Communitarianism

COMMUNITARIANISM is characterized by an appeal to the idea of community as means to criticize liberal political theory. According to communitarians, the liberal emphasis on abstract individual rights disregards collective values and the relation between individuals and communities. This quest for community can be found in several countries, especially the United States. Part of its appeal lies in its ambiguity, since community has also been a key concept for conservatives, libertarians, communists, and Marxists.

This idea of community can be traced to Roman political theory, which defined communitate as the commonality or spontaneous consensus of individuals within a group. A similar term, communis, was used to translate the Greek word koinonia and was applied to denote the church community or the Catholic Church as Communitorium. This explains theological concepts, such as communion and excommunication.

The same concept was found in libertarian, communist, utopian, Marxist, and conservative positions in the 19th century. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jean-Baptiste Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon insisted on the idea of community. Karl Marx spoke of a “community of producers” (Produzentengemeinschaft) in Das Kapital. The same plurality is present in the United States in Henry Thoreau's Walden, and in the works of pragmatists like Charles S. Peirce, William James, Herbert G. Mead, and John Dewey, who used terms such as scientific community and moral community.

One of the main German conservative thinkers, Ernst Jünger, considered the German Army during World War I as “the community on the front” (Frontgemeinschaft). A similar slogan was used by national socialism. However, a totally different meaning was ascribed to this term by the priests who created the pacifist movement Communauté in France, as well as by members of the Base Christian Communities in Latin America during the 1970s. Later, Robert Nisbet defended a “quest for community” as a basic category for social and political philosophy, while Robert Bellah diagnosed a “loss of community” in the United States, as a result of individualism.

While the concept of community was present in the debate between conservatives and liberals, it is now found in the debate between communitarians and liberals. Some communitarians argue that the liberal emphasis on a general concept of justice leads to an inadequate view of community that jeopardizes a socially oriented state politics.

Michael Sandel criticizes Johan Rawls's theory of justice and political liberalism for pretending to be “universal” while also relying on the essentialist concept of “person” as individual, thereby ignoring moral, cultural, and political collectivity. Bellah, known for his sociology of civil religion and his plea for communitarianism in the study Habits of the Heart, followed Emile Durkheim and observed how ontological individualism eroded morality. He proposes social realism with emphasis on values “common to the biblical and republic nations.” Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he defends a form of “civil religion,” but does not guard against its side effect: intolerance. His Dukheimian conceptions are not related to a clear political condition, and so remain ambiguous.

A similar appeal to community was made by Michael Walzer in the book Spheres of Justice, as he observed the need for communal solidarity, attention to different “shared meanings,” lower indexes of social disintegration, and a respect for the values and conceptions of good in different communities. Walzer denounced reducing all this to a single standard. Using the example of Medicaid, he showed the failure of liberal distributive justice and advocated that the members of different communities should decide about their own good. He also criticized the Protestant emphasis on individuality, which generally disregards communion or communication with others.

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