The Idea of "Community": A Critique

...The intellectual prestige of sociology since World War II is largely a result of a decline in political faith among Western intellectuals...

...Even status-seeking—the target of attack most closely linking the older social criticism directed against ruthless individualism to the newer charges of over-conformity—receives a kind of sociological warrant (as in Vance Packard's book, which has been aptly described as a pornography of social class in America...

...The result is that cliches about group "integration," "role-playing," "identity," "belongingness" and "we-feelings" fill the vacuum...

...At its most simplistic, such an approach stands in direct opposition to the moral and aesthetic defense of the individual against the claims of society, to which I have previously referred .4 Though the more perceptive sociological critics, such as David Riesman, Erich Fromm and W. H. Whyte, have assigned part of the blame for contemporary conformism to the popularity of vulgarized versions of social science, these writers are nevertheless themselves sociologically sophisticated and are not content merely to re-assert the values of individualism in face of the imperatives of modern social organization...

...10 Stein, loc...

...contradictory ways the older themes attributing the absence of community to competitive and hostile men, with the new-style complaints about the smothering conformism of life in suburbia...

...Just as psychoanalytic therapy, which originally presupposed a stable social world with relatively fixed moral standards incorporated into the patient's superego, is now itself often expected to provide the values and meaningful life-goals the individual feels he lacks...

...5 William J. Newman, The Futilitarian Society, New York: George Braziller, p. 355...

...tr To Max Weber, the modern mood of "disenchantment of the world" was the result of the spread of bureaucracy, of the proliferation of functional organizations organized to pursue limited goals and lacking the aura of sacredness traditionally associated with family, church and nation...

...aborted forms of striving for group adjustment that the social critics themselves condemn...

...One could even say that the discipline of sociology begins with a concern over the decline of such traditional forms of association as small towns, neighborhoods, religious congregations and social classes, following upon that "creative destruction" we call the Industrial Revolution...

...It is often essentially aesthetic in outlook, defending the antinomianism of the creative artist as an ultimate value...

...it cannot create new ones...

...The trouble, however, is that this insistence on community as a value apart from its concrete manifestations produces precisely the O Stein, op...

...We are far too deeply committed to urban-industrial civilization even to think of abandoning it now...

...1964), pp...

...Erich Kahler's distinction between a community and a collective is relevant here: "Collectives develop through the joining of pre-established individuals for some specific purpose...

...As Hannah Arendt remarks, the American body politic "has at least endured to the present day, in spite of the fact that the specifically modern character of the modern world has nowhere else produced such extreme expressions in all nonpolitical spheres of life as it has in the United States...

...Instead of loyalty to families, churches, local communities, occupational associations and other established groups with multiple purposes and often possessing deep roots in the past, loyalty attaches itself to functional organizations, thus making a specialized collective instrumentality into an end-initself...

...Frequently it tends to become nostalgic in tone, idealizing the smalltown and nineteenth century past, overlooking the tyrannies of Main Street, and picturing our grandfathers as firm, principled "characters" in contrast to the flabby, herd-men of today...

...p. 248...

...11 Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss, New York: George Braziller, 1957, p. 87...

...The effort is analogous to that of those Americans who have made popular psychiatry the basis of a personal ethic, becoming self-conscious, even hypochondriacal, about their "mental health," which comes to be seen as the goal of life instead of as the by-product of a life with meaningful goals...

...The anxious audience reads the critics and, made self-conscious about community, strives to sink roots in the suburbs, to define occupational groups as devoted brotherhoods, and to stress the importance of belongingness in child-rearing...

...The compulsive quest for status weakens community by pitting people against one another as competitors while at the same time encouraging frantic conformity to the shifting group fashions that set the terms on which status is granted...

...They live together to do something together...

...But Weber did not anticipate the "organization man" who strives to invest bureaucracy with the intrinsic value and loyalty usually given to these older forms of association...

...it has a tinny quality betraying a lack of conviction on the part of all concerned...

...and success, and their preference for "making good" over "being good," to use a phrase of Margaret Mead's...

...Thus the social critics who deplore status-seeking and the mechanical kind of community of our Park Forests, paradoxically perpetuate the conditions they complain of when they re-assert the values of true community and stable identity...

...Very often the critics combine in apparently 8 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, New York: Collier Books, 1961, p. 36...

...Sociology can analyze the events and processes that have destroyed older values and forms of community...

...The error lies in conceiving of community as a kind of end-in-itself, apart from the particular activities and functions that actually bind people together, and apart from those values that constitute a truly shared vision of life...

...Louis: TransAction, 2 (Nov...

...The ideology of community thus provides the basis for a popular social criticism that influences its audience in ways providing new material for the critics to assault...

...The increasing popularity of sociological accounts of our plight has created an ideology of community that shapes our social relations, or at least our consciousness of them, in much the same way that popular Freudianism shapes our psychological self-awareness...

...there can be no mere going back...

...Today, at least on the surface, the complaints seem to be just the opposite...

...Even the recent political activism of young people has combined political goals like civil rights and world peace with heavy rhetorical emphasis on such nonpolitical concerns as the overcoming of alienation, sexual freedom, and the need for generational solidarity...

...It thus contributes to an indigenous American nostalgia which, in the absence of any systematic conservative ideology, is exploited by promoters of right-wing causes...

...But these writers slur over the fact that America remains the classic land of "mass culture," impersonal large-scale bureaucracy and population mobility...

...These indictments of American society were clearly influenced by socialism in its various forms and by the New Deal...

...For the sociologist, the relation between individual and society is always a crucial problem...

...Community may result from the concrete forms of political, economic, familial and cultural association among men, but it cannot be willed into existence by exhorting people to immerse themselves in group activity and to find greater significance in their social identities...

...Made aware of the loss of community, the audience tries to create out of whole cloth a social ethic and a true community...

...Dec...

...Their sociological real 4 See, for example, Everett K. Wilson, "Conformity Revisited," St...

...28-32, and the rebuttals to Wilson by Dennis H. Wrong and Ernest van den Haag, pp...

...Others, like Stein, go all the way back to primitive societies to discover models of community "in the anthropological sense...

...Writers who are not professional social scientists frequently confine themselves, in the name of individualism, to a straightforward attack on all contemporary forms of group life, from suburban togetherness to the "engineered consent" of the mass media and the imposed uniformity of authoritarian political movements...

...Totalitarian movements are "orthodoxies without doctrines," as Raymond Aron once said, because their unity is founded on the community of ideology they create 1 See, for example, Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community, New York: Oxford University Press, 1955...

...Emphasis on the erosion of traditional ties that once bound men together becomes central to most sociological thinking that goes beyond the technicism of factfinding and/or abstract theory-building...

...Consequently, instead of a genuine conformity based on shared values, we find conformism—the belief, rarely articulated as such, that one should act, think and feel as others do for its own sake...

...too much conformity to others and sensitivity to their feelings rather than indifference...

...Business organizations are criticized—by William H. Whyte, for example—not for ruthless exploitation, but for being big happy families eager to transform their employees into self-satisfied "organization men...

...This alleged political consequence of mass society, however, has never had such plausibility when applied to America...

...There are a number of different emphases in recent social criticism centering on the themes of loss of community and conformity...

...Since awareness of loss of community in modern society is over a century old, we need to recognize that responses to this awareness have become part of the very social reality we seek to understand...

...Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960...

...If the critics of the 1930s were futuristic in outlook, hopeful for a new social order, the critics of the 1950s were nostalgic, looking back to a more individualistic past...

...Hence the prevalence of judgments such as the following: In the desert of the suburb, community life has lost whatever vestiges of meaning it ever had for Americans...

...They end up providing their audience with a new and updated ideology of community, reminding one of books on child-rearing that tell parents not to rely on books on child-rearing but to be "spontaneous...

...The sociologist's very definition of man asserts that he is profoundly shaped by the group, by the dominant values of society...

...By singling out "status-seeking" as a major target of criticism, they often manage to combine the anti-capitalist attack on competitiveness of the 1930s, the moral-aesthetic defense of individuality against pressures towards conformity, and the more recent indictments of suburban and organizational groupism...

...The goal is a community which will both bind men together in intimate, fraternal relations and at the same time allow individuality to flourish...

...As Ortega once pointed out, "People do not live together merely to be together...

...if any community life exists at all, it exists frantically at the synthetic level of the club and church...

...The very receptivity of the audience indicates that an exposed nerve has been touched...

...David Riesman has argued that middle-class Americans today are more like the Zuni Indians, described and idealized by Ruth Benedict in her Patterns of Culture, than like the status-proud Kwakiutl, whom she, like Thorstein Veblen before her, saw as caricaturing American competitive values...

...In general terms, the restoration of a "true" or "organic" community is seen as the ultimate remedy...

...This critical perspective is not based on an ideology of community...

...In that decade leading social critics complained of the competitiveness of men under capitalism, their ruthless pursuit of wealth 2 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, New York: The Viking Press, p. 140...

...in consequence the sociological critic cannot, without violating his professional conscience, confine himself to affirming the values of individualism and personal autonomy while failing to consider the social context in which these values might be realized...

...Only moral, religious and political inspiration can do that...

...The contrast between these two styles of criticism is bewildering...

...Books with titles such as "The Quest for Community" or "The Eclipse of Community" have a contemporary resonance extending far beyond the circle of social scientists or even the educated public.' Used as a counter-concept to "mass society," "anomie," "rootlessness," and similar terms, "community" replaces the more politically focused labels of the past...

...The "loss of community" in modern society has become a major theme in contemporary social criticism...

...These nostalgic excursions into history end in remarkably similar exhortations...

...Collectives are established by common ends, communities derive from common origins...

...Daniel Bell has argued for the latter: The early theorists of mass society condemned it because in the vast metropolitan honeycombs people were isolated, transient, anonymous to each other...

...Accordingly, critics influenced by sociology locate the source of individual malaise in the fragmentation and disorder of modern society rather than in society's demands for conformity as such...

...the memory of the old order must be the chief incitement towards a new...

...Or have Americans taken to heart the earlier criticisms and overdone it in trying to rectify them...

...This brand of social criticism, while blunt, often zestful in its assaults on institutions and fashions, and always needed, has limitations from the point of view of both the professional sociologist and the social critic who has learned from the sociologists...

...295 ism saves them from the kind of purely romantic protests against modern life which refuse to recognize social necessities as distinct from the demands of the individual psyche...

...An ethic of conformism, the search for suburban oases and the loyalties of organization men are responses to the conditions described by the earlier critics: urban anonymity, social and geographical mobility, and the values of competitive individualism, which have for so long been characteristic of America and have by no means disappeared...

...so sociology is looked to in the hope that it will itself remedy the loss of community...

...nowhere does this consciousness of need reveal more clearly its hopelessness .S The diagnosis of our discontents put forward by these sociological critics is often a convincing and powerful one...

...We need go back only as far as the 1930s to find a change in the conditions and institutions alleged to be responsible for our "lack of community...

...Sociology itself began with the sense of a disturbance in the relation between individuals and society created by the modern political and technological revolutions...

...Instead of a status system in which individuals are rated according to stable dominant values, we find status-seeking in which status itself becomes a value no matter what the terms on which it is awarded...

...Is it just that the fashionable values of intellectuals have changed...

...It merely asserts with refreshing directness the need for protecting individuality from any social pressures...

...Commitment to an "ideology of community," rather than the attempt to create a "community of ideology," has been a characteristic American response to mass society, although it is, of course, by no means peculiarly American...

...But the emphasis is on the sharing of values rather than on their content...

...Impressed by the stability of the American political order, an influential group of political sociologists in this country has denied that the United States is a mass society and characterized it instead as "pluralist...

...10 The problem is seen as that of realizing community under the new conditions of urban-industrial mass civilization...

...7 A recent account of sociology's conservative intellectual pedigree is Nisbet, op...

...The inevitable failure of the ideology of community to deliver the elusive good it promises then gives rise to a social criticism that at its worst simply becomes a counter-ideology making a shibboleth of "nonconformity" or exploiting a romanticized version of an allegedly more individualistic American past...

...However, as Bell acknowledges, the various targets of criticism are dialectically related...

...The very willingness to follow the prescribed antidote to the disease is a symptom of the disease and indeed aggravates it...

...Changes in the structure of the economy achieved by political means were looked to for the creation of a community that would substitute fraternal cooperation for divisive competition...

...One of the most influential sociological interpretations of extremist political movements defines them as efforts to create a new "community of ideology" to supplant traditional group allegiances that have been destroyed by rapid social change...

...But because they no longer believe in the political solutions favored by their predecessors of the thirties the specificity of their diagnosis stands in marked contrast to the vagueness and virtual absence of any prescribed remedy...

...rather than on any definitive political goals affirmed by their ideology...

...The paradox of totalitarian movements is that they are able to combine a fanatical following of "true believers" with a political strategy that is almost entirely opportunistic and in no way constrained by an official creed...

...Students of totalitarianism have shown how the psychic dependence of militant supporters frees its leaders from bondage to the manifest ideology that is the movement's ostensible raison d'être...

...Bewailing the disappearance of organic community, the literary critic F. R. Leavis, writing in 1932, concludes: "We must beware of simple solutions...

...European writers who have described modern industrial society as a "mass society" in which men are lost and rootless, have seen it as inherently prone to produce destructive, ideologically fanaticized mass movements...

...Present-day targets are simply latterday versions of Babbitt and Main Street and the critics remain in the tradition of the revolt against village, church and provincial bourgeoisie that initiated a new trend in American writing some decades ago...

...Nowhere is there more consciousness of the need for community...

...Unlike the material acquisitiveness condemned by the critics of the thirties, competition for status both unites and divides people, creating what Riesman (borrowing a term from William Graham Sumner) has Iabeled "antagonistic cooperation...

...The achievement of community, like the achievement of mental health (or, for that matter, of happiness, as John Stuart Mill argued a century ago), cannot come from pursuing it directly as a goal but only as a by-product of the shared pursuit of more tangible goals and activities...

...To see the community merely as something to be resisted, as the source of false identities which stifle an essentially private self, is to deny that men live in communities as naturally as fish in water and that their private selves are necessarily closely intertwined with a self shaped by public pressures...

...2 To recognize the search for community as a major force in American life need not commit us to apocalyptic theories of mass society that see totalitarianism as the inevitable outcome...

...9 Nearly thirty years later, Maurice Stein, a sociologist, strikes the identical note: "There is little to be gained by sentimentalizing about primitive life or advocating a return to it in any form...

...9 Quoted by Williams, Ibid., p. 279...

...With varying emphases, these themes are central to the writing of the 1930s of such moral scientists as Margaret Mead, the Lynds, Ruth Benedict, Abram Kardiner, Robert K. Merton, Lawrence Frank and others...

...For, "if there is one thing certain about the `organic community,' it is that it has always gone," as Raymond Williams remarks.8 Some convince themselves, like George Orwell, that it was there in their childhoods, others locate its last incarnation in the vanished rural village or small town, in nineteenth century bourgeois society, in the Medieval commune or in the polls of the ancient world...

...33-36...

...There is too much "community," not enough individualism...

...Totalitarian leaders possess, therefore, a flexibility of political maneuver that is unavailable to power-seeking groups demanding a less than total commitment from their supporters...

...too great a readiness to participate in collective tasks as opposed to sturdy independence...

...It almost seems as if community in the anthropological sense is necessary before human maturity or individuation can be achieved, while this same maturity is, in turn, a prerequisite for community," as Maurice Stein puts its The call for the re-creation of community maintains a link between contemporary sociology and the conservative critique of modernity first formulated in the aftermath of the French Revolution...

...The goal of success was held to be demoralizing when all are urged to pursue it under circumstances where opportunities are highly unequal...

...Americans, sensitive as they are to the criticisms of others, took the charge to heart and, in building the postwar suburbs, sought to create fraternity, communality, togetherness, only to find themselves accused of conformity .3 Although Bell is correct in maintaining that the American middle class has responded anxiously to its critics, he too readily dismisses their complaints as stemming merely from the ideological bias of "European sociology...

...The failures and inconsistencies of recent social criticism suggest that there are limits to what we are entitled to expect from social science in general and sociology in particular as a source of remedies for our deeper discontents...

...For status requires validation by others and implies shared values in a way that money or power as goals do not...

...Tendencies that have elsewhere found expression in organized mass movements may be contained by the American political system...

...but still they do exist and manifest themselves in nonpolitical forms...

...8 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1960, p. 277...