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Liberalism and the Value of Community1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andrew Mason
Andrew Mason*
Affiliation:
University of Hull, Hull, England, HU6 7RX
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Extract

Over the past decade or so the term ‘communitarianism’ has been applied to a wide range of positions with great variation between them. This is not in itself an objection to its continued use, for a concept may be coherent and illuminating even though it shelters considerable diversity. What is troubling about the body of literature now labelled as communitarian is that it frequently appeals to images of community without giving the notion the analytical attention it deserves and that we have come to expect in relation to other central political concepts such as ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’ What I propose to do in this paper is to focus on a particular understanding of community which I think has been neglected in recent discussions, largely because it has not been sufficiently distinguished from others, and then to raise a question in the light of it which has been at the forefront of the debate: viz., can liberalism in its currently dominant form truly respect the value and importance of community? Several writers have responded to the critiques of liberalism develoged in the work of those such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair Macintyre by arguing that the basic framework of liberal thought is fully compatible with a due appreciation of community. Joel Feinberg, for example, attempts to show that ‘one can preserve one’s allegiance to personal autonomy in the way that liberalism requires while fully acknowledging the central and indispensable importance of community in human lives.’ I shall register some doubts about whether liberalism can show proper respect for community when ‘community’ is understood in the way I describe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 215 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 This paper has gone through several versions and the writing of it has benefited from the comments that I have received from a number of people at various stages of its development. I would like to thank David Archard, Nick Bailey, G. A. Cohen, Roger Crisp, Andrew Moore, Noel O’Sullivan, Nick Wheeler, the referee, and an executive editor for their helpful criticisms. Participants in the Wolfson Philosophy Society at Oxford, the Philosophy Department Research Seminar at Hull, and the Political Theory Workshop at York also provided me with reasons to make a considerable number of revisions to it. Most of it was written during the tenure of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and I would like to thank the Academy for its support.

2 The very different views espoused by Alasdair Macintyre, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer are usually classified as communitarian.

3 This is not the only issue that liberals and communitarians have addressed. See Caney, S. ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism: A Misconceived Debate,’ Political Studies 40 (1992) 273-89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a useful summary and analysis of the different criticisms that communitarians have made of liberalism.

4 See Sandel, M. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982)Google Scholar.

5 See Macintyre, A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1981)Google Scholar; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth 1988), esp. Ch. 17.

6 See, e.g., Benn, S.I. A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 12; Buchanan, A.E. ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,’ Ethics 99 (1989) 852-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caney, ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism: A Misconceived Debate’; Galston, W. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991)Google Scholar, Ch. 3; Feinberg, J. The Moral Limits of the Criminal law, Vol. 4: Harmless Wrongdoing (New York: Oxford University Press 1988)Google Scholar, Ch. 29A; Kymlicka, W. Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar, esp. Ch. 4.

7 Feinberg, 81

8 For some more explanation of what it is for a concept to be a moral notion, see Kovesi, J. Moral Notions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1967)Google Scholar; cf. also Plant, R. Community and Ideology: An Essay in Applied Social Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1974)Google Scholar, Ch. 2.

9 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 205-7

10 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 175

11 Cf. Joseph Raz’ s discussion of the way in which comprehensive goals presuppose the existence of social forms: The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), Ch. 12, section 5.

12 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 205

13 Friedman, M. ‘Feminism and Modem Friendship: Dislocating the Community,’ Ethics 99 (1989), 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Cf. J. Baker,Arguingfor Equality (London: Verso 1987), Ch. 4.

15 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 180

16 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 181

17 Cf. Mendus, S. ‘Strangers and Brothers: Liberalism, Socialism, and the Concept of Autonomy,’ in Milligan, D.E. and Miller, W. Watts eds., Liberalism, Citizenship, and Autonomy (Aldershot: Avebury 1992), esp. 10-13Google Scholar.

18 Reconciling community membership with the exercise of personal autonomy has been an important aspiration of many socialists, especially those impressed by Marx’s critique of the romantic anti-capitalism which celebrates the rural communities that were tom apart by industrialization. See, e.g., Keat, Russell ‘Individualism and Community in Socialist Thought,’ in Mepham, J. and Ruben, D.-H. eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 4: Social and Political Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester 1981) 127-52Google Scholar.

19 See Phillips, A. ‘Fraternity,’ in Pimlott, B. ed., Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought (London: Heinemann 1984)Google Scholar.

20 See, e.g., Rorty, R. ‘Solidarity and Objectivity,’ in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 30Google Scholar.

21 See Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 9, esp. 198.

22 Some have thought that liberals must deny that a person’s identity is constituted by various communal attachments, on the grounds that this is incompatible with the fact that persons are (generally at least) capable of exercising autonomy. I consider this idea in my ‘Personal Autonomy and Identification with a Community,’ in Milligan and Watts Miller, eds., Liberalism, Citizenship, and Autonomy.

23 Cf. Bhikhu, Parekh ‘Britain and the Social Logic of Pluralism,’ in Parekh, B. ed., Britain: A Plural Society (London: Commission for Racial Equality 1990), 74-5Google Scholar. This paragraph owes much to conversations with him.

24 Of course whether some piece of behavior is appropriate or acceptable in some context, e.g., a man standing up for a woman on a crowded train, may be contested; even when it is contested, however, disagreement occurs against the background assumption that this conception of appropriateness is widely shared.

25 Sandel, 150-1. Charles Taylor seems to endorse a variant of the constitutive conception: see Taylor, C. Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 27,36Google Scholar.

26 Naomi Scheman makes the following points in more detail in ‘On Sympathy,’ The Monist 62 (1979) 322.

27 Benn,223

28 The view that community necessarily involves face to face relations is widespread. See Young, I. ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,’ in Nicholson, L. ed., Feminism/ Postmodernism (London: Routledge 1990), 312-13Google Scholar, for references to some others who hold this view. Because I do not suppose that community relations are necessarily of this kind, many of Young’s criticisms of community as an ideal do not apply to the model I have defended.

29 Benn, 230-3

30 Rawls endorses the idea that inequalities may be justified in accordance with the difference principle by incentive arguments of this kind: see Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 78Google Scholar. The idea that inequalities justified by incentives arguments are incompatible with community is argued at some length, and with more care, by G.A. Cohen in his Tanner Lectures, delivered at Stanford University in 1991.

31 Cf. Miller, D. ‘In What Sense Must Socialists be Communitarians?’ Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (1988), 58Google Scholar.

32 Cf. Rawls, section 29.

33 See, e.g., Buchanan, A.E. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (London: Methuen 1982)Google Scholar; Lukes, S. Marx and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985)Google Scholar.

34 Archard, D. ‘The Marxist Ethic of Self-Realization: Individuality and Community,’ in Evans, J .D.G. ed., Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 31Google Scholar

35 Cf. Young, 311.

36 For an interesting discussion of multi-culturalism and how it differs from assimilationism, see Parekh, ‘Britain and the Social Logic of Pluralism.’

37 Cf. Cohen, G.A. History, Labor, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 145-6Google Scholar. Some would argue that the very idea of a global community is unintelligible: see Miller, ‘In What Sense Must Socialists Be Communitarians?’ (67-8).

38 The claim that a person’s life goes better through experiencing concern for others would rest on the (in my view, plausible) idea that concern for others enriches a person’s life.

39 My account is agnostic on the issue of whether the moral value of a community is reducible to the prudential value it has for its individual members. Hence it is not committed to what Amartya Sen calls ‘welfarism,’ although it is compatible with it: see Sen, A. ‘Utilitarianism and Welfarism,’ Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 I assume that something may be an ingredient of the good life either because it is instrumentally valuable or because it is intrinsically valuable (or both).

41 Feinberg, 81

42 Buchanan ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,’ 854

43 Kymlicka, 13

44 See, e.g., Grand, J. Le and Estrin, S. eds., Market Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar; Miller, D. Market, State, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar; and, indeed, Ch. 4 of Buchanan’s own book Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985).

45 Cf. Kymlicka, 91. Kymlicka goes on to say that he thinks that the abstract characterization of liberalism he gives (see above) commits liberals to a politics of neutral concern, which makes his account of liberalism specific enough for me to have no quarrel with it on this score (see ibid., p. 97).

46 Feinberg, 81-2

47 See, e.g., Jaggar, A. Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton: Harvester 1983Google Scholar), Ch. 3 for such an attribution.

48 Wittgenstein’s remarks on family resemblance are clearly relevant here: see Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1953), sections 66-7.

49 I allow the possibility that institutions (such as the capitalist market) favored by liberals who profess to value the exercise of autonomy are in fact incapable of providing the conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise their autonomy properly and adequately. Note also that the core liberal commitment identified does not entail the view that individuals are essentially pre-social or rationally self-interested.

50 See Gray, J. Mill On Liberty: A Defense (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983)Google Scholar.

51 See, e.g., Dworkin, R. ‘Liberalism’ reprinted in his A Matter of Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985) 181-204Google Scholar.

52 See Nozick, R. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell 1974)Google Scholar, Ch. 3, esp. 48-9.

53 See Raz, 419.

54 Buchanan argues that in Feinberg’s view once an individual’s behavior meets the standard of ‘substantial voluntariness,’ the value of autonomy should always be given priority (Buchanan,’ Assessing the Communitarian Critique,’ 880). Congruent with this interpretation, Feinberg says it is his tentative thesis that in cases of irreconcilable conflict between community and autonomy, autonomy should be given priority (Feinberg, 82).

55 See Dworkin.

56 See Nozick, Ch. 3.

57 Note that liberals might provide us with a relatively full theory of prudential value, i.e., a detailed account of what kind of things make a person’s life go better, without making claims about what are essential ingredients of the good life for everyone.

58 There are good reasons for resisting this extension: friendship relates one person to another as a particular, concrete individual, whereas in communities (on my understanding) persons relate to one another as members of the same group. For an elaboration of this point in relation to friendship, see Gilbert, P. Human Relationships: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell 1991), 103-4Google Scholar.

59 Kymlicka, esp. Ch. 8

60 But not on all conceptions. Gerald Dworkin, for example, argues for a purely formal conception of autonomy, according to which a person could be autonomous even if she unreflectively obeys some authority, provided that she came to lead this way of life in the right way: see Dworkin, G. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 2. I distinguish a number of different conceptions of autonomy in my ‘Autonomy, Liberalism, and State Neutrality,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 40 (1990), section I.

61 Here I assume that it is the autonomous life which is of primary importance in this context. Many writers regard the notion of an autonomous choice as more basic than that of an autonomous life. There need be no conflict here, however, since an autonomous life can be regarded as one which is, in its broad outlines, chosen autonomously, even though not every action within it need be the result of an autonomous choice.

62 Cf. Benn’s distinction between reasons of respect and reasons of concern in A Theory of Freedom, Ch. 1.

63 Whether radical individualism really is incompatible with this core liberal commitment depends upon whether the notion of an autonomous life is sufficiently general that it involves no specific manner of living. Some argue in favor of a purely formal notion of autonomy (see note 60 above); radical individualism interpreted in terms of such a notion might not be in tension with a suspicion of claims which supposedly identify some specific good as an essential ingredient of the good life for everyone.

64 Raz,391

65 Raz,393

66 John Gray claims that J.S. Mill was what I have called a radical individualist— he says that for Mill ‘choice-making is a necessary ingredient of the good life for any man’ (Gray, 81)— and suggests that Mill might have held this position because he believed that many goods are such only if they are chosen.

67 Cf. Buchanan, ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique,’ 878-82. (Buchanan arrives at conclusions related to mine via a different route.)