Communitarianism

Academic (Philosophical) Communitarianism

In the 1980s, communitarian thinking was largely associated with the works of political philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer. Others sometimes associated with this group include Alasdair MacIntyre, Seyla Benhabib, and Shlomo Avineri. These scholars called attention to the mistaken assumptions about the nature of the self on which liberal philosophy, especially as espoused by John Rawls, rested. Liberalism, these communitarian critics pointed out, views the person as divorced from all his moral commitments and communal attachments. These communitarians challenged this view, depicting the self as fundamentally “situated” or “contextualized” in a given culture, within a particular history, and with a particular set of values. These academic communitarians, and the sociologists who preceded them, like émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies, stressed that individuals in viable communities not only flourish as human beings but also are more reasonable and productive than isolated individuals. Only if social pressures to conform rise to excessively high levels do they undermine the development and expression of the self.

Academic communitarians also argued that the nature of the political community was misunderstood by liberalism. Where liberal philosophers described a neutral framework of rules within which a diversity of commitments to moral values can coexist, communitarians showed that such a “thin” conception of political community was both empirically misleading and normatively dangerous. Good societies, according to these authors, rested on much more than “neutral” rules and procedures; they relied on shared moral culture.

Some academic communitarians argued even more strongly on behalf of particularistic values, [Page 327]suggesting that, indeed, these were the only kind of values that mattered and that it was a philosophical error to posit any universal moral values. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that human rights are as real as unicorns. Michael Walzer initially argued that concrete universal values were philosophically illusory and that societies could be measured only according to their own particularistic moral standards. As the debate over abstract universal values gave way to a discussion about cross-cultural justifications of human rights, the problems of such a relativistic position came to be widely (though not universally) acknowledged. In the 1990s, responsive communitarians developed a position that accommodated both particularistic and universal values (see below).

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