The Responsive Community

...To its credit, the Responsive Community did publish, in its Summer 1995 issue, a powerful essay by Ralf Dahrendorf about the painful trade-offs and sacrifices under alternative political and cultural regimes...

...But Etzioni himself takes issue with the idea that communitarianism is liberalism properly conceived: he claims that "communitarians have established a fundamentally different paradigm" (toward which, for example, poor John Rawls can only bend without abandoning what Etzioni oddly calls his libertarian position...

...In short, they are "disinclined to focus on the structural side of our communitarian disrepair...

...And they are no less silent about the degradation of employment and the stagnation of wages—particularly among the bottom third of the workforce— which "brutally sabotages communities, parenting, and family values...

...MAGAZINES The Responsive Community makes it clear that communitarians are, indeed, political liberals in the sense of defending liberal freedoms (protecting free speech, resisting paternalist welfare policies and the excesses of identity politics...

...HOW FAR has the larger, or higher, purpose been achieved...

...Some members of this "network," as Etzioni terms it, have hopes that communitarianism might someday spark a full-blown social movement— a movement that might transform the very meaning of politics...

...The hope (to quote Etzioni once more) is for "layered loyalties...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 89...

...But Dahrendorf 's message failed to seep under the magazine's skin...

...The major absentee is the economy...

...For communitarians, it would seem, they are best ignored, since attending to them threatens to undermine the very moral consensus that their perspective promises as both immanent ("in our tradition") and imminent (near realization...

...But TRC also engineers some fruitful cross-fertilization: sometimes philosophers address social-scientific questions (Charles Taylor on theories of modernity) and vice versa (Philip Selznick defending communitarian liberalism and theorizing about justice...

...Is it, as Tocqueville wrote of "individualism" in 1835, "a new word to which a new idea has given birth...

...Such relentless elevation can be depressing...

...Is communitarianism, then, an interpretation of liberalism (on the grounds, perhaps, that liberalism is too important to be left to the liberals...

...One answer emerged in 1993: "The Communitarian movement has a key role to play in the struggle over the soul of the Clinton administration .. . Clinton and Gore have shown strong communitarian commitments," wrote Etzioni...

...But since 1995 the magazine's focus has distinctly shifted away from the terrain of Washington politics toward considerations of local activism...

...The Responsive Community, in short, seems to have lost interest in speaking its truth to White House power, preferring instead to record and amplify the voices of civic and community activists...

...Has TRC helped to bring what Etzioni calls "the moral voices across the land" into unison or harmony or at least intelligible discord...

...He writes here and in his books as the prophet of a new idea...

...In 1994 the magazine cheerfully reported that "President Clinton, who has been reading Amitai Etzioni's latest book, The Spirit of Community, extolled communitarian values . . ." and in 1995 it praised Hillary Rodham Clinton's "courageous speech about America's greatest crisis...

...Paul," and so on...

...F OR ONE thing, it drastically limits the topics addressed...

...But does it really make sense to suppose that that object can be adequately addressed, in theory or in practice, from a perspective that is "neither right nor left, liberal or conservative...

...You will not find it in the 1975 edition of Webster's dictionary, though you will find a "communitarian" there defined as "a member of a society that practices communism...

...Communitarians hang on to the hope of society-wide community (what Etzioni calls "The Community of Communities") while remaining systematically ambiguous about where precisely "community" is located, and evasive about conflicts between communities that compete for resources or allegiances...

...Into whose ear does this voice speak...

...Glendon's formulation, cited above, gets it right: communitarianism responds to the old and general liberal dilemma of how to cultivate social cohesion and solidaristic behavior in the unpromising soil of the market economy and the urban society...

...Which is why Alasdair Maclntyre was right to explain in 1991 that he is not and never has been a communitarian, since he believes that such attempts "will always be ineffective or disastrous," not least because he believes "fundamental moral conflict" to be "so widespread and politically disabling" that community can only be built "at the level of particular institutions...

...Communitarianism, in short, is not an idea, theory, or doctrine, new or old, but a perspective that informs the work of TRC's contributors and like-minded thinkers...

...That assumption has, I believe, three interlinked consequences, amply illustrated in the pages of the magazine...

...STEVEN LUKES teaches moral philosophy at the University of Siena and sociology at New York University...

...Indeed, reading the Responsive Community is a serious undertaking and its contributors are, as I have sought to stress, grappling with very serious issues...

...Second, the assumption in question leads communitarians, in their attempts to account for that disrepair in politically and socially nondivisive terms, to avoid precisely what divides left from right, and to focus instead on culture and "values" or at most on legal and institutional barriers to the missing solidarities...

...That perspective was set out in "The Communitarian Platform," a 1991 document signed by a variety of mainly academic sympathizers...

...and perhaps this secular faith provides the energy required to run a journal, organize a network, and catch the ear of an American president and (it is said) a British prime minister...

...Etzioni foretells a "moral awakening without puritanism...

...They are at least united in the object of their various concerns, and in their rejection of libertarian and authoritarian solutions...

...Is the idea (if there is one) a theory or doctrine, or is it, like environmentalism, a perspective from which theories and doctrines may be developed...

...to "Can Associations of Business be True Community Builders...

...This point was well made in the Responsive Community itself, in a recent essay by Charles Derber...

...Communitarianism is the collective name for a range of strenuous attempts to confront that dilemma in the United States today, where ethnic divisions, a ferociously shifting job market, the erosion of cultural capital, and the absence of socialist (let alone social democratic) traditions render the dilemma all the more acute...

...That is to say, we face "the great dilemma of how to hold together the two halves of the divided soul of liberalism—our love of individual liberty and our sense of community for which we accept common responsibility . . . Communitarianism can be understood as democracy's environmentalist movement, helping to heighten awareness of the political importance and endangered condition of the seedbeds of civic virtue...

...Communitarians have been silent, Derber lamented, about "corporate networks and contingent labor markets, both of which profoundly atomize employment and do violence to bonds among workers as well as between workers and companies...

...But, as the evidence of TRC's pages makes plain, communitarianism is not a new idea, or even a new variant of an old one...

...whereas for the right they may be defended as desirable or as an inevitable cost to pay for other objectives...

...Start with the Family" . . . "Schools: The Second Line of Defense" . . . "Cleaning Up the Polity" . . . "The Human Community...

...But there are various ways of being serious, and the communitarian way is endlessly earnest and uplifting...

...Sometimes these contributors work in familiar modes...

...But the bulk of TRC's contents is directed at public policy questions in the broadest sense— from, say, "What Makes a Good Urban Park...

...Yet a larger—or, as the communitarian voice would say, a higher—purpose survives: the magazine continues to bring together a startlingly diverse coterie of political philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists, lawyers and public policy-experts, practitioners and consultants...

...In early issues Thomas A. Spragens offered a two-part critique of "The Limits of Lib88 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 ertarianism," arguing that "liberalism at its best has never fallen prey to the simple-minded individualism promulgated by libertarians"— a theme that Selznick has also developed...

...For the left, by definition, structured inequalities and power relations demand rectification through political action...

...The lawyers expound and debate such matters as the relationship of community to the First and Fourth Amendments, and to property and welfare rights, the rights of the homeless, and the deregulation of family law...

...His most recent book is The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat...

...Is the idea of communitarian irony or satire a self-contradiction...

...Or does it name a distinctive new variant of a very old idea...

...What does this new ism signify...

...In the journal's first issue, the editors declared themselves "as a group, neither right nor left, liberal or conservative, but dedicated to providing a voice to address and articulate issues that we believe concern us all...

...What is systematically avoided is concern with uncovering relations of power and dependency that render individuals resistant—and often immune—to calls for moral reawakening and mutual concern...

...why do some democratic societies think about rights so differently from others...

...We know from the magazine what they are against: libertarianism and authoritarianism...

...Readers have learned about civic participation by taxpayers in Missoula, Montana, "Saving Lives in Seattle: A Model for Civic Responsibility," "Welfare Reform: New Hope in Milwaukee," "Keeping the EldDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 87 MAGAZINES erly in the Neighborhood in St...

...Its accents are liberal, optimizing, reconciliatory, ecumenical, and, above all, serious...

...This last note came in a regular feature, revealingly titled "The Communitarian Pulpit," in which the magazine published excerpts from the works of such figures as the Clintons, William Bennett, and Jesse Jackson...

...The Responsive Community (TRC), the quarterly journal founded in 1990 by Amitai Etzioni and three academic colleagues, offers diverse—and not always satisfying—answers to these questions...

...In this respect, Etzioni exemplifies in an extreme or pure form what many of TRC's contributors exhibit in varying degrees: the belief that the various values of a "pluralistic community" are all jointly realizable without too much strain—that wealth creation, social cohesion, individual freedom, and the various goals of all kinds of different "communities" can all be fitted together and "optimized...

...Thus the terms in which communitarians typically frame issues optimistically assume social actors potentially open to moral persuasion rather than intractably divided by conflicting interests and values...

...There is very little here about the moral and cultural consequences of market processes, and virtually nothing about the ramifications of economic inequality...

...It is high-minded and declaratory ("Restoring the Moral Voice...

...Perhaps its best account of its project came in a 1994 essay by the Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who described the problem of finding "the optimal mix in a democratic economy, how to procure a just balance between individual freedom, equality, and social solidarity...

...Are we any clearer about what communitarians stand for...

...Thus we revisit some of the classic questions in political philosophy (the public/ private dichotomy, equality and difference, the potential universality of human rights) and in sociology (are voluntary associations in terminal decline...

...This leads me to the third and final aspect of communitarianism's resolute nonpartisanship: its tone of voice...