communitarianism

communitarianism, social and political philosophy that emphasizes the importance of community in the functioning of political life, in the analysis and evaluation of political institutions, and in understanding human identity and well-being. It arose in the 1980s as a critique of two prominent philosophical schools: contemporary liberalism, which seeks to protect and enhance personal autonomy and individual rights in part through the activity of government, and libertarianism, a form of liberalism (sometimes called “classical liberalism”) that aims to protect individual rights—especially the rights to liberty and property—through strict limits on governmental power.

There are strong communitarian elements in many modern and historical political and religious belief systems—e.g., in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament (Acts 4:32: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common”); in the early Islamic concept of shūrā (“consultation”); in Confucianism; in Roman Catholic social thought (the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum [1891]); in moderate conservatism (“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle…of public affections”—Edmund Burke); and in social democracy, especially Fabianism. Communitarian ideas have also played a significant role in public life through their incorporation into the electoral platforms and policies of Western political leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Varieties of communitarianism

The term communitarian was coined in 1841 by John Goodwyn Barmby, a leader of the British Chartist movement, who used it to refer to utopian socialists and others who experimented with unusual communal lifestyles. It was rarely used in the generations that followed.

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It was not until the 1980s that the term gained currency through its association with the work of a small group of mostly American political philosophers who argued for the importance of the common good in opposition to contemporary liberals and libertarians, who emphasized the good for individuals, particularly including personal autonomy and individual rights. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and the American political theorist Michael Sandel were among the most prominent scholars of this brand of communitarianism. Other political theorists and philosophers who were often cited as communitarians in this sense, or whose work exhibited elements of such communitarian thinking, included Shlomo Avineri, Seyla Benhabib, Avner de-Shalit, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, William A. Galston, Alasdair MacIntyre, Philip Selznick, and Michael Walzer.

During the same period, students of East Asian politics and society used communitarianism to describe the social thinking within authoritarian societies such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia, which extolled social obligations and the importance of the common good and accorded much less weight to autonomy and rights. Indeed, these societies viewed individuals as more or less interchangeable cells who find meaning in their contribution to the social whole rather than as free agents. Scholars of this kind of communitarianism included the American political theorist Russell A. Fox and the Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan.

In 1990 Etzioni and Galston founded a third school, known as “responsive” communitarianism. Its members formulated a 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, mainly in the West. 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.

The common good versus individual rights

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 by communitarians as an undue emphasis on individual rights, leading people to become selfish or egocentric. Excessive individualism was discussed in an oft-cited communitarian work, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), by the American sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah, who observed that by the early 1980s most Americans had become self-centred. Increasing prosperity from the 1950s, among other factors, had contributed to a decline in respect for traditional authority and institutions, such as marriage, and fostered a kind of materialistic hedonism, according to many communitarians. Earlier sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim had discussed such antisocial tendencies in the context of modernization, which they viewed as a historical transition from oppressive but nurturing communities (Gemeinschaft) to liberating but impersonal societies (Gesellschaft). They 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. Essentially the theses of Tönnies and Durkheim were supported with contemporary social-scientific data in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), by the American political scientist Robert Putnam.

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The close relation between the individual and the community was discussed on a theoretical level by Sandel and Taylor, among other academic communitarians, in their criticisms of philosophical liberalism, including especially the work of the American liberal theorist John Rawls and that of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. They argued that contemporary liberalism and libertarianism presuppose an incoherent notion of the individual as existing outside and apart from society rather than embedded within it. 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 constituted (or “constructed”) by culture and social relations, there is no coherent way of formulating individual rights or interests in abstraction from social contexts. In particular, according to these communitarians, there is no point in attempting to found a theory of justice on principles that individuals would choose in a hypothetical state of ignorance of their social, economic, and historical circumstances (from behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”), because such individuals cannot exist, even in principle.

Liberal scholars argued that this line of criticism is overstated or misconceived. Despite its emphasis on autonomy and rights, they contended, contemporary liberalism is not incompatible with the notion of a socially embedded self. Indeed, Rawls himself, in his foundational work A Theory of Justice (1971), recognized the importance of what he called “social unions” and asserted that “only in a social union is the individual complete.” Thus, according to liberals, the communitarian critique does not rebut the core of liberal theory but merely serves as a corrective to “stronger” liberal doctrines such as libertarianism, which does embrace an atomized notion of individual identity (see below A synthesis: Rights and responsibilities).

Academic communitarians also drew upon Aristotle and the German idealist philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel to argue that some conception of the good must be formulated on the social level and that the community cannot be a normative-neutral realm. Unless there is a social formulation of the good, there can be no normative foundation upon which to draw to settle conflicts of value between different individuals and groups. Such an overriding good (e.g., the national well-being) enables persons with different moral outlooks or ideological backgrounds to find principled (rather than merely prudential) common ground.

Liberals and libertarians responded by characterizing the communitarian position as akin to East Asian authoritarian communitarianism. They also argued that social formulations of the good—and the obligations they generate, which individuals must then discharge—can sometimes be oppressive. Some libertarians cited taxes and mandatory vaccinations as examples of such obligations.