How Much of Communitarianism is Left (and Right)?

In the last few years, the conflict between communitarians and liberals has cooled. Communitarians have pointed out—and many liberals have recognized—that for all their criticisms of liberal political and social life, communitarians are firmly committed to the central achievements of liberalism: the protection of civil rights and liberties and liberal democratic government. Liberals have pointed out—and many communitarians have recognized—that liberalism can be defended apart from any commitment to the individualist, asocial philosophical anthropology found in philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. Thus a liberal political theory need not neglect the inherently social character of human life. Nor need a liberal regime deny the importance of goods that are fundamentally communal in nature.

That liberals and communitarians have begun to put aside the exaggerated and one-sided pictures they had of each other is all to the good. But this reconciliation—like many of the debates of the recent past—has taken place at a very abstract level, in discussions of rights or of philosophical anthropology. As a result, some of the ways in which liberal and communitarian ideals conflict in practice have not received the detailed exploration they deserve.

Liberalism can certainly recognize the social character of humankind and the importance of government provision of some common goods. But that need not make the institutions and practices of liberalism any more supportive of a strongly communal life. Communitarians can plausibly argue that communal identification and communal goods continue to be undermined because many areas of our lives are dominated by large bureaucratic corporations that operate in a market economy and large bureaucratic states that attempt to regulate that economy. And the increasing pace of change and movement in liberal political communities makes it ever more difficult for men and women to make the kinds of connections that would support strong communities.

Largely because they have not gone very far in providing us with an account of what a more communal polity and society would look like—a severe problem in itself—it is more difficult to see just how and where such a political community would threaten the achievements of liberalism. Yet there is little reason to doubt that truly strong communities seek to replicate themselves. And an important way of doing this is by intolerance toward—and, in many cases, suppression of—ways of thought and action that are contrary to the dominant view. It is hard to imagine the kind of political and social transformation that would create dedicated citizens out of the ever more diverse and divided people who live in the contemporary liberal democracies. But that, after all, may be just to say that such a transformation could only come about by means that would violate the liberal rights of many groups.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a form of political and social life that would largely meet the goals of communitarians while preserving our liberal rights. That is, I hope to begin to meet the challenge so often laid at the feet of communitarians: to actually describe the kinds of political and social institutions and practices that would satisfy liberals while attaining at least some communitarian goals. Moreover, I hope to show that, not only is liberal democracy compatible with the local and decentralized communitarianism I put forward, but that liberal democracy and this form of communitarianism need each other. The achievements of liberalism, I suggest, are threatened by the over-weaning role of the liberal state and the deconstruction of liberal citizens. (I argue, by the way, that the latter process has been stimulated much more by liberal institutions than by the doctrines of all the relativists, historicists, post-modernists and multi-culturalists put together.) And I claim that the achievement of a local and decentralized communitarianism, one that is open to the greatest variety and diversity of religious, cultural, ethnic, and sexual commitments, is impossible without a strong, if chastened, liberal state protecting our rights.