Communitarianism


Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based on the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely moulded 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, or among a community who share an interest or who share a history.
As a political philosophy, communitarians emphasize the importance of the family and intermediary institutions of civil society, such as churches, charities, and other voluntary associations, understood as non-coercive social structures that stand apart from both collectivism and individualism. In Europe, communitarian ideas are often associated with Christian democratic traditions, with notable communitarian parties being the German CDU, the Dutch CDA and the Austrian ÖVP.

Terminology

The philosophy of communitarianism originated in the 20th century, but the term "communitarian" was coined in 1841, by John Goodwyn Barmby, a leader of the British Chartist movement, who used it in referring to utopian socialists and other idealists who experimented with communal styles of life. However, it was not until the 1980s that the term "communitarianism" gained currency through association with the work of a small group of political philosophers. Their application of the label "communitarian" was controversial, even among communitarians, because, in the West, the term evokes associations with the ideologies of socialism and collectivism; so, public leaders—and some of the academics who champion this school of thought—usually avoid the term "communitarian", while still advocating and advancing the ideas of communitarianism.
The term is primarily used in two senses:
  • Philosophical communitarianism considers classical liberalism to be ontologically and epistemologically incoherent, and opposes it on those grounds. Unlike classical liberalism, which construes communities as originating from the voluntary acts of pre-community individuals, it emphasizes the role of the community in defining and shaping individuals. Communitarians believe that the value of community is not sufficiently recognized in liberal theories of justice.
  • Ideological communitarianism is characterized as a radical centrist ideology that is sometimes marked by socially conservative and economically interventionist policies. This usage was coined recently. When the term is capitalized, it usually refers to responsive communitarianism, the movement of Amitai Etzioni and other philosophers.
Czech and Slovak philosophers like Marek Hrubec, Lukáš Perný and Luboš Blaha extend communitarianism to social projects tied to the values and significance of community or collectivism and to various types of communism and socialism, including:
While the term communitarian was coined only in the mid-nineteenth century, ideas that are communitarian in nature appeared much earlier. They are found in some classical socialist doctrines, and further back in the New Testament. Communitarianism has been traced back to early monasticism.
A number of early sociologists had strongly communitarian elements in their work, such as Ferdinand Tönnies in his comparison of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 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 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 mass society and the decline of communal bonds and respect for traditional values and authority in the United States as of the 1960s. Among those who raised these issues were Robert Nisbet, Robert N. Bellah Habits of the Heart, and Alan Ehrenhalt. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documented the decline of "social capital" and stressed the importance of "bridging social capital," in which bonds of connectedness are formed across diverse social groups.
In the twentieth century communitarianism also began to be formulated as a philosophy by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. In an early article the Catholic Worker clarified the dogma of the Mystical Body of Christ as the basis for the movement's communitarianism. Along similar lines, communitarianism is also related to the personalist philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier.
Responding to criticism that the term 'community' is too vague or cannot be defined, Amitai Etzioni, one of the leaders of the American communitarian movement, pointed out that communities can be defined with reasonable precision as having two characteristics: first, a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another ; and second, a measure of commitment to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings, and a shared history and identity – in short, a particular culture. Further, author David E. Pearson argued that "o earn the appellation 'community,' it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily, indeed, by definition, coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don't."
What is specifically meant by "community" in the context of communitarianism can vary greatly between authors and periods. Historically, communities have been small and localized. However, as the reach of economic and technological forces extended, more expansive communities became necessary to provide effective normative and political guidance to these forces, prompting the rise of national communities in Europe in the 17th century. Since the late 20th century there has been some growing recognition that the scope of even these communities is too limited, as many challenges that people now face, such as the threat of nuclear war and that of global environmental degradation and economic crises, cannot be handled on a national basis. This has led to the quest for more encompassing communities, such as the European Union. Whether truly supra-national communities can be developed is far from clear.
More modern communities can take many different forms, but are often limited in scope and reach. For example, members of one residential community are often also members of other communities – such as work, ethnic, or religious ones. As a result, modern community members have multiple sources of attachments, and if one threatens to become overwhelming, individuals will often pull back and turn to another community for their attachments. Thus, communitarianism is the reaction of some intellectuals to the problems of Western society, an attempt to find flexible forms of balance between the individual and society, the autonomy of the individual and the interests of the community, between the common good and freedom, rights, and duties.

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 embeddedness. 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.
In addition to Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, other thinkers sometimes associated with academic communitarianism include Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Seyla Benhabib, Shlomo Avineri, and Patrick J. Deneen.