights have become part of international
customary law, and they are not contested in the public rhetoric of the
international arena. Of course many gross violations occur off the
record, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International have the
task of exposing the gap between public allegiance to rights and the
sad reality of ongoing abuse. This is largely practical work, however.
There is not much point writing about or deliberating about the
desirability of practices that everyone condemns at the level of
principle.
But political thinkers and activists around the world can and do take
different sides on many pressing human rights concerns that fall
outside what Walzer terms the ‘minimal and universal moral
code’ (Walzer 1987, 24; Walzer 1994). This gray area of debate
includes criminal law, family law, women's rights, social and economic
rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the attempt to
universalize Western-style democratic practices. The question is: how
can the current thin list of universal human rights be expanded to
include some of these contested rights?
Charles Taylor has put forward the following proposal (Taylor
1999). He imagines a cross-cultural dialogue between representatives
of different traditions. Rather than argue for the universal validity
of their views, however, he suggests that participants should allow
for the possibility that their own beliefs may be mistaken. This way,
participants can learn from each others ‘moral universe’.
There will come a point, however, when differences cannot be
reconciled. Taylor explicitly recognizes that different groups,
countries, religious communities, and civilizations hold incompatible
fundamental views on theology, metaphysics, and human nature. In
response, Taylor argues that a ‘genuine, unforced
consensus’ on human rights norms is possible only if we allow
for disagreement on the ultimate justifications of those
norms. Instead of defending contested foundational values when we
encounter points of resistance (and thus condemning the values we do
not like in other societies), we should try to abstract from those
beliefs for the purpose of working out an ‘overlapping
consensus’ of human rights norms. As Taylor puts it, ‘we
would agree on the norms while disagreeing on why they were the right
norms, and we would be content to live in this consensus, undisturbed
by the differences of profound underlying belief’ (Taylor 1999,
124).
While Taylor's proposal moves the debate on universal human rights
forward, it still faces certain difficulties. For one thing, it may
not be realistic to expect that people will be willing to abstract
from the values they care deeply about during the course of a global
dialogue on human rights. Even if people agree to abstract from
culturally specific ways of justifying and implementing norms, the
likely outcome is a withdrawal to a highly general, abstract realm of
agreement that fails to resolve actual disputes over contested
rights. For example, participants in a cross-cultural dialogue can
agree on the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment
while radically disagreeing upon what this means in practice — a
committed Muslim can argue that theft can justifiably be punished by
amputation of the right
hand,[8]
whereas a Western liberal will want to label this an example of cruel
and unusual punishment.
As we have seen, the debate on universalism versus particularism has
moved from fairly abstract methodological disputes between
Anglo-American philosophers to relatively concrete international
political disputes between philosophers, social scientists, government
officials, and NGO activists. The distinctive communitarian
contribution has been to cast doubt on universal theories grounded
exclusively in the liberal moralities of the Western world, on the
grounds that cultural particularity should both make one sensitive to
the possibility of justifiable areas of difference between the West and
the rest and to the need for more cross-cultural dialogue for the
purpose of improving the current thin human rights regime. Various
contributions from East Asia and elsewhere have given some meat to
these challenges to liberal universalism. In any case, let us now turn
to the second main area of controversy between liberals and
communitarians — the debate over the self that has similarly moved
from philosophy to politics.
Communitarian thinkers in the 1980s such as Michael Sandel and Charles
Taylor argued that Rawlsian liberalism rests on an overly
individualistic conception of the self. Whereas Rawls argues that we
have a supreme interest in shaping, pursuing, and revising our own
life-plans, he neglects the fact that our selves tend to be defined or
constituted by various communal attachments (e.g., ties to the family or
to a religious tradition) so close to us that they can only be set
aside at great cost, if at all. This insight led to the view that
politics should not be concerned solely with securing the conditions
for individuals to exercise their powers of autonomous choice, as we
also need to sustain and promote the social attachments crucial to our
sense of well-being and respect, many of which have been involuntarily
picked up during the course of our upbringing. First, however, let us
review the ontological or metaphysical debate over the self that led to
this political conclusion.
In an influential essay titled ‘Atomism’, Charles Taylor
objected to the liberal view that ‘men are self-sufficient
outside of society’. (Taylor 1985, 2000) Instead, Taylor defends
the Aristotelian view that ‘Man is a social animal, indeed a
political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an
important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis’ (Taylor
1985, 190). Moreover, this atomistic view of the self can undermine
liberal society, because it fails to grasp the extent to which
liberalism presumes a context where individuals are members of, and
committed to, a society that promotes particular values such as
freedom and individual diversity. Fortunately, most people in liberal
societies do not really view themselves as atomistic selves.
But do liberal thinkers actually defend the idea that the self is
created ex-nihilo, outside of any social context and that
humans can exist (and flourish) independently of all social contexts?
In fact, Taylor's essay was directed at the libertarian thinker Robert
Nozick. As it turns out, the communitarian critique of the atomistic
self does not apply to Rawslian liberalism: in Part III of Theory
of Justice, Rawls pays close attention to the psychological and
social conditions that facilitate the formation of liberal selves
committed to justice. But few readers ever got to Part III of Rawls
massive tome, so communitarians got quite a bit of mileage from their
critique of liberal atomism. This charge didn't stick, however.
While liberals may not have been arguing that individuals can
completely extricate themselves from their social context, the
liberal valuation of choice still seemed to suggest an image of a
subject who impinges his will on the
world.[9]
Drawing on the insights of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, communitarians
argued that this view neglects the extent to which individuals are
embodied agents in the world. Far from acting in ways designed to
realize an autonomously arrived-at life-plan, vast areas of our lives
are in fact governed by unchosen routines and habits that lie in the
background. More often than not we act in ways specified by our social
background when we walk, dress, play games, speak, and so on without
having formulated any goals or made any choices. It is only when
things break down from the normal, everyday, unchosen mode of
existence that we think of ourselves as subjects dealing with an
external world, having the experience of formulating various ways of
executing our goals, choosing from among those ways, and accepting
responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. In other words,
traditional intentionality is introduced at the point that our
ordinary way of coping with things is insufficient. Yet this
breakdown mode is what we tend to notice, and philosophers have
therefore argued that most of our actions are occasioned by processes
of reflection. Liberals have picked up this mistaken assumption,
positing the idea of a subject who seeks to realize an autonomously
arrived-at life-plan, losing sight of the fact that critical
reflection upon ones ends is nothing more than one possibility that
arises when our ordinary ways of coping with things is insufficient to
get things done.
Some liberals have replied by recognizing the point that vast areas of
our lives are governed by unchosen habits and routines, that the
deliberate, effortful, choosing subject mode may be the exception
rather than the rule. They emphasize, however, that the main
justification for a liberal politics concerned primarily with securing
the conditions for individuals to lead autonomous lives rests on the
possibility and desirability of normative self-determination,
that is,on the importance of making choices with respect to things
that we value (Doppelt 1989). While it may be true
that certain communal practices often, or even mostly, guide our
behavior behind our backs, it doesn't follow that those practices
ought to be valued, or reflectively endorsed in non-ordinary moments
of existence, much less that the government ought somehow to promote
these practices. And what liberals care about ultimately is the
provision of the rights, powers, and opportunities that individuals
need to develop and implement their own conceptions of the good
life.
This qualified version of the liberal self, however, still seems to
imply that moral outlooks are, or should be, the product of individual
choice. One's social world, communitarians can reply, provides more
than non-moral social practices like table manners and pronunciation
norms — it also provides some sort of orientation in
moral space. We cannot make sense of our moral experience
unless we situate ourselves within this given moral space, within the
authoritative moral horizons. What Charles Taylor calls ‘higher,
strongly evaluated goods’ (Taylor 1989) — the goods we
should feel committed to, those that generate moral obligations on us
regardless of our actual preferences are not somehow invented by
individuals, but rather they are located within the social world which
provides one's framework of the lower and the higher. Thus, the
liberal ideal of a self who freely invents her own moral outlook, or
private conception of the good, cannot do justice to our actual moral
experience.
But once again, liberals need not deny the assumption that our social
world provides a framework of the higher and the lower nor need it be
presumed that we must regard our own moral outlook as freely
invented. Will Kymlicka, for example, explicitly recognizes that
things have worth for us in so far as they are granted significance by
our culture, in so far as they fit into a pattern of activities which
is recognized by those sharing a certain form of life as a way of
leading a good life (Kymlicka 1989, 166). That one's social world
provides the range of things worth doing, achieving, or being does
not, however, undermine the liberal emphasis on autonomy, for there is
still substantial room for individual choice to be made within this
set. The best life is still the one where the individual
chooses what is worth doing, achieving, or being, though it
may be that this choice has to be made within a certain framework
which is itself unchosen.
Communitarians can reply by casting doubt on the view that choice is
intrinsically valuable, that a certain moral principle or
communal attachment is more valuable simply because it has been chosen
following deliberation among alternatives by an individual subject. If
we have a highest-order interest in choosing our central projects and
life-plans, regardless of what is chosen, it ought to follow that
there is something fundamentally wrong with unchosen attachments and
projects. But this view violates our actual self-understandings. We
ordinarily think of ourselves, Michael Sandel says, ‘as members
of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this
history, as sons or daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this
republic’, (Sandel 1981, 179) social attachments that more often
than not are involuntarily picked up during the course of our
upbringing, rational choice having played no role whatsoever. I didn't
choose to love my mother and father, to care about the neighborhood in
which I grew up, to have special feelings for the people of my
country, and it is difficult to understand why anyone would think I
have chosen these attachments, or that I ought to have done so. In
fact, there may even be something distasteful about someone who
questions the things he or she deeply cares about — certainly no
marriage could survive too long if fundamental understandings
regarding love and trust were constantly thrown open for discussion!
Nor is it obvious that, say, someone who performs a good deed
following prolonged calculation of pros and cons is morally superior
than a Mother-Teresa type who unreflectively, spontaneously acts on
behalf of other people's interests.
Liberals can reply that the real issue is not the desirability of
choice, but rather the possibility of choice. There may well
be some unchosen attachments that need not be critically reflected
upon and endorsed, and it may even be the case that excessive
deliberation about the things we care about can occasionally be
counter-productive. But some of our ends may be problematic and that
is why we have a fundamental interest in being able to question and
revise them. Most important is not choosing our own life-plans;
rather, liberalism founded on the value of self-determination requires
only that we be able to critically evaluate our ends if need
be, hence that ‘no end or goal is exempt from possible
re-examination’ (Kymlicka 1989, 52; Dworkin 1989, 489; Macedo
1990, 247). For example, an oppressed woman has a fundamental interest
in being able to critically reflect upon traditional understandings of
what it means to be a good wife and mother, and it would be unjust to
foreclose her freedom to radically revise her plans.
This response, however, still leaves open the possibility of a deep
challenge to liberal foundations. Perhaps we are able to reexamine
some attachments, but the problem for liberalism arises if there are
others so fundamental to our identity that they cannot be set aside,
and that any attempt to do so will result in serious and perhaps
irreparable psychological damage. In fact, this challenge to
liberalism would only require that communitarians be able to identify
one end or communal attachment so constitutive of one's identity that
it cannot be revised and rejected. A psychoanalyst, for example, may
want to argue that (at least in some cases) it is impossible to choose
to shed the attachment one feels for one's mother, and that an attempt
may lead to perverse and unintended consequences. A feminist theorist
may point to the mother-child relationship as an example of a
constitutive feature of one's identity and argue that any attempt to
deny this fails to be sensitive to women's special needs and
experiences (Frazer & Lacey 1993, 53-60). An anthropologist may
argue on the basis of field observations that it is impossible for an
Inuit person from Canada's far north to suddenly decide to stop being
an Inuit and that the only sensible response is to recognize and
accept this constitutive feature of his identity. Or a gay liberation
activist may claim that it is both impossible and undesirable for gays
to repress their biologically-given sexual identity. These arguments
are not implausible, and they seem to challenge the liberal view that
no particular end or commitment should be beyond critical reflection
and open to revision.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that we can identify one
particular attachment so deeply-embedded that it is impossible to
really bring to conscious awareness and so significant for one's
well-being that an individual can only forsake commitment to its good
at the cost of being seriously psychologically disturbed. This end is
beyond willed change and one loses a commitment to it at the price of
being thrown into a state of disorientation where one is unable to
take a stand on many things of significance (Taylor 1989, 26-7). Does
this really threaten liberal politics? It may, if liberal politics
really rests on the liberal self. Fortunately, that is not the
case. Rereading some of the communitarian texts from the 1980s, there
seems to have been an assumption that once you expose faulty
foundations regarding the liberal self, the whole liberal edifice will
come tumbling down. The task is to criticize the underlying philosophy
of the self, win people on your side, and then we can move on to a
brand new communitarian society that owes nothing to the liberal
tradition. This must have been an exhilarating time for would-be
revolutionaries, but more level-headed communitarians soon realized
that overthrowing liberal rights was never part of the agenda. Even if
liberals are wrong to deny the existence of constitutive ends —
even if the philosophical justifications for a liberal form of social
organization founded on the value of reflective choice are rotten to
the core — there are still many, relatively pragmatic reasons
for caring about rights in the modern world. To name some of the more
obvious benefits, liberal rights often contribute to security,
political stability and economic modernization.
In short, the whole debate about the self appears to have been
somewhat misconceived. Liberals were wrong to think they needed to
provide iron-clad philosophies of the self to justify liberal politics,
and communitarians were wrong to think that challenging those
foundations was sufficient to undermine liberal politics. Not
surprisingly, both sides soon got tired of debating the pros and cons
of the liberal self. By the early 1990s, this liberal-communitarian
debate over the self had effectively faded from view in Anglo-American
philosophy.[10]
So what remains of the communitarian conception of the self? What
may be distinctive about communitarians is that they are more inclined
to argue that individuals have a vital interest in leading decent
communal lives, with the political implication that there may be a need
to sustain and promote the communal attachments crucial to our sense of
well-being. This is not necessarily meant to challenge the liberal view
that some of our communal attachments can be problematic and may need
to be changed, thus that the state needs to protect our powers to
shape, pursue, and revise our own life-plans. But our interest in
community may occasionally conflict with our other vital interest in
leading freely chosen lives, and the communitarian view is that the
latter does not automatically trump the former in cases of conflict. On
the continuum between freedom and community, communitarians are more
inclined to draw the line towards the latter.
But these conflicts cannot be resolved in the abstract. Much turns on
empirical analyses of actual politics — to what extent our
interest in community is indeed threatened by excess liberal politics,
to what extent the state can play a role in remedying the situation,
to what extent the nourishment of communal ties should be left to
civil society, and so on. This is where the political communitarians
of the last decade have shed some light. Let us now turn to the
politics of community, the third major strand of the communitarian
thought.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that communitarian critics of
liberalism may have been motivated not so much by philosophical
concerns as by certain pressing political concerns, namely, the
negative social and psychological effects related to the atomistic
tendencies of modern liberal societies. Whatever the soundness of
liberal principles, in other words, the fact remains that many
communitarians seem worried by a perception that traditional liberal
institutions and practices have contributed to, or at least do not seem
up to the task of dealing with, such modern phenomena as alienation
from the political process, unbridled greed, loneliness, urban crime,
and high divorce rates. And given the seriousness of these problems in
the United States, it was perhaps inevitable that a second wave of
1990s communitarians such as Amitai Etzioni and William Galston would
turn to the more practical political terrain of emphasizing social
responsibility and promoting policies meant to stem the erosion of
communal life in an increasingly fragmented
society.[11]
Much of this thinking has been carried out in the flagship
communitarian periodical, The Responsive Community, which is
edited by Amitai Etzioni and includes contributions by an eclectic
group of philosophers, social scientists, and public policy makers
[this periodical, regrettably, folded in summer 2004 due to financial
constraints]. Etzioni is also the director of a think-tank,
Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, that produces
working papers and advises government officials in
Washington.[12]
Such political communitarians blame both the left and the right for
our current malaise (Bell 1997). The political left is chastised not
just for supporting welfare rights economically unsustainable in an
era of slow growth and aging populations, but also for shifting power
away from local communities and democratic institutions and towards
centralized bureaucratic structures better equipped to administer the
fair and equal distribution of benefits, thus leading to a growing
sense of powerlessness and alienation from the political process.
Moreover, the modern welfare state with its universalizing logic of
rights and entitlements has undermined family and social ties in civil
society by rendering superfluous obligations to communities, by
actively discouraging private efforts to help others (e.g., union
rules and strict regulations in Sweden prevent parents from
participating voluntarily in the governance of some day care centers
to which they send their children), and even by providing incentives
that discourage the formation of families (e.g., welfare payments are
cut off in many American states if a recipient marries a working
person) and encourage the break-up of families (e.g., no-fault divorce
in the US is often financially rewarding for the non custodial parent,
usually the father).
Libertarian solutions favored by the political right have contributed
even more directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and
valued forms of communal life, particularly in the UK and the US. Far
from producing beneficial communal consequences, the invisible hand of
unregulated free-market capitalism undermines the family (e.g., few
corporations provide enough leave to parents of newborn children),
disrupts local communities (e.g., following plant closings or the
shifting of corporate headquarters), and corrupts the political
process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest
groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no
longer represent the community at large). Moreover, the valorization
of greed in the Thatcher/Reagan era justified the extension of
instrumental considerations governing relationships in the marketplace
into spheres previously informed by a sense of uncalculated
reciprocity and civil obligation. This trend has been reinforced by
increasing globalization, which pressures states into conforming to
the dictates of the international marketplace.
More specifically in the American context, communitarian thinkers such
as Mary Ann Glendon indict a new version of rights discourse that has
achieved dominance of late (Glendon 1991). Whereas the assertion of
rights was once confined to matters of essential human interest, a
strident rights rhetoric has colonized contemporary political
discourse, thus leaving little room for reasoned discussion and
compromise, justifying the neglect of social responsibilities without
which a society could not function, and ultimately weakening all
appeals to rights by devaluing the really important ones.
To remedy this imbalance between rights and responsibilities in the
US, political communitarians propose a moratorium on the manufacture
of new rights and changes to our ‘habits of the heart’
away from exclusive focus on personal fulfillment and towards concern
with bolstering families, schools, neighborhoods, and national
political life, changes to be supported by certain public
policies. Notice that this proposal takes for granted basic civil and
political liberties already in place, thus alleviating the concern
that communitarians are embarking on a slippery slope to
authoritarianism. Still, there may be a concern that marginalized
groups demanding new rights, e.g., homosexual couples seeking the
right to legally sanctioned marriage, will be paying the price for the
excesses of others if the communitarian proposal to declare a
moratorium on the minting of new rights is put into effect.
More serious from the standpoint of those generally sympathetic to
communitarian aspirations, however, is the question of what exactly
this has to do with community. For one thing, Etzioni himself seeks to
justify his policies with reference to need to maintain a balance
between social order and freedom, (Etzioni 1996) as opposed
to appealing to the importance of community. But there is nothing
distinctively communitarian about the preoccupation with social order;
both liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Burkean conservatives
affirm the need for order. And when the term community is employed by
political communitarians, it seems to mean anything they want it to
mean. Worse, as Elizabeth Frazer has argued, it has often been used to
justify hierarchical arrangements and delegitimize areas of conflict
and contestation in modern societies (Frazer 1999).
Still, it is possible to make sense of the term community as a
normative ideal.[13]
Communitarians begin by positing a need to experience our lives as
bound up with the good of the communities out of which our identity
has been constituted. This excludes contingent attachments such as
golf-club memberships, that do not usually bear on ones sense of
identity and well-being (the co-authors of Habits of the
Heart (Bellah et al. 1985) employ the term
‘lifestyle enclaves’ to describe these
attachments). Unlike pre-modern defenders of Gemeinshaft,
however, it is assumed that there are many valued forms of
communal life in the modern world. So the distinctive communitarian
political project is to identify valued forms of community and to
devise policies designed to protect and promote them, without
sacrificing too much freedom. Typically, communitarians would invoke
the following types of communities:
- Communities of place, or communities based on geographical
location. This is perhaps the most common meaning associated with the
word community. In this sense, community is linked to locality, in the
physical, geographical sense of a community that is located somewhere.
It can refer to a small village or a big city. A community of place
also has an affective component — it refers to the place one
calls ‘home’, often the place where one is born and bred
and the place where one would like to end one's days even if home is
left as an adult. At the very least, communitarians posit an interest
in identifying with familiar surroundings.
In terms of political implications, it means that, for example,
political authorities ought to consider the existent character of the
local community when considering plans for development (Jane Jacobs
famously documented the negative effects of razing, instead of
renovating, run-down tenements that are replaced by functionally
adequate but characterless low-income housing blocs (Jacobs
1965). Other suggestions to protect communities of place include:
granting community councils veto power over building projects that
fail to respect existent architectural styles; implementing laws
regulating plant closures so as to protect local communities from the
effects of rapid capital mobility and sudden industrial change;
promoting local-ownership of corporations; (Shuman 1999) and imposing
restrictions on large-scale discount outlets such as Wal-Mart that
threaten to displace small, fragmented, and diverse family and locally
owned stores (Ehrenhalt 1999). - Communities of memory, or groups of strangers who share a
morally-significant history. This term — first employed by the
co-authors of Habits of the Heart — refers to imagined
communities that have a shared history going back several
generations. Besides tying us to the past, such communities turn us
towards the future — members strive to realize the ideals and
aspirations embedded in past experiences of those communities, seeing
their efforts as being, in part, contributions to a common good. They
provide a source of meaning and hope in peoples lives. Typical
examples include the nation and language-based ethnocultural groups.
In Western liberal democracies, this typically translates into various
nation-building exercises meant to nourish the bonds of commonality
that tie people to their nations, such as national service and
national history lessons in school textbooks. Self-described
republicans such as Michael Sandel place special emphasis upon the
national political community and argue for measures that increase
civic engagement and public-spiritedness (Sandel 1996). However, there
is increased recognition of the multi-national nature of contemporary
states, and modern Western states must also try to make room for the
political rights of minority groups. These political measures have
been widely discussed in the recent literature on nationalism,
citizenship, and multiculturalism (Kymlicka 1995, Macedo 2000, Tamir
1993). - Psychological communities, or communities of face-to-face personal
interaction governed by sentiments of trust, co-operation, and
altruism. This refers to a group of persons who participate in common
activity and experience a psychological sense of togetherness as shared
ends are sought. Such communities, based on face-to-face interaction,
are governed by sentiments of trust, cooperation, and altruism in the
sense that constituent members have the good of the community in mind
and act on behalf of the communitys interest. They differ from
communities of place by not being necessarily defined by locality and
proximity. The differ from communities of memory in the sense that they
are more ‘real’, they are typically based on face to face social
interaction at one point in time and consequently tend to be restricted
in size.[14]
The family is the prototypical
example. Other examples include small-scale work or school settings
founded on trust and social cooperation.
Communitarians tend to favor policies designed to protect and promote
ties to the family and family-like groups. This would include such
measures as encouraging marriage and increasing the difficulty of
legal marriage dissolution. These policies are supported by empirical
evidence that points to the psychological and social benefits of
marriage (Waite 1996). Communitarians also favor political legislation
that can help to restructure education in such a way that peoples
deepest needs in membership and participation in psychological
communities are tapped at a young age. The primary school system in
Japan, where students learn about group cooperation and benefits and
rewards are assigned to the classroom as a whole rather than to
individual students, could be a useful model (Reid 1999).
What makes the political project of communitarianism distinctive is
that it involves the promotion all three forms of valued communal
life. This leads, however, to the worry that seeking the goods of
various communities may conflict in practice. Etzioni, for example,
argues for a whole host of pro-family measures: mothers and fathers
should devote more time and energy to parenting (in view of the fact
that most childcare centers do a poor job of caring for children),
labor unions and employers ought to make it easier for parents to work
at home, and the government should force corporations to provide six
months of paid leave and another year of unpaid leave (Etzioni 1993,
ch.2 and Etzioni 1996, ch.6). The combined effect of these changes of
the heart and public policies in all likelihood would be to make
citizens into largely private, family-centered persons.
Yet Etzioni also argues that the American political system is corrupt
to the core, concluding that only extensive involvement in public
affairs by virtuous citizens can remedy the situation: ‘once
citizens are informed, they must make it their civic duty to
organize others locally, regionally, and nationally to act on
their understanding of what it takes to clean up public life in
America’ (Etzioni 1993, 244) But few can afford sufficient time
and energy to devote themselves fully to both family life and public
affairs, and favoring one ideal is most likely to erode the other.
Surely it is no coincidence that republican America in Jeffersons day
relied on active, public-spirited male citizens largely freed from
family responsibilities. Conversely, societies composed of persons
leading rich and fulfilling family lives (such as contemporary
Singapore) tend to be ruled by paternalistic despots who can rely on a
compliant, politically apathetic populace.
Communitarians who advocate both increased commitment to public
affairs and strengthened ties to the workplace (to the point that it
becomes a psychological community) also face the problem of
conflicting commitments. Michael Sandel, for example, speaks favorable
of ‘proud craftsmen’ in the Jacksonian era and of Louis
Brandeis's idea of ‘industrial democracy, in which workers
participated in management and shared responsibilities for running the
business’ (Sandel 1996, 170, 213; Bell 1997b) Identification
with the workplace and industrial democracy are said to improve
workers civic capacities, but that may not be the case. In the same
way that extensive involvement in family life can conflict with
commitments to public life, few persons will have sufficient time and
energy for extensive participation in both workplace and public
affairs. Recall that the republican society of ancient Athens relied
on active, public-spirited males freed from the need to work (slaves
did most of the drudge labor).
It is also worth noting that devotion to the workplace can undermine
family life. As Tatsuo Inoue of Tokyo University argues,
Japanese-style communitarianism — strong communal identity based
on the workplace — sometimes leads to karoshi (death
from overwork) and frequently deprives workers of ‘the right to
sit down at the dinner table with their families’ (Inoue
1993). Just as liberals (pace Ronald Dworkin) sometimes have to choose
between ideals (e.g., freedom and equality) that come into conflict
with one another if a serious effort is made to realize any one of
them fully, so communitarians may have to make some hard choices
between valued forms of communal life.
Still, there may be some actual or potential win-win scenarios cases
where promoting a particular form of communal life can promote, rather
than undermine, other forms — and political communitarians will
of course favor change of this sort. For example, critics have
objected to residential community associations, or ‘walled
communities', on the grounds that they undermine attachment to the
polity at large and erode the social cohesion and trust needed to
promote social justice and sustain the democratic process (McKenzie
1994, Bell
1995).[15]
Might it then be possible to reform urban planning so that people can
nurture strong local communities without undermining attachment to the
national community, perhaps even strengthening broader forms of
public-spiritedness? Many practical suggestions along these lines have
been raised. Architects and urban planners in the US known as the New
Urbanists, for example, have proposed various measures to strengthen
community building — affordable housing, public transport,
pedestrian focused environments, and public space as an integral part
of neighborhoods — that would not have the
‘privatizing’ consequences of gated communities. The
problem, as Gerald Frug points out, is that ‘virtually
everything they want to do is now illegal. To promote the new urbanist
version of urban design, cities would have revise municipal zoning
laws and development policy from top to
bottom.’[16]
This points to the need for public policy recommendations explicitly
designed to favor complementing forms of communal attachments.
Just as it would be wrong to assume that communitarian goals always
conflict, so one should allow for the possibility that individual
rights and communitarian goals can co-exist and complement each
other.[17]
In Singapore, for example, it can be
argued that more secure democratic rights would have the effect of
strengthening commitment to the common national
good.[18]
The Singapore government does not hide the fact that it makes life
difficult for many who aim to enter the political arena on the side of
opposition parties: Between 1971 and 1993, according to Attorney
General Chan Sek Keong, eleven opposition politicians were made
bankrupt (and hence ineligible to run in
elections).[19]
Whether intended or not, such actions send an unpatriotic message to
the community at large: Politics is a dangerous game for those who
haven't been specially anointed by the top leadership of the ruling
party, so you should stick to your own private affairs. As Singaporean
journalist Cherian George puts it, one can hardly blame people for
ignoring their social and political obligations ‘when they hear
so many cautionary tales: Of Singaporeans whose careers came to a
premature end after they voiced dissent; of critics who found
themselves under investigation; of individuals who were detained
without trial even though they seemed not to pose any real threat; of
tapped phones and opened letters’. The moral of these stories:
In Singapore, better to mind your own business, make money, and leave
politics to the
politicians.’[20]
Put positively, if the aim is to secure attachment to the community
at large, then implementing genuinely competitive elections, including
the freedom to run for the opposition without fear of
retaliation,[21]
is an important first step.
The Singapore case, however, points to another dimension of the
politics of community that brings us back to the communitarian defense
of cultural particularism. Democratic reformers in Singapore typically
think of democracy in terms of free and fair competitive elections
what Western analysts often label ‘minimal democracy’. In
Hong Kong, the situation is similar — the aspiration to
‘full’ democracy put forward by social critics turns out
to mean (nothing more than) an elected legislature and Chief
Executive. Put differently, it is quite striking that the republican
tradition in communitarian thought with its vision of strong democracy
supported by active, public-spirited citizens who participate in
political decision-making and held shape the future direction of their
society though political debate seems largely absent from political
discourse in Singapore and Hong Kong, and perhaps East Asia more
generally. Many East Asians are clamoring for secure democratic
rights, but this rarely translates into the demand that all citizens
should be committed to politics on an ongoing basis or the view that,
as David Miller puts it, ‘politics is indeed a necessary part of
the good life’ (Miller 2000). At one level, the relative absence
of republican ideals can be explained by the fact that there are no
equivalents of Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in East Asian
philosophy. It can also be argued that republicanism fails to resonate
because East Asians typically place more emphasis on other forms of
communal life — the family in particular has been important theme in
Confucian ethical theory and practice (relative to Western
philosophy). To the extent that different forms of communal life do
conflict in practice, in short, it may the case that different
cultures will draw the line in different places — and they may
have a strong moral case in doing so, if these lines conform to the
views shared by both defenders and critics of the political status
quo.
Orginally posted at Stanford Encyclopedia of Pilosophy
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