Communitarianism is a movement that seeks to balance rights and responsibilities and to nourish the moral ties of family, neighborhood, workplace, and citizenship as a basis for innovative public policy. Ever since President-elect Bill Clinton declared his candidacy for the Presidency 15 months ago, political journalists have noted important “communitarian” strands in his public utterances.
He proclaimed a “New Covenant” designed to redefine the duties of citizens and of their government. As the thematic framework for his domestic policy, he chose the triad “opportunity, responsibility, community.” He also identified “reciprocal obligation” as the moral basis of progressive social action and insisted that divisions among groups must be put aside because we share a common fate and will “rise -- or fall -- together.” All these phrases and concepts have been important in the development of communitarian theory and policy recommendations.
Further, Mr. Clinton’s running mate, Vice-President-elect Al Gore, attended the first “communitarian teach-in” held on Capitol Hill in November 1991, and his post-election victory speech was studded with communitarian themes, such as the links between citizens’ rights and responsibilities.
Communitarianism seems to have achieved unexpected political relevance. This has occurred, in part, because it undergirds a “third” way of conceiving government and policy, beyond New Deal liberalism and Reagan-Bush conservatism. Of equal importance has been a decade-old confluence of multidisciplinary scholarly discussion and practical political experiences in which citizens have demonstrated the power of joint action. Within academe, developments in sociology, law, and political science have been of particular importance in the evolution of communitarian thinking.
Sociologists have long insisted on the importance of affective ties -- families, neighborhoods, local communities -- and of social norms. In recent years, Amitai Etzioni’s The Moral Dimension and Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth have offered constructive alternatives to the emphasis on individualism and self interest that guides so much of contempo rary social analysis. Both have argued that it is impossible to carry out empirical in quiry without including the human capacity for internalizing and acting on moral principles.
Among legal scholars, two lines of development are particularly noteworthy. Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk points to the destructive consequences of translating every political dispute into the language of untrammeled individual entitlement. Scholars such as Harvard University’s Frank Michelman and the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein have worked to develop a new legal philosophy based on the themes of deliberation, participation, and the public interest -- and to apply this new thinking to areas such as administrative law and regulation of news media.
My own discipline of political science presents a special case. In the early 1980’s, scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel criticized liberal political theory in terms that were labeled “communitarian” because of their emphasis on the need for alternatives to individualism (Kantian as well as economic). This gave rise to the inference that communitarians were, by definition, anti-liberal, and sparked the great “liberal-communitarian” debate. By the end of the decade, however, it had become clear that this way of posing the question was misconceived. Mr. Taylor noted that the two sides were arguing at “cross-purposes” and that one could easily accept communitarian theses such as the social embeddedness -- even social constitution -- of individual identity, while holding fast to the liberal insistence on guaranteeing personal freedom against collective oppression.
Meanwhile, other theorists in political-science departments were working out new possibilities for more-participatory, more-cooperative, and less-competitive democratic governance -- labeled “strong” (Benjamin Barber at Rutgers University), “unitary” (Jane Mansbridge at Northwestern University), “deliberative” (James Fishkin at the University of Texas at Austin and Amy Gutmann at Princeton University). This work revised the previously domi nant understanding of democratic politics as necessarily driven by clashes among self-seeking interest groups.
On the practical side, events at home and abroad served to illustrate the validity of some communitar ian principles. The civil-rights and environmental movements demonstrated the power of citizens working together on the basis of shared beliefs to offer moral arguments that transformed our politics.
Movements such as “People Power” in the Philippines, Poland’s Solidarity movement, Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, and the democratic dissent in the Soviet Union inspired by Andrei Sakharov drove home the point that a community’s moral voice could, in the end, prove stronger than the forces of routinized oppression.
The transmission of communitarian ideas to U.S. politics occurred in part through osmosis, but also as the result of purposeful action. Four years ago, Mr. Etzioni took the lead in organizing informal discussion groups that led to the founding of the quarterly communitarian journal, The Responsive Community, now in its third year of publication. A year-long dialogue among interested scholars also led to the drafting of a Communitarian Platform, signed by a long list of academics and public figures spanning the political spectrum. Last year’s teach-in attracted elected public officials from both parties.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization formed to seek alternatives to Reaganism and New Deal/Great Society liberalism in the wake of Walter F. Mondale’s unsuccessful Presidential campaign, and its research affiliate, the Progressive Policy Institute, entered into a sustained dialogue with several scholars (myself included). Mr. Clinton came into contact with these ideas during his chairmanship of the DLC, and the organization’s agenda of party renewal had a significant impact on the themes and policies advanced during his campaign. It is, I think, fair to say that Mr. Clinton’s repeated claim to be a “different kind of Democrat” in part reflected that agenda -- in particular, the idea that individual rights must be joined with personal responsibility and that every advantage gained from the community generates a corresponding obligation to the community.
This translated, at the level of policy, into several examples of what may be regarded as communitarianism in action. They included Mr. Clinton’s advocacy of voluntary national service and his proposal for an end to the welfare system as we now know it, in favor of a package of services including job training, and health and child care, if needed, to supplement private-sector employment. They also included his call for reforms of the political system to diminish the power of special-interest groups, and his insistence that the most fortunate members of our society have a particular obligation to participate in the task of national renewal.
I believe that many ways exist in which interested scholars can contribute to the further development of this agenda. On the theoretical level, much remains to be done. Principles of personal responsibility must be fleshed out in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine, the bedrock rights of individuals. The idea of community must be conceptualized so that it recognizes and draws strength from diversity without being overwhelmed by people’s differences. A more precise understanding of the general welfare or common good must take group interests and identities into account while standing apart as more than their aggregate. A theory of public persuasion as an alternative to both coercion and indifference must be worked out.
On the policy level, new approaches are needed that emphasize participation in the larger community without calling for sacrifices so substantial that citizens will reject them. Finding ways to reduce inequalities between wealthier and poorer local school districts is an example of the kind of problems that can be addressed from this perspective. The discussion of values in public policy also will have to be carefully distinguished from the kind of intolerance that the American people have clearly and properly rejected. Family policy (directed toward working parents, teen-age parents, single mothers, and others) is a key example of this challenge, addressed in the Communitarian Network’s just-issued position paper on the family. Historically oppressed groups will need meaningful reassurance that “community” is a formula for inclusion, not code for paternalism.
All in all, I believe that communitarianism represents the most promising basis so far for muting the left/right divisions that have shaped (and stalled) so much public-policy debate over the past generation. It offers the most hope for building on widely shared moral sentiments -- concerning family, neighborhood, work, and citizen responsibility -- not to justify the status quo, but rather to mobilize a broad coalition in the cause of long-overdue reform of our society as well as of our government. It is an intensely practical movement, but one in which academics from many disciplines can play vital roles.
William A. Galston is professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland at College Park, senior research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, co-editor of The Responsive Community, and author, most recently, of Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge University Press, 1992). This article represents the author’s personal views and not those of the President-elect’s transition team, which he serves as a policy adviser.