Community Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Community usually refers to an integrated set of human relationships generally based on close ties, kinship, or ethical solidarities. These are often contrasted with the impersonal relations of modern society. Political community refers to ideas of political deliberation, solidarity, civic attachment, and common norms; political community also often rests upon ethical community.

Historical Perspectives

For Aristotle, political community was the highest goal of human activity. Community was rooted in human nature, and the ends of human nature were determined by the order of the cosmos. Political community rested on an ethos that guided practical activity, and aimed at more than mere protection or peaceful association. It required a deliberative community guided by reason. Political justice existed between these free and equal beings who sought self-sufficiency. For Plato, the citizen was not only a political animal by nature; the citizen was a member of an ongoing and historical community, not an independent individual.

Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle in stressing the importance of community. Human’s essentially social nature, however, included a variety of associations beyond the political, with or do connecting both the order of the universe and the orders of social life. Relativizing and subordinating political community to religious community, Aquinas regarded the latter as the most perfect and saw its quest for perfect happiness as limited.

Early modern works like Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun formulated utopian communities based on communistic ideals like peace and happiness for all. These Renaissance theorists rejected the division of labor and the drudgery of work for socially purposeful activity. Utopias were the first instance of a modern discourse in which society or the social represented a sphere of self-organization, the willful creation of human activity and not of god or nature, and could be subject to human control and direction. In the nineteenth century, utopian socialists like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen founded experimental communities based on utopian ideals.

In industrial society, the idea of the social was more closely equated with the market over community. Ferdinand Tönnies formulated the standard distinction between two types of human association: community and society, or Gemienschaft and Gesellschaft. These, however, are not definitions of society but ideal types, which are found in combination in all societies. Gemeinschaft is a form of association based on strong ties such as family and kinship. The latter possess, according to Tönnies, a unity of will, a characteristic that might also be found in national identity or other group identities. Gesellschaft, in contrast, designates market like relations based on calculating self-interest.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau identified the alienation typical of modern commercial society. It created a pervasive inequality, bound humans to repressive institutions, and created artificial egoistic needs. Though Rousseau never advocated a return to a “state of nature,” he did think that commercial society was egoistic and fragmented, lacking in community. It alienated humans from the sympathy for the suffering of others that such association required. Rousseau sought a solution in a more direct form of republican democracy, which could only be realized in smaller and integral communities.

Nineteenth-Century Ideas Of Community

Romantics mounted a critique of Enlightenment rationalism, its abstract universalism, and its mechanical and lifeless spirit that separated humans from nature and communal solidarities. While romanticism looked to the past, especially the medieval era, for models of integrated community, it was not uniformly conservative or backward looking. Early German romantics embraced republican political theories supportive of the French revolution, believing individual creativity and community could flourish through a renewed reason. Romantics also championed national identity. Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, saw national community as an integral unity based in a national language. Human nature, Herder argued, is historical, not an ideal of absolute, unchanging happiness. It is relative to linguistic, cultural, and social conditions. Early Marxist views can be seen as a variant of romanticism. Human alienation, which separated humans from their communal roots and the full development and expression of their creative powers, reached its greatest heights in industrial capitalism. The recovery of true community and creative human powers meant transcending the limits of nations for international communism.

Thinkers who rejected the achievements of French Revolution (1789–1799) looked to the failures of the terror as a caution against applying Enlightenment ideals to social life. Conservatives like Edmund Burke took a moderate path. Burke looked to the wisdom of tradition as source of gradual no revolutionary change. Tradition was the voice of history and community, which, while of human origin, was not a product of human will. Reactionary Joseph De Maistre saw the monarchy as the best form of association and rejected the Enlightenment idea of community as human artifice. God reveals constitutions, Maistre argued, according to god’s plan. Others took the idea of national community in a less innocent direction believing that in the late nineteenth century, nationalism was linked to imperialism and power politics.

Developmental liberals such as John Stuart Mill, T. H. Green, and John Dewey recognized that the social conditions of modern freedom required not just civil rights but social rights. Rejecting the atomism of liberal theory, they argued that human life is essentially social and requires the guarantee of basic conditions such as education, social welfare, and protection from the fluctuations of the economy. While the latter aren’t equivalent to the strong solidarities and moralities of the community, they are conditions that need to be in place for such communities to flourish.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim also sought to formulate a notion of community suitable for modern conditions. Mechanical solidarity was based on the similarity of tasks in older societies, while organic solidarity was the more complex integration of a modern division of labor and rested on pluralism. While not rejecting individualism, Durkheim held, like developmental liberals, that society needs to complete individualism. Political community, promoting a positive notion of liberty, differentiates from the state and community promotes a modernist sense of solidarity by integrating secondary groups (contra Rousseau) like the church, the family, labor, industry, and professions into the larger community. In contrast, anomie, in Durkheim’s view, is a disconnection with community. Lacking in norms or attachments, Durkheim saw rootless, normless (largely urban) anomie as the main source of disorder and social disintegration.

Contemporary Communitarians

The contemporary y debate between communitarians and liberals has revived debate over the role community plays in political theory. Communitarians reject what they see as the atomism and abstract universalism of contemporary liberalism as exemplified by John Rawls. Communitarians, such as Michael Sandel, Alistair Macintyre, and Michael Walzer stress the idea that the good, rooted in specific political communities, takes priority over the right or claims of justice. Communitarians look to a prior community organized around the good life, with standards of morality and politics internal to community. Neither political order nor the identity of individuals, who are the bearers of rights, can be coherently conceived without reference to the constitutive conditions of community. American social theorists like Phillip Selznick and Amati Etzioni were also prominent in advocating a communitarian view of politics that balance individual rights and community responsibilities.

Multiculturalism has emerged as another element of the liberalism and communitarian debate. Charles Taylor, for example, has argued that cultural communities, such as those of the Quebecquois in Canada, are due cultural rights based on their character as linguistic communities. Reflecting the influence of Herder, Taylor holds that “the language I speak, the web which I can never fully dominate and oversee, can never be just my language, it is always our language.” The integrity of language and culture precedes individual rights. This is not a matter of simply choosing a language but maintaining a community in which the language flourishes. Critics hold that Taylor views communities too holistically and his portrayal of liberalism is too narrow. Individuals are not simply members of unified language communities but of multiple and permeable social worlds. The “unified” self is constructed out of this plurality.

The central challenge for contemporary theories of political community remains to reconcile the forms of solidarity required by national and ethnic identities with the requirements of justice and universal human rights of cosmopolitan societies. This challenge examines how the local virtues of patriotism, civic virtue, and local theories of the good life are compatible with the plurality of value orientations—both within most cosmopolitan contemporary societies and as relations between nations and transnational associations.

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