Communitarianism, social and political philosophy that emphasizes the importance

of community in the functioning of political life, in the analysis and evaluation of political
institutions, and in understanding human identity and well-being. It arose in the 1980s as
a critique of two prominent philosophical schools: contemporary liberalism, which seeks to
protect and enhancepersonal autonomy and individual rights in part through the activity of
government, and libertarianism, a form of liberalism (sometimes called “classical liberalism”)
that aims to protect individual rights—especially the rights to liberty and property—through strict
limits on governmental power.

There are strong communitarian elements in many modern and historical political and religious
belief systems—e.g., in the Hebrew Bible(Old Testament) and the Christian New
Testament (Acts 4:32: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul,
and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held
in common”); in the early Islamic concept of shūrā(“consultation”); in Confucianism; in Roman
Catholic social thought (the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum[1891]); in
moderate conservatism (“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong
to in society, is the first principle…of public affections”—Edmund Burke); and in social
democracy, especially Fabianism. Communitarian ideas have also played a significant role in
public life through their incorporation into the electoral platforms and policies of Western
political leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama.

Varieties Of Communitarianism
The term communitarian was coined in 1841 by John Goodwyn Barmby, a leader of the
British Chartistmovement, who used it to refer to utopian socialists and others who
experimented with unusual communal lifestyles. It was rarely used in the generations that
followed.

It was not until the 1980s that the term gained currency through its association with the work of
a small group of mostly American political philosophers who argued for the importance of
the common good in opposition to contemporary liberals and libertarians, who emphasized the
good for individuals, particularly including personal autonomy and individual rights. The
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and the American political theorist Michael Sandel were
among the most prominent scholars of this brand of communitarianism. Other political
theorists and philosophers who were often cited as communitarians in this sense, or whose
work exhibited elements of such communitarian thinking, included Shlomo Avineri, Seyla
Benhabib, Avner de-Shalit, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, William A. Galston, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Philip Selznick, and Michael Walzer.

During the same period, students of East Asian politics and society used communitarianism to
describe the social thinking within authoritariansocieties such as China, Singapore, and
Malaysia, which extolled social obligations and the importance of the common good and
accorded much less weight to autonomy and rights. Indeed, these societies viewed individuals
as more or less interchangeable cells who find meaning in their contribution to the social whole
rather than as free agents. Scholars of this kind of communitarianism included the American
political theorist Russell A. Fox and the Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan.

In 1990 Etzioni and Galston founded a third school, known as “responsive” communitarianism.
Its members formulated a platform based on their shared political principles, and the ideas in it
were eventually elaborated in academic and popular books and periodicals, gaining thereby a
measure of political currency, mainly in the West. The main thesis of responsive
communitarianism is that people face two major sources of normativity, that of the common
good and that of autonomy and rights, neither of which in principle should take precedence over
the other.

The Common Good Versus Individual Rights

Whereas the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment can be viewed as a reaction to centuries
of authoritarianism, oppressive government, overbearing communities, and rigid dogma,
modern communitarianism can be considered a reaction to excessive individualism, understood
by communitarians as an undue emphasis on individual rights, leading people to become selfish
or egocentric. Excessive individualismwas discussed in an oft-cited communitarian work, Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), by the American
sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah, who observed that by the early 1980s most Americans had
become self-centred. Increasing prosperity from the 1950s, among other factors, had
contributed to a decline in respect for traditional authority and institutions, such as marriage,
and fostered a kind of materialistic hedonism, according to many communitarians.
Earlier sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim had discussed such
antisocial tendencies in the context of modernization, which they viewed as a historical
transition from oppressive but nurturing communities (Gemeinschaft) to liberating but
impersonal societies (Gesellschaft). They warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness)
and alienation in modern societies composed of atomized individuals who had gained their
liberty but lost their social moorings. Essentially the theses of Tönnies and Durkheim were
supported with contemporary social-scientific data in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival
of American Community (2000), by the American political scientist Robert Putnam.

The close relation between the individual and the community was discussed on a theoretical
level by Sandel and Taylor, among other academic communitarians, in their criticisms of
philosophical liberalism, including especially the work of the American liberal theorist John
Rawlsand that of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. They argued that
contemporary liberalism and libertarianism presuppose an incoherent notion of the individual as
existing outside and apart from society rather than embedded within it. To the contrary, they
argued, there are no generic individuals but rather only Germans or Russians, Berliners or
Muscovites, or members of some other particularistic community. Because individual identity is
partly constituted (or “constructed”) by culture and social relations, there is no coherent way of
formulating individual rights or interests in abstraction from social contexts. In particular,
according to these communitarians, there is no point in attempting to found a theory
of justice on principles that individuals would choose in a hypothetical state of ignorance of
their social, economic, and historical circumstances (from behind a Rawlsian “veil of
ignorance”), because such individuals cannot exist, even in principle.

Liberal scholars argued that this line of criticism is overstated or misconceived. Despite its
emphasis on autonomy and rights, they contended, contemporary liberalism is not incompatible
with the notion of a socially embedded self. Indeed, Rawls himself, in his foundational work A
Theory of Justice (1971), recognized the importance of what he called “social unions” and
asserted that “only in a social union is the individual complete.” Thus, according to liberals, the
communitarian critique does not rebut the core of liberal theory but merely serves as a
corrective to “stronger” liberal doctrines such as libertarianism, which does embrace an
atomized notion of individual identity (see below A synthesis: Rights and responsibilities).

Academic communitarians also drew upon Aristotle and the German idealist philosopher Georg

Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel to argue that some conception of the good must be formulated on the
social level and that the community cannot be a normative-neutral realm. Unless there is a
social formulation of the good, there can be no normative foundation upon which to draw to
settle conflicts of value between different individuals and groups. Such an overriding good (e.g.,
the national well-being) enables persons with different moral outlooks or ideological
backgrounds to find principled (rather than merely prudential) common ground.

Liberals and libertarians responded by characterizing the communitarian position as akin to

East Asian authoritarian communitarianism. They also argued that social formulations of the
good—and the obligations they generate, which individuals must then discharge—can
sometimes be oppressive. Some libertarians cited taxes and mandatory vaccinations as
examples of such obligations.

A Synthesis: Rights And Responsibilities

Responsive communitarianism may be considered a synthesis of both liberal and academic-
communitarian concerns. Sandel and Taylor in effect held that many forms of philosophical
liberalism, especially libertarianism, overemphasize autonomy and rights at the expense of the
common good. However, in doing so, they were less than clear about the standing of individual
rights, including human rights. Indeed, Alasdair MacIntyre asserted that rights were merely
figments of the imagination, like unicorns. Responsive communitarians attempted to bridge this
divide. In their platform and in their academic works, they posited that all societies must heed
the moral claims of two core values, the common good and autonomy and rights. They also
held that, because actual societies tend to tilt toward one core value or the other, they need to
be pulled back toward the centre. Thus Japan, in their view, was strongly dedicated to the
common good but insufficiently committed to the rights of women, ethnic minorities, and the
disabled, while the United States during the presidential administration of Ronald
Reagan (1981–89) and the United Kingdom during the prime ministership of Margaret
Thatcher(1979–90) attached undue importance to individual rights. The early prime
ministership of Tony Blairdemonstrated a concern for the common good through its policies
of devolution and the “stakeholder society” (the idea that businesses should be responsive to
workers, consumers, and other groups whose interests they affect), as did the early
administration of George W. Bushthrough its dedication to “compassionate conservatism.”
After the 2001 September 11 attacks, however, the common good in the United States was
increasingly identified with national security, and some individual rights (e.g., the right to habeas
corpus) were curtailed.

In the same vein, responsive communitarians also warned against excessively expansive
definitions of rights and championed modern communities in which people find both a rich web
of social relations and considerable degrees of freedom. In the early 21st century, responsive
communitarians believed that the Scandinavian countries had achieved the best balance,
though even there some individual rights were being curtailed for security reasons and in
response to anti-immigrant sentiment.

Policy Implications
Responsive communitarianism developed criteria for the formulation of policies that would
enable societies to cope with the potential conflicts between the common good and individual
rights, including in areas such as public health versus individual privacy and national security
versus individual liberty. These criteria, which must be applied jointly, included the following:

1. No change is justified in governing public policies and norms unless society encounters
serious challenges, because these kinds of changes exact considerable societal costs. (The
September 11 attacks constituted such a challenge.)

2. Limitations on rights can be considered only if there are significant gains to the common
good—what the U.S. courts refer to as a “compelling interest”—and if the intrusion is as limited
as possible.

3. Adverse side effects that result from policy changes must be treated, above all, by
introducing stronger mechanisms of accountability and oversight.

An example of the application of these criteria can be seen in the debate in the United States
concerning whether to improve public health by testing newborn babies for HIV. According to
communitarians, such tests would be justified if: (1) they saved lives (an infant infected with
HIV has a strong chance of not developing AIDS if it is not breastfed and is treated with the
drug AZT), (2) the intrusion were limited to testing blood that would be collected anyway, and (3)
the adverse side effects could be limited by regulations that ban the disclosure of test results to
nonmedical personnel.

Socially Constructed Preferences

The communitarian approach challenges the liberal view—reflected in many social sciences,
especially neoclassical economics and the study of law—that the political and economic
preferences of individuals should be respected and that their aggregation should guide the
governance of the polity (through voting) and the economy (through the influence of consumer
spending on the production and distribution of consumer goods). It is fully legitimate, for
example, for public authorities to urge people to resist the appeals of political extremists or to
encourage them to save more of their money. Communitarianism also challenges the libertarian
position that it is paternalistic to interfere with individual choices based on personal preferences.
In keeping with their view concerning the social constitution of individual identity,
communitarians argue that personal preferences are to a significant extent not autonomous but
rather a reflection of the larger culture, aspects of which can be heavily influenced by
nonrational forces such as commercial advertising. Hence, public efforts to influence such
preferences in beneficial ways, say in campaigns against smokingand obesity, do not
undermine personal autonomy and are not a violation of human dignity.

The Third Sector

Communitarianism adds a major element to a centuries-old debate in the West over the proper
roles of government on the one hand and the market on the other. Communitarians argue that
attention also must be paid to the role of civil society, including families, local and
nonresidential communities, voluntary associations, schools, places of worship, foundations,
and nonprofit corporations. It stresses that much of the behaviour that must be regulated in any
society, as well as the factors that encourage people to discharge their social responsibilities
(e.g., caring for children), are influenced by this third sector. Communitarians point to the
importance of social norms and informal social controls in fostering pro-social conduct and in
providing the moral foundations (e.g., trust) required for the successful operation of both
governments and markets. The American political journalist Jonathan Rauch introduced the
term “soft communitarianism” to refer to communitarianism that focuses on the role of civil
society, in contrast to “hard,” East Asian communitarianism, which views the state as the
primary social agent

Cultural RelativismAnd The Global Community

Because communitarians favour communal formulations of the good, which are necessarily
particular to each community, they are vulnerableto the charge of ethical relativism, or to the
claim that there is no absolute good but only different goods for different communities, cultures,
or societies. Walzer adopted a clearly relativistic position in his book Spheres of Justice (1983),
in which he asserted that the caste system is “good” by the standards of traditional Indian
society. Critics argued, however, that his position was untenable. One simply needs to consider
a community that champions honour killings, lynchings, or book burnings to realize that
communities should not be the ultimate arbiters of that which is good. While acknowledging
that different communities may have different ultimate values, Taylor argued—as did
Rawls—that an “overlapping consensus” on specific norms and policies is still possible, though
different communities may have different reasons for believing that a given norm or policy is
right. In the United States, for example, abortion-rights and antiabortion activists have worked
together to make adoption easier and to improve the quality of day-care centres. According to a
much more-contested argument, advanced by the American scholar of religion Don Browning,
there are some substantive universal values, such as human rights and the integrity of the
global climate, that can provide a foundation for particularistic, communal ones.

Closely related to the question of the scope of morality is the question of the scope of
community itself. Historically, communities have been local. However, as the reach of economic
and technological forces extended, more-expansive communities became necessary in order to
provide effective normative and political guidance to and control of these forces—hence the rise
of national communities in Europe in the 17th century. Since the late 20th century there has
been a growing recognition that the scope of even these communities is too limited, as many
challenges that people now face, such as the threat of nuclear war and the reality of global
environmental degradation, cannot be handled on a national basis. This has led to the quest for
more-encompassing communities. The most advanced experiment in building a supranational
community is the European Union (EU). However, so far the EU has not developed the kind of
social integration and shared values that a strong community requires.

A similar issue arises with regard to the global community, currently more an ideal than a reality.
Could such a community be constructed top-down, say, through some kind of enhanced United
Nations (UN)? Or will it arise from the bottom up, through societal processes and institutions
such as international nongovernmental organizations(NGOs), the transnational sharing of
norms (e.g., for protecting the environment), a global second language (about one quarter of the
world’s population has at least a functional command of English), and other informal social
networks? The question remains whether, ultimately, world governance can thrive without a
worldwide community.