Communitarianism

Variations on the Theme of Communitarianism

All communitarians uphold the importance of the social realm, and in particular of community, though they differ in the extent to which their conceptions are attentive to liberty and individual rights. Early communitarians, such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Robert Nisbet, stressed the importance of closely knit social fabric and authority. Asian communitarians are especially concerned about the values of social order. They argue that to maintain social harmony, individual rights and political liberties must be curtailed. Some seek to rely heavily on the state to maintain social order (for instance, leaders and champions of the regimes in Singapore and Malaysia), and some on strong social bonds and moral culture (as Japan does). Asian communitarians also hold that the West's notion of liberty actually amounts to anarchy; that strong economic growth requires limiting freedoms; and that the West uses its idea of legal and political rights to chastise other cultures that have inherent values of their own.

In the 1980s, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Robert Bellah and his associates criticized the excessive individualism of classical liberalism as exemplified by the United States under President Ronald Reagan and Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In 1995, Alan Ehrenhalt's book The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America questioned the value of enhancing choice at [Page 225][Page 226]the expense of maintaining community and authority. In his book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam identified what he deemed “social capital”—the element of communities that forms affective bonds among people—and stressed the importance of “bridging social capital,” in which bonds of connectedness are formed across diverse social groups.

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