Here’s how Michael Walzer (one of the key proponents of Communitarianism, the other important member of this school, who could well be considered its founder along with Charles Taylor, being Michael Sandel [of that famous Justice undergrad course at Harvard that later made it to YouTube]). What is interesting is that within a decade of John Rawls releasing his book “A Theory of Justice” in 1971, while being a professor of philosophy at Harvard, his colleagues at Harvard responded to his book that was characterized as THE BOOK (perhaps the most significant book in political philosophy after The Republic of Plato) that brought to life political philosophy, a field which was long thought to be dead as no new fresh winds ideas were blowing in it for a long, long time. These colleagues were specifically Robert Nozick with his book “Anarchy, State and Utopia” (released in 1974, after which Nozick says in one of his autobiographical work “The Examined Life” that he stopped getting dinner invitations from the Boston community because his political philosophy of Libertarianism was seen as lacking compassion and soul), Michael Sandel with his book “Liberalisma nd the Limits of Justice” in 1982 and Michael Walzer with his book Spheres of Justice in 1983 delineated the political philosophy of Communitarianism.
As Wikipedia notes “The close relation between the individual and the community was discussed on a theoretical level by Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, among other academic communitarians, in their criticisms of philosophical liberalism, especially the work of the American liberal theorist John Rawls and that of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. They argued that contemporary liberalism failed to account for the complex set of social relations that all individuals in the modern world are a part of. Liberalism is rooted in an untenable ontology that posits the existence of generic individuals and fails to account for social embeddedness. 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 constructed by culture and social relations, there is no coherent way of formulating individual rights or interests in abstraction from social contexts. Thus, according to these communitarians, there is no point in attempting to found a theory of justice on principles decided behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance, because individuals cannot exist in such an abstracted state, even in principle.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism)
But, getting back to the article under consideration, here’s how in the very beginning of the article Walzer characterizes Liberalism: “…here, contemporary Western societies (Amer- ican society especially) are taken to be the home of radically isolated individuals, rational egotists, and existential agents, men and women pro- tected and divided by their inalienable rights. Liberalism tells the truth about the asocial society that liberals create -not, in fact, ex nihilo as their theory suggests, but in a struggle against traditions and communities and authorities that are forgotten as soon as they are escaped, so that liberal practices seem to have no history. The struggle itself is ritually celebrated but rarely reflected on. The members of liberal society share no political or religious traditions; they can tell only one story about themselves and that is the story of ex nihilo creation, which begins in the state of nature or the original position. Each individual imagines himself absolutely free, unencumbered, and on his own – and enters society, accepting its obligations, only in order to minimize his risks. His goal is security, and security is, as Marx wrote, “the assurance of his egoism.” And as he imagines himself, so he really is,
“that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice…. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need, and private interests.“
He goes on to write, while invoking Marx and Alastiar MacIntyre as precursors of his own critique of liberalism, thus:
“But the only theory that is necessary to the communitarian critique of liberalism is liberalism itself. All that the critics have to do, so they say, is to take liberal theory seriously. The self-portrait of the individual constituted only by his willfulness, liberated from all connection, without common values, binding ties, customs, or traditions – sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans every- thing – need only be evoked in order to be devalued: It is already the concrete absence of value. What can the real life of such a person be like? Imagine him maximizing his utilities, and society is turned into a war of all against all, the familiar rat race, in which, as Hobbes wrote, there is “no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost.” Imagine him enjoying his rights, and society is reduced to the coexistence of isolated selves, for liberal rights, according to this first critique, have more to do with “exit” than with “voice.” They are concretely expressed in separation, divorce, withdrawal, solitude, privacy, and political apathy. And finally, the very fact that individual life can be described in these two philosophical languages, the language of utilities and the language of rights, is a further mark, says Maclntyre, of its incoherence: Men and women in liberal society no longer have access to a single moral culture within which they can learn how they ought to live.’ There is no consensus, no public meeting-of-minds, on the nature of the good life, hence the triumph of private caprice, revealed, for example, in Sartrean existentialism, the ideological reflection of everyday capriciousness.
“We liberals are free to choose, and we have a right to chose, but we have no criteria to govern our choices except our own wayward understanding of our wayward interests and desires. And so our choices lack the qualities of cohesion and consecutiveness. We can hardly remember what we did yester- day; we cannot with any assurance predict what we will do tomorrow. We cannot give a proper account of ourselves. We cannot sit together and tell comprehensible stories, and we recognize ourselves in the stories we read only when these are fragmented narratives, without plots, the literary equiv- alent of atonal music and nonrepresentational art. Liberal society, seen in the light of this first communitarian critique, is fragmentation in practice; and community is the exact opposite, the home of coherence, connection, and narrative capacity.”
If this much has piqued your interest, then click on the link below to the article and read it.
Source: The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism
Author(s): Michael Walzer
Reviewed work(s):Source: Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 6-23
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191477
Accessed: 24/08/2012 12:14
Know Thyself 