Communitarianism

Communitarian sociologists tend to make two important assumptions about the nature of social life in contemporary American society. These assumptions refer to conceptions of our social environment and who we are as individuals. They largely draw upon the sociological tradition. First, the communitarians assume that American society is powerfully influenced by the conditions of “modernity.” Modernity, to use Blau’s (1977) formulation, is a context of heterogeneity and inequality; of cosmopolitanism, rationalization, bureaucracy, and mass society. Second, communitarians assume that individuals in society are neither fully free nor fully constrained. They are “situated agents.” Individuals have great potential for self-determination, moral autonomy, or free-riding, but are nevertheless conceived as highly socialized and deeply influenced by the values, beliefs, practices, and opportunities handed to them by their communities.

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The challenge of communitarianism is to preserve the achievements of modernity while actively responding to its liabilities. Communitarians do not reject reason, science, rights, or individual autonomy. But since they assume a situated agent, they argue that individuals can look to community for the transmission of wisdom, for a sense of belonging, for exchange relations based on reciprocity, commitment, and cooperation, for collective responsiveness to individual needs, and ultimately for self-definition and realization. In short, community and its concomitant social institutions and primary groups is an antidote to the atomizing forces of modernity.

The communitarians reject a dualism between the requirements of modernity and pre-modernity. In Tonnies’ well-known terms, they refuse to choose between gessellschaft and gemeinschaft. Nor do they accept a dualism that “one could have either individual rights without binding moral codes or binding moral codes without individual rights” (Wolfe, 1987, p. 191). The communitarian ideal is to reawaken the moral guidance of community while maintaining rights protections from the possibilities of constricting normative conformity. The ideal community is not defined by tradition, hierarchy, fixed status, inheritance or blind obedience, but instead “arises from free communication, person-to-person interaction, and association based on mutual dependence and concern. The core values are liberation and fellowship... Good order arises from reciprocity, trust, cooperation, and a shared understanding of the common good” (Selznick, 1992, p. 372).

In its aspiration of community, the communitarians do not deny the funcional interdependence of individuals or the exchange relations between hem that result in use and misuse of power. the systemic coordination of the market, the rationalization associated with bureaucracy, or the motivaions of individuals to strategically enhance their own social and economic outcomes. Interdependence and the need for exchange are the basis of society. Nevertheless, communitarians aspire to more than instrumental social life. “As we move to association, and from association to community, mutuality reaches beyond exchange to create more enduring bonds of interdependence, caring, and commitment. There is a transition, we may say, from reciprocity to solidarity, and from there to fellowship” (Selznick, 1992, p. 362). The goal is not, as rational choice theorists would have it, to identify mechanisms of cooperation and coordination that are congruent with immediate, self-interest (e.g., Yamagishi, 1994; Hechter, 1987), but to cultivate voluntaristic cooperation based on shared values and a concern for the outcomes of both oneself and other members of the community.

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.[1] Communitarianism usually opposes extreme individualism and disagrees with extreme laissez-faire policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.

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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.

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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. ... Comment: Acknowledgement of a decline in respect for traditional values and authority in 1960's America does not imply that CEStoicism believes values and authorities should be accepted simply because they are traditional. Instead, we believe respect for values and authority comes from their democratic creation and maintenance.

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. Comment: CEStoicism strives to be an 'intentional culture' (contrasted with a 'birth/default culture') that people can voluntarily join or leave based upon the attraction and evolution of it's values, norms, meanings, history and identity. 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."Comment: In a democratic community, the application of power is not only from group to individual. It can also be from individual to group. Individuals in participatory democratic communities have the potential (through persuasion and deliberation) and the defined processes (meetings, proposals, voting) to orginate and apply moral suasion, sanctions, compliance and coercion to the group. Additionally, groups demanding loyalty while ignoring members' voice will promote members' exit.

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 Comment: See p-individual, 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.

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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.

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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.