Communitarianism

Basic Principles and their Application

While a carefully crafted balance between liberty and social order defines a generic concept of the good [Page 217]society, communitarians point out that the historicalsocial conditions of specific societies determine the rather different ways a given society in a given era may need to change to attain the same balance. Thus, contemporary Japan requires much greater tolerance for individual rights, while in the United States excessive individualism needs to be curbed.

Communitarians also pay much attention to the relationship between the self and the community. Political theorists depict the self as “embedded,” which implies that the self is constrained by the community. Responsive communitarians stress that individuals who are well integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in responsible ways than are isolated individuals, but if social pressure to conform rises to high levels, it will undermine the individual self.

Communitarians pay special attention to social institutions. Several of these form the moral infrastructure of society: families, schools, communities, and the community of communities. Infants are born into families, whose societal role is to introduce values and begin the development of the moral self. The role of schools is to develop further the moral self and to remedy moral development if the family has neglected or distorted it.

Communitarians emphasize that children reared in well-functioning families and schools will still not be sufficiently equipped for membership in a good, communitarian society. This is a point ignored by those social philosophers who assume that once people have acquired virtue and habits, their inner moral compasses will adequately guide them. In contrast, communitarians assume that commitments to moral values tend to deteriorate unless they are continuously reinforced. A major societal role of communities is to reinforce the commitments of their members. This is achieved by the community's “moral voice,” the informal sanctioning of others, built into a web of informal affect-laden relationships that communities provide.

Studies indicate that Americans in the 1980s often avoided speaking up on moral issues. The work of Robert Bellah and his associates has been particularly influential here, demonstrating the rise of, first, expressive and then instrumental individualism, and their negative effects. Many Americans, and to some extent members of other Western societies, embraced the liberal ideology that what is morally sound is to be determined by each individual and that one should not judge the acts of others. There followed large increases in crime, drug abuse, divorce, and loss of trust in public institutions and legitimate authority. Social bonds frayed.

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