Communitarianism: A Summary

The thread on my abortion post, somewhat surprisingly to me, turned in part into a discussion of communitarianism, and specifically the idea of using the law to promote (or discourage) communally felt goods (or ills). Since at the same time I was engaged in another series of posts that had to do with liberal and communitarian political theory, it made me think that a general post on communitarian terms and concepts might be in order. I provided something like this for liberalism a few years ago, and some people found it helpful; maybe some others will find this one the same.

Like liberalism, communitarianism can refer to both an ideology--a set of more or less organized claims or ideas about political positions and actions--and a philosophy. However, I would argue that the range of arguments and proposals that can be plausibly identified as "philosophically communitarian" is much greater, culturally and historically, than is the case with liberalism. Practically all core liberal ideas are associated with the growth of personal and social liberation from the modern history of Europe: the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism, dogma-debunking science, and the rambunctious public sphere, and the skepticism of royal, church, and ultimately government authority which followed. "Liberty" surely has its positive connotations, with economic and moral empowerment and equality being treated as a necessary requirements to the realization of liberal rights; T.H. Green made that argument in the 19th century, and John Rawls did in the 20th. But by and large, notions of rights (whether natural--John Locke--or categorical--Immanuel Kant) operate in a negative way, asserting what should not be done to a person or be imposed upon her interests or preferences in the name of a religious truth, a local tradition, a community norm, or a political goal. Liberalism--as a philosophy and ideology--is thus to a great degree a carrier of the individual liberation and social deconstruction achieved in the modern West to the rest of the world.

Communitarianism, by contrast, can be applied to any of a great number of philosophical presumptions that do not aim to justify individual liberation from tradition, authority, religion, society, necessity, and so forth, but rather to positively assert the embeddedness of the self in a community. The "liberty of the ancients" as described by Benjamin Constant--in which the existence of slavery made possible the regular participation of citizens in the collective formation of civic life--is basically communitarian, and rightly so; Aristotle and others like him are complicated thinkers that don't easily fit into any one (especially modern) category, but only a seriously misinterpretation could discover in their writings a condemnation of the cultural and hierarchical claims of one's community and the affects it has on individual lives. Similarly, one can discover communitarian ideas in classical Confucianism, medieval Christendom, or in almost any other premodern worldview. Practically any theology or ontology or epistemology which criticizes or undermines individuated, critical, unprejudiced (and therefore alienated) action or cognition, and considers to be natural or good or necessary its opposite (a dependence upon revelation, an emphasis on group-ordained roles, the prioritizing of mutual benefit and progress, etc.) is communitarian. Still, such broad descriptions--which could presumably equally fit Han dynasty China or ancient Sparta or 16th-century Swiss villages, to say nothing of their modern incarnations--leave much unexplained. Thus, figuring out exactly how any person or policy identified as communitarian comes to that label is at least as important as identifying it as such in the first place.

Michael Walzer (whom I also quoted in the aforementioned liberalism post--what can I say? the man is brilliant) suggests in an old essay of his that contemporary communitarian perspectives can be sorted into two fundamental camps. The first perspective "holds that liberal political theory accurately represents liberal social practice." That is, it affirms that the doctrines of liberalism--the notions of self, rationality, and nature which emphasize economic, social, moral and political liberation--have in fact resulted in the fragmentation of civilization: we have lost our ability to connect with one another, lost even the ability to coherently explain that loss, and consequently live materialist, egotistical, self-interested, isolated lives, with no sense of a common good, no moral standards for judgment, no solidarity, no traditions, no hope for transformation or better ends. The second perspective, by contrast, "holds that liberal theory radically misrepresents real life"--that the "deep structure of even liberal society is in fact communitarian." Being born into a state of nature, outside of embedded relationships of power and meaning, is of course impossible; the way we work through our families and languages and cultures to evaluate and make sense our lives proves that. Hence, according to this perspective, liberal theory is not so much destructive as it is confusing (though that confusion could do a fair amount of destruction along the way).

There are problems with both approaches, as Walzer notes; they struggle when they try to turn themselves into productive critiques of our undeniably liberated world. In regards to the first, if it is true that the modern flight from norms of obligation and belonging has destroyed our ability to articulate and attend to community, why exactly would we want to subject ourselves to communitarian policies which presumably would be in vain? In regards to the second, there is the fact that, as Walzer concludes, "if we are all to some degree communitarians under the skin...the portrait of social incoherence loses its critical force." Still, Walzer believes--and I agree--that there is a lot of wisdom and truth in both approaches: it is useful to reflect on how much communal sensibility and appreciation for the public good the modern West has lost, and it is valuable to see how much of that sensibility nonetheless still haunts our moral and political thinking. Amongst philosophers and writers, I would describe Wendell Berry, Alasdair MacIntyre, or Robert Nisbet as communitarians of the former sort, and Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, or Walzer himself as in the second camp--though almost none of these people would use the word "communitarian" to describes themselves.

(The aforementioned names are all, obviously, intellectuals who have engaged in the debate over the modern world in the United States as it has developed over the past generation or two; I could have included Thomas Aquinas, Mencius, or Edmund Burke as advancing similar communitarian arguments, though in radically different contexts.)

Agrarianism, populism, nationalism and fascism, localism, civic republicanism and humanism, traditional conservatism (both theo- and paleo-), socialism and communism, some forms of anarchism, social democracy--all of these are specific movements that are communitarian in important ways. The ontological supports that advocates of these ideologies have philosophically drawn upon or have felt led to them by range across the above divide, and of course plenty of agitators for one or more of the above theories of government and society don't feel a necessary connection to any particular sustaining philosophy at all. However, generally speaking, the more a person's criticism of liberal modernity is based on conceptions of the natural world or religion, the more likely it is to be "conservative" in the political sense, and thus tending towards the first perspective. This is the sort of communitarian ideology most Americans are used to, even though it's rarely called by that name: this is where you find advocates of traditional marriage and gender roles, opponents of artistic expressions and media that ignore local values, supporters of protective and small-town agricultural economies, and people critical of the language of rights and grievances. With them usually also comes both a sense of nostalgia or lamentation and, perversely, Republicans trawling all too successfully for votes. This attitude--and voting pattern--is familiar enough today that it is regularly incorporated into liberal writers' assessments of "Red America" or "the Homeland"; still, it doesn't capture the alternately despairing and hopeful, anarchist or countercultural, element of this communitarian critique. Of course, many of those who are persuaded by elements of this critique are not truly critical of philosophical liberalism at all; so long as the government stays small or they are able to keep a few socially conservative regulations on the books, they are content with the liberating, "creative destruction" of capitalism and individual rights. This is the primary reason why, as Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher have observed, conservatism in America today is deeply confused.

On the other hand, if one's critique of modern liberalism is based on social observations, such as about the importance of civic trust, national service, or class equity, whether derived from Karl Marx or Alexis de Tocqueville, then one's communitarianism is likely to be more inclined to the second perspective. This is the kind of communitarianism that, in contrast to the former and more politically common type, most theorists will be familiar with: Michael Sandel, Philip Pettit, William Galston, and Richard Dagger have been key figures in a small but significant neo-Tocquevillian revival, in which a re-attachment to the virtues that the liberal order presupposes, and a recommitment to its participatory demands and possibilities, are seen as crucial to restoring legitimacy to the modern democratic welfare state. Most of these individuals, strongly influenced by the social democratic left, see themselves as liberals or civic republicans rather than communitarians, a word which they (wrongly, I think) associate with conservatism and religious authoritarianism. Sometimes those in this group are categorized as "left" communitarians, as opposed to the previous, more "right"-leaning kind, and there is a certain logic to that usage (though I think "left" and "right" can be used to explore conservatism, and thereby separate the pure traditionalists from those of a more explicitly communitarian focus as well). More usually they have eschewed such labels altogether, and defined themselves instead as representing a "Third Way" or a "Radical Center," and in so doing have blurred to the point of indistinguishability the difference between themselves and scholars like Will Kymlicka who take community and culture seriously, but only on explicitly liberal terms. Nonetheless, even these left-leaning communitarians, by opening themselves up to necessity of tradition and attachment, usually find themselves less than instinctively supportive of modernity's project of liberation. The primary political form this moderate "illiberalism" takes is through populism--an easily abused term, but one which at its heart suggests putting real economic, moral, and political power in the hands of specific communities, or at least aligning such protective power with the popular interests of decidedly non-cosmopolitan non-elites. The right has long claimed the populist mantle, but today, as the 2008 presidential contest begins, there's more populist and communitarian rhetoric to to be found amongst the Democrats than the Republicans.

A couple of additional points. Many conservatives, and quite a few populists as well, have responded with suspicion to communitarianism in its most straightforward form, such as that articulated over the past fifteen years or so by Amitai Etzioni and others. Their primary complaint, as Christopher Lasch once put it, is that communitarianism as an ideology on its own terms is too much a creature of sociological investigation, and thus suffers from a tendency to frame its recommendations around "behavior" and "customs"--which are unreflective and static stylizations of what is actually lived out in a community--as opposed to "action" and "memory." Lasch's distinction is a little overwrought, I think, and doesn't serve his own populist agenda well, but he makes a good point: too often communitarian laws and programs clumsily aim to prop up something which has been, somehow or another, identified as important to the embeddedness of a people, failing to see that it is the context within which people can act communally that matters, and only rarely the particular form of community content. This leads to a final observation, about the association between Continental philosophy and communitarianism. It is true that the German romantic tradition, including but not limited to G.W.F. Hegel, gave rise to a phenomenological argument which asserted that knowledge, ethics and action depend upon already-existing historical and cultural horizons and materiality; this, in time, contributed to the writings of hermeneutical thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Hannah Arendt, all of whom emphasized such communal realities as language, participation, and the Volk. While there is no real sense that any of these thinkers were communitarians in the manner I have discussed them here, it is nonetheless true that, under the influence of Arendt, social and participatory democratic thinkers like Sheldon Wolin have advanced arguments that link political action with community, thus providing a good antidote to overly sociological constructions of belonging.

And me? Well, I'm a populist, one whose communitarianism has enough of a religious grounding to take some forms of cultural conservatism seriously, but also one who is attached enough to romantic and socialist traditions to see virtue and equality as mutually compatible, if the playing field is democratic enough. But figuring out how to make it that way is something else entirely.