Communitarianism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Communitarianism Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Communitarianism, like many political terms, has both a general and a specific meaning. In the general sense, a communitarian is anyone who believes that community is so vital to a worthwhile individual life that it must be protected against threatening trends and tendencies of the modern world. In the specific sense that emerged from the so-called liberal communitarian debate of the 1980s and 1990s, a communitarian is someone who maintains that the excessively abstract and individualistic theories of liberal philosophers have been among the most threatening of these trends. This specific sense seems to be what most writers have in mind when they now refer to communitarianism.

A Brief History

The word communitarian first appeared in English in the early 1840s, when it was roughly synonymous with socialism and communism. These other words acquired more precise meanings in the ideological battles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but communitarianism remained a vague term, signifying little more than a desire to defend the traditional rural community or small town from the supposedly isolating and corrosive influences of capitalism, bureaucracy, and urban life. While socialists and communists came to be identified with the political left, communitarians were as likely to be to the right as the left of center.

According to one line of thought that developed in the late nineteenth century, the primary threat to community is the centrifugal force of modern life. Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between two types of society, gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (association or civil society), was especially influential in this regard, with gemeinschaft identified with the warmth of intimate, natural, and traditional life in contrast to the cold, calculating, and rational gesellschaft.

Concern for community took another direction in the twentieth century, as some saw the centripetal force of the modern state as the principal threat to community. In 1932, José Ortega y Gasset warned in The Revolt of the Masses against “the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State” (120). Less dramatically, Robert Nisbet argued in his 1953 book The Quest for Community that the free, spontaneous, and healthy life of community is increasingly difficult to sustain under the pressure of the modern state, with its impulses toward centralized power and bureaucratic regulation.

The Liberal-Communitarian Debate

These two themes persist in the writings of the communitarian political theorists of recent years, but they take the specific form of a series of objections to the community-dissolving tendencies of liberal individualism. Four books published in the early 1980s marked the emergence of this philosophical communitarianism: Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983), and Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Papers (1985). In general, the complaint was that liberal theories of justice and rights, such as those from John Rawls, have been too abstract and universalistic. Walzer thus called for a “radically particularist” approach that attends to “history, culture, and membership” by asking not what “rational individuals . . . under universalizing conditions of such-and-such a sort” (xiv) would choose, but what would “individuals like us choose . . . who share a culture and are determined to go on sharing it?” (5).

Communitarians have also complained that contemporary liberals rely on an atomistic conception of the self—an “unencumbered self,” in Sandel’s terms—that is supposedly prior to or independent of attachments to family, tradition, and community. This conception is both false and pernicious, communitarians claim, because individual selves are largely constituted by the communities that nurture them. Liberal theories of justice and rights thus contribute to the withdrawal into private life and the intransigent insistence on one’s rights against others that threaten to undermine liberal democracies. There is little sense of a common good or even a common ground on which citizens can meet. As MacIntyre says, politics now “is civil war carried on by other means” (253).

The liberal-communitarian debate has not been clear-cut because some of those labeled communitarian have seen themselves as liberals trying to correct an atomistic tendency within liberalism (e.g.,Taylor). Moreover, those who seemed the most severe critics of liberalism, MacIntyre and Sandel, have either forsaken communitarianism in favor of republicanism, like Sandel, or denied ever being a communitarian, like MacIntyre. Communitarianism in the specific sense survives, however, although it most often takes the form of a political communitarianism, less concerned with philosophical criticism of liberalism than with attempts to revive and defend community by calling attention to shared values, encouraging participation in civic life, and reinvigorating politics at the local level.

Bibliography:

Avineri, Shlomo, and Avner de-Shalit, eds. Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bell, Daniel. Communitarianism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Etzioni, Amitai. The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Frazer, Elizabeth. The Problems of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Mulhall, Stephen, and Adam Swift. Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses, translated by T. Carey. New York:W.W. Norton, 1932.
Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society, translated by J. Harris and M. Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1983.