Communitarianism: The Good, the Bad,& the Muddly

...Hence communitarians can adopt what might be called an arm's-length or historical understanding of the modern world, so that an emphasis on justice is not the occasion for jeremiads about the rise of self-interested behavior but an occasion to remind readers that the sanctity of contract reflects a social force, not individual convenience...

...In the United States Edmund Burke has been hijacked by assorted conservatives, but in Britain he is properly recognized as a liberal...

...Tawney, A.D...

...The third way in which communitarianism is distinctive is in its relative downplaying of rights and justice as the foundation stones of any political theory...

...Its liberalism, where it is liberal, depends on the thought that a liberal society embodying a liberal morality in its conscience collective is the indispensable base and support for the liberal individual —Durkheim's actual view...

...it is not antiliberal, but it is anticontractual...

...it is insistent on the need for cultural discipline and cultural support, on the need for a culturally acceptable conception of freedom, on a wide view of property as a means of anchoring us to society and not only a resource to be exploited economically...

...It is dubiously true of critical theory in literature and the fine arts where the same process of rewriting occurs fairly uninhibitedly...

...His communitarianism sometimes collapsed into mere mindless conservatism, but was most interesting when it was most obviously rooted in liberal values...

...Once again, Durkheim turns out to hold strikingly individualistic and justice-oriented views—though with a twist that makes him the distinctive figure he is...

...One may challenge Durkheim by denying that we are quite so dependent on a given society's collective morality as he suggests, and one may challenge Scruton by denying that authority plays so benevolent a role as he implies, but we shall always be proceeding case by case...

...Individuals exist only to the degree that they are formed by society...

...The problems of extreme positions are obvious: The fate and interests of the "abstract individual" can concern us only to the extent that they mirror our own concerns...

...There is a tradition, not fully articulate or strictly philosophical, but tangible enough, which is distinctive and attractive and which animates a great deal of British socialist and social democratic thinking, and which is quite plausibly described as "communitarian" in allegiance...

...Conversely, Michael Sandel's criticism of Rawls's Theory of Justice relies not only on the thought that Rawlsian selves are impossible to envisage but also on the thought that fraternity is a more important ingredient in social harmony than justice...

...But this demands some external critical standpoint, even if this standpoint cannot be Henry Sidgwick's vision of the ideal stance to be adopted by the moral philosopher— "the point of view of the universe...

...That is, we may draw our image of the community that expresses and reinforces our better, more fulfilled selves from previous societies or previously aspired-to societies, but we may combine this inevitably partial image with a sociological and moral understanding of the past's limits and the future's potentialities...

...Whether Alasdair Maclntyre can be unequivocally labeled a communitarian is debatable...

...Far from supposing that there is an abstract, more or less timeless notion of justice to which we may appeal in scrutinizing the fairness of such allocations, we are bidden to work up to a plurality of principles from a proper sense of the variety of goods and their varying importance to different societies and persons...

...They are not, indeed, complaints that would hold against the final stages of Rawls's argument in A Theory of Justice, where it is the socially unifying qualities of justice that matter...

...I doubt whether there is very much that is useful to be said about such preferences except on a case-by-case basis...

...no social critic wishes merely to reendorse the beliefs and practices of those in whose welfare he is interested...

...There are in fact dozens of real arguments lurking behind the one false façade, but three large topics dominate the field and on all of them communitarianism has something interesting and persuasive, though nothing conclusive, to say...

...For instance, Kant is a paradigm of detached a priori speculation, but his political writings are very firmly rooted in the conditions of a half-enlightened late eighteenth-century Germany, and although Marx insisted that the human essence was the ensemble of social relations and that all abstract moralizing in the name of the abstract individual was a hopeless waste of time he still condemned history as a catalogue of follies and oppressions in the best Enlightenment fashion...

...It is what we get from R.H...

...Most of them rate the "maximin" conception of justice less highly than Rawls does...

...Spheres of Justice is less about justice as it has usually been treated over the past twenty or thirty years than about apt allocative principles for a variety of human goods...

...Academic political theory has for two decades operated under the shadow of John Rawls's wonderful book, A Theory of Justice...

...It is suspicious of rationalistic demands for universal justice and abstract egalitarianism but confident enough in the good nature of men and women who have been fortunate in their moral upbringing to talk readily of the brotherhood of man...

...It has not been conservative, because it has thought the past more brutal, more constraining, and less fulfilling than the present is for many and the future could be for all...

...There are many ways of proceeding from here, few of them likely to provoke much dispute in the abstract, most of them likely to provoke a lot when it comes down to cases...

...Where, save in the concerns of our present, concrete selves can we find the questions we address to Hobbes's "mushrooms...

...They are not, however, complaints against liberalism...

...The peculiar place of justice in modern society is so to speak bracketed by Durkheim...

...Methodological Critique If the idea of a "communitarian critique of liberalism" makes little sense, we have to look elsewhere for the real argument...

...In the modern world, but only in the modern world, individuals have a passion for justice...

...It is unnecessary to pile up examples...

...This seems to be a valid complaint against explanatory holism...

...Its concern for liberty marks it as a liberal theory, eager to keep the government out of bedroom and library...

...This was dubiously true of major revolutions of thought in the physical sciences, where the tradition itself was rewritten in the light of new information...

...Turn of the century "English Idealists" —who were mostly Scottish but, more important, Hegelian—were selfconscious communitarian liberals...

...to settle these principles we ask about the way in which the goods themselves matter to those who would enjoy them...

...Which Rationality?, but a moment's reflection shows that it's not...

...There are doubtless many other ways in which this methodological argument could be constructed...

...Such unlikely combinations as T.H...

...It is not clear to me at least that in order to make sense of Socrates, say, we have to go down the implausible route of turning him into a traditionalist faute de mieux or the equally implausible route of saying that he was an uninteresting or ineffective critic because he was not...

...if we limit our gaze to the fully socialized and concrete persons on which communitarians concentrate, what room is there for radical criticism of their thoughts and actions...

...Green and Michael Walzer can be appealed to in aid of the thought that societies have as it were "better selves" to which they can be recalled by the social critic...

...their morally interesting qualities are those they actually possess, not those they might be hypothesized to possess if they were to lose most of what makes people recognizably human...

...These complaints, spelled out in Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, were, of course, the common coin of nineteenth-century critics of Kant on the one hand and Bentham on the other...

...I am sorry about that, but have to admit that it is one of the objects of this essay to express a certain irritation with the terms in which some recent debates have been handled—terms that make it much harder than it need be to size up the attraction of appeals to "community" and associated ideas...

...the last third, reached by few readers of this 554-page book, tried to show that around such a view a coherent but plural society could form...

...The communitarian critique of modernity is a familiar topic...

...it starts from a variety of sources, Burke's emphasis on the "little platoons," the Puritans' emphasis on the local congregation, early trade unionists' emphasis on solidarity among those who worked side by side...

...If it has no claim to be the communitarian tradition, it nonetheless strikes me as much the most attractive of communitarian traditions...

...I am conscious that these remarks have swung between irritation and hesitation, that I have insisted that of course there is no simple opposition between liberalism and communitarianism, and have then gone on to suggest that there are few moral and political positions that cannot come in both communitarian and noncommunitarian flavors, so that there's next to nothing worth saying about communitarianism in general...

...Having said this, we have to take at least some of it back...

...Still, having taken this much back, we can at least see how justice is to be understood in a communitarian SUMMER • 1989 • 353 Thoory framework...

...But it was a wonderfully confusing book...

...Piling up examples of nostalgia is unhelpful, however, because the more vital consideration is the existence of innumerable counterexamples...

...This may seem a perverse view, given Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose Justice...

...The world of a career open to talents is the world in which we can only be satisfied if our rewards reflect our abilities—a piece of wishful thinking if ever there were one, but no matter...

...Sandel proposes fraternity rather than justice as the fundamental social value, while Walzer's Spheres of Justice declines to nominate one value as paramount, and insists that in a plural society, justice too must be plural...

...354 • DISSENT...

...it is a reflection of the nature of modern society rather than a reflection of the nature of justice...

...Lindsay, and Richard Titmuss...

...Green educated half a generation of senior clergy and civil servants to think in such terms...

...I mustn't end here...

...Justice is not a framework established by individual contractors so much as the moral climate in which contracting becomes salient...

...sometimes we feel more at home with the critic from within, whose affection for what he is criticizing is evident...

...Anyone who has moved in these circles should proceed swiftly to the paragraph after next...

...The meaning of that proposition may be obscure to anyone who has not spent the past decade acquiring the same irritation at the way academic political theory has revolved around the so-called "liberal-communitarian debate...

...With what, other than the mental and moral qualities we find in our present, concrete selves, can we equip them...

...that book provides a sustained and often moving defense of welfare-state liberalism, a liberalism committed to a conception of distributive justice that seeks to make the least favored citizen as well off as possible, subject to the overriding claims of the widest possible equal liberty for all...

...It has been anti-utopian, because it has been unwilling to sacrifice the actual to the possible, and because it has supposed that we ought to build on the best we can make of the present rather than leveling the ground and starting from scratch...

...So-called "communitarian" critics seized on the first third and argued that the rational egoist of this moral theory (and of most economic theory, too) was a fiction and an unhelpful one...

...How Important Is Justice...

...Normatively, the same case is inescapable...

...the opposition between the integrated and the alienated critic does not altogether catch the realities of debate...

...It is at present unfashionable in Britain...

...It is more apt to appeal to decency and fair play than to search for justifiable rights or large principles...

...The simple point, however, is that "communitarian liberal" is so far from being a 350 • DISSENT Political Theory contradiction in terms that numerous distinguished and less distinguished writers over the past two centuries have precisely been communitarian liberals...

...Stone's Trial of Socrates, and it is possible to complain that he was an unhelpful critic because he was so utterly at odds with his fellow Athenians' view of the world...

...What is wrong with such thoughts emerges in the answers SUMMER • 1989 • 351 Political Theory writers offer to some obvious moral or political problems...

...It is certainly possible to quarrel with Socrates without adopting the philistine view of philosophy displayed in I.F...

...One familiar line of thought is to suggest that the social critic must work within the values of the society he criticizes, whether by holding up the society's behavior to the unflattering light of its convictions or by displaying the lacunae and contradictions in its convictions themselves...

...Still, once the simple point is made that any criticism, any innovation, any change of view has to latch on to something in our existing worldview, and that that world view must be a social rather than strictly individual possession, we have exhausted the logical constraints of a holistic methodology...

...More generally, it is one thing to try to make one's political and moral theory reflect the complexity of the social or political enterprises that it is intended to elucidate and criticize, quite another to suggest that all worthwhile criticism has to endorse a larger tradition in order to make sense...

...its so-called "maximin" conception of justice—maximizing the minimum share of social benefits—marks it out as a welfarestate theory unbothered by the pretensions of property owners to have first claim on the social product...

...It is an exceedingly old and still unresolved question how far moral and political theory should consider men "as if new sprung from the earth like mushrooms"—in Hobbes's graphic phrase—or as fully socialized, committed, concrete, and particular persons, firmly situated in some particular place and at some particular time...

...It has been less the creation of moral philosophers or political theorists than of practical people engaged in education or in pushing forward the welfare state or making industrial relations more equitable...

...A Critique of Modernity If methodological disputes are one field where there's a distinctive communitarian line, where we find all communitarians lined up in one camp, the second field, the "antimodernist" critique of contemporary politics and culture certainly can be distinctively communitarian, though much more contested within the communitarian ranks...

...William Beveridge built the post-1945 British welfare state on just these ideological foundations...

...Whatever the relationship between communitarianism and liberalism, it cannot be one of simple opposition...

...It is, for all that, the one piece of communitarian thinking that—partly because it comes without contentious philosophical trappings—manages to put forward an attractive political position that is distinctive in just the way a communitarian position should be...

...The commonest items in the repertoire of those who practice the politics of nostalgia are the belief in a warm communal past and a hostility to a present in which the callous cash nexus is the only bond between man and man...

...What confuses matters is the (contingent) fact that several of the best known writers in a communitarian vein, such as Sandel, Michael Walzer, Robert Bellah, and Charles Taylor are critical of various forms, or various aspects of liberalism too...

...Its existence gives the lie to all those who think that communitarian ways of thinking must be conservative and retrogressive...

...John Stuart Mill, after all, tried to teach the nineteenth century that an adequate liberalism needed Coleridge as well as Bentham—the emphasis on the communal and the cultural to balance the emphasis on the individual and the rational...

...it is very largely unknown to what fashionably passes for communitarian thought in the United States...

...It has not been illiberal, because it has always been committed to the ethos of give and take, but it has not been happy with the liberal rhetoric of freedom because of its fear that freedom for the pike means death for the minnow and because of the history of selfish, greedy, and powerful individuals and states passing off their interests as "freedom...

...The rest is debatable and partly a matter of taste and fashion...

...Marx obviously, and Alasdair Maclntyre in After Virtue, are but two writers who have assailed the uncommunal present, not in the name of the past, but in the name of the once-and-future community...

...theorists of Gemeinschaft lamented the rise of Gesellschaft: Durkheim has frequently been misunderstood to say that formerly there was social solidarity but now there is a merely functional order assented to by self-interested individuals...

...that he is unequivocally an antimodernist is not...

...Thatcher and the modern British bobby in 1984 and 5, his only ideological weapon was the appeal to the traditional image of the mining village, the solidaristic community built around shared employment and shared hardships and danger...

...Or, rather, we need to distinguish between antimodernism for its own sake, where the past is genuinely the object of attraction, and antimodernism for the sake of the future community...

...When Richard Rorty suggests that there is less point in condemning the American conduct of the Vietnam War as unjust or inhumane or wicked than in condemning it as somehow discordant with the American political tradition, many of us would want to retort that if it had been perfectly in accord with that tradition it would still have been unjust, inhumane, and wicked...

...And how can we even characterize their actual thoughts and actions without some abstraction, some attempt to determine what they would, or should, believe and pursue if they had not been socialized into the outlooks they in fact possess...

...His defense of community prejudice against radical reliance on individual reason was founded on a fear that the twentieth century has done much to justify: the fear that rationalizing and centralizing political projects would destroy individual liberties more effectively than any traditional government had ever done...

...But it is equally possible to argue that he was and has remained a critic for all seasons precisely because he climbed out of the cave and took a larger view than his fellows...

...When Arthur Scargill led the British miners in their 352 • DISSENT Political Theory hopeless battle against Mrs...

...Its conservatism, as Roger Scruton's contributions to British conservatism, is distinctively communitarian in being hostile to the revival of laissez-faire thinking that often passes for conservatism...

...sometimes we need the energy that comes from estrangement and a real dislike of what the critic condemns...

...Of course, these views are far from being a monopoly of theorists...

...the first third of the book argued for this view of justice by showing that rational, self-interested individuals would have drawn up a social contract embodying such a view...

...Here, too, ambiguities abound, of course, but once again, there is little that can be said about the scope of the communitarian's arguments a priori...

...Edmund Burke's eloquence was poured out on those who tried to strip the individual of his collective attachments and prejudices and send him naked into the world...

...Here, there is no doubt again that there is a distinctively communitarian slant to the argument...

...Conversely, we must give ourselves some distance from those concerns if we are to gain any argumentative perspective on the concrete world...

...they wish not merely to do well but to do as well as they are entitled to...

...The first and most esoteric issue is the issue of method...