Nisbet and Habermas

Whereas Nisbet described a modern state’s “accumulation of effective functions” as diverting “allegiance” and “authority” from “other spheres of life,” Habermas saw “instrumental reason” of public “systems” that are “colonizing” our “lifeworld.”https://t.co/rrlkg5jq5f

— Intercollegiate Studies Institute (@ISI) October 21, 2020

Birzer on Nisbet

Not a fan of Birzer, but this will probably worth listening to.

“We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen...The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.” My interview with @bradleybirzer on Robert Nisbet, Burke, #decentralization, #localism. https://t.co/Ax4G8APmmP

— M Matheson Miller (@mmathesonmiller) October 8, 2020

The Moral Imagination

Ten Conditions of Revolution?

Robert Nisbet’s Ten Conditions of Revolution (essay by Bradley J. Birzer) https://t.co/hMW4lfpa8x

— ImaginativeConservat (@imaginativecons) September 18, 2020

Imaginative Conservative

Community and Labor Unions?

In returning to Nisbet’s understanding of unions, we uncover a new story to tell about labor’s purpose and its decline. What we find is not only a loss of bargaining power, but the loss of solidarity and self-government in the workplace and labor market. https://t.co/rA5I1hxXKO

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) September 8, 2020

Nock and Nisbet on Society and State

Nock and Nisbet on Society and State (essay by Bradley J. Birzer) https://t.co/WWUUYElD6X

— ImaginativeConservat (@imaginativecons) September 5, 2020

Imaginative Conservative Related:

You might be interested in this Russell Kirk review essay of Quest for Community. The recent Pepperdine online event reminded me of Nisbet so I just posted this as the Classic Kirk essay of the month: https://t.co/YWT0iOR8I1

— Cecilia Kirk Nelson (@CeciliaKNelson) September 4, 2020

Robert Nisbet's Conservatism

Robert Nisbet’s 11 Tenets of Conservatism (essay by Bradley J. Birzer) https://t.co/n9aABZ4Ajh

— Winston Elliott III (@WinstonElliott3) August 28, 2020

Robert Nisbet’s 11 Tenets of Conservatism (essay by Bradley J. Birzer) https://t.co/htWGllMvMc

— ImaginativeConservat (@imaginativecons) August 28, 2020

Imaginative Conservative

Social Atomization

"What is crucial in the formation of the masses is the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain their normal sense of membership in society."

- Robert Nisbethttps://t.co/3ZZOynRF0L

— Intercollegiate Studies Institute (@ISI) June 12, 2020

Rod Dreher Should Read Sam Francis

But he probably won't. At least he's reading John Cuddeback. He wrote this last Monday: Politics, Family, & the Benedict Option

Preserving Liberty

Inescapable liberalism? Rescuing liberty from individualism and the State by Patrick Deneen

Defenders of a true human liberty need at once to "get bigger" and "get smaller." Rather than embrace the false universalism of "globalism," a true universality - under God - shows us the infinite narrowness of "globalization" and points us to the true nature of transcendence. And the only appropriate way to live in and through this transcendent is in the loci of the particular, those places which do not aspire to dim the light of the eternal City.

We need rather to attend to our States and localities, our communities and neighbourhoods, our families and our Church, making them viable alternatives and counterpoints to the monopolization of individual and State in our time, and thus to relearn the ancient virtue of self-government, and true liberty itself.

We have to attend to our States because of how sovereignty is currently understood and claimed, but even some of them are too big.

Supporting War as an Answer to Man's Search for Meaning

The War on Terror and the Quest for Community by Greg Weiner

“It is hard,” Nisbet writes in Quest for Community, “not to conclude that modern populations depend increasingly on the symbolism of war for relief from civil conflicts and frustrations. … The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the twentieth century.” Moral war, he argues, is uniquely apt to become total war. He continues: 

One of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade. … The clear tendency of modern wars is to become ever more closely identified with broad, popular, moral aspirations: freedom, self-determination of peoples, democracy, rights, and justice. Because war, in the twentieth century, has become rooted to such an extent in the aspirations of peoples and in broad moral convictions, its intensity and range have vastly increased. … The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community. 

Yet this “community,” Nisbet warns, is hollow. The sense of participation it generates is ephemeral compared to the richer and more rooted relationships of subsidiarity. Nisbet is not, to be sure, hostile to affiliation with a cause larger than oneself. His point is that contemporary man gravitates toward vast, diffuse and impersonal causes that open vacuums filled by power rather than traditional forms of authority and meaning.

This moral element of war drives the false sense of meaning and participation in a cause in which, let us be serious, the vast majority of people waving flags and lionizing troops are not participating at all. Hence the decision to invade Iraq, whose most ardent backers never contended that Hussein threatened American “freedom,” became a moral crusade to free the Iraqi people from their chains and, in our own rhetoric, to protect ourselves from the apparent danger of tyranny imposed by—whom?—the onward-marching troops of the Iraqi Republican Guard? The result is a sense of community and common endeavor that is, on Nisbet’s reading, precisely and only that: a sense.

Two on American Political Origins

Was There an American Revolution? By ROBERT NISBET

The Declaration as the Constitution by Kevin Gutzman

Items of Interest, 31 July 2012

Begun on July 16.

Culture’s Dead, We’ve Betrayed It—Can We Save It? by Andrew Haines

While a wholesale, artificial approach won’t get us to this spot, there are nevertheless things we can do to help this culture along. Foremost among them is to foster real community—meetings of people in the flesh. These should center not simply around discussing ideals, nor the totally banal; they should incorporate objective human goods like food and music, and they should draw from the cultural tradition whence notions of “aesthetic” and “goodness” arose. They should be pockets of humanism, but with a new and very self-aware intentionality.

 

I had a brief exchange with a Blackfriar about evangelization after I claimed that the "old ways were best, too bad they're not being used now." What old ways?  "A strong local Christian community with one-on-one outreach - the "early Church" model, with an emphasis on the word community since the word doesn't really apply to most parishes. I don't see the ideal being obsered in the big metropolitan areas in the U.S., at least. Granted, there are many obstacles to that ideal being realized, but it would be good for theses to be recognized and addressed, so that people are no longer comfortable with the status quo." He had initially posted the above Apple video as a possible model for new evangelization efforts. wage slavery makes great demands of our time and two income - less resources, etc.

Part of the problem with parishes as community is that we have much more mobility so that people don't just socialize within their villages or local communities as we once did. It is still evident and very important in more agrarian societies, but not in the urbanised modern world. As such, we have to use new ways to build community, to give a sense of belonging. The Apple video above shows that a community can be formed out of a desire for excellence. In a Christian context, this would mean a love of virtue, and indeed, a love of God who is the Most Excellent. Evangelization, then, would mean letting that excellence be shared and seen and enjoyed by others – acts of charity and of preaching.

Fellowship was to be sought in the pursuit of excellence - what Apple promotes in its company ethos should be adopted by Christians, who would form associations not on the basis of local proximity, but on a common task or work. I responded:

Mobility (and mass urbanization) is possible only because of cheap energy. I would prefer the Church be ahead of the curve than behind it when it comes to adjusting to the coming loss of cheap energy, but it may not happen. Community/communion/friendship should be based on excellence but it also requires that one live with the other --"quality time" doesn't make up for lack of time, just as in parenting. 

 He ended with the implicit claim that this was not being realistic: " So, are we going to preach to the world that exists, or do we need to create that ideal world before we preach? I go for the former..."

Catholic ecclesial movements of the 20th century seem to be a response vocational model - ecclesial movements I have mentioned before that Fr. Louis Bouyer asks this question in his The Church of God, and I think his answer, that the local geographic parish maintains its importance in the life of the Church despite changing times, is right. Those who have an apostolate to preach or teach or administer the sacraments may have to meet the people where they are; but what of the laity? What are they supposed to do? The thing is that in our false meritocracy, very few people stay loyal to the company. There is a lot of changing of jobs, and very few stable friendships that survive the transition to a new workplace. (Especially if one moves to a new city or state!) More often than not, the people at work keep you company while at work or lunch, but you see very little of them when you are off work. You may get to be close with some, but if you change companies, they will probably drop out of your life, sooner or later. The human heart seeks stability and permanence, but we ignore this because we have to provide for ourselves or our families, or we have to follow career opportunities.

The recent NYT article, Friends of a Certain Age, casts light on the predicament of many young adults.

The Evolution of English
Robert Nisbet, Conservatives and Libertarians, Uneasy Cousins
Returning to the Path of Wisdom: Plato, Tolkien, and Technê by Jerry Salyer
Kevin Carson, The Phony “War on Cops” and the Real War on Us 
Can Organic Farming Feed the World? 
Resilience through simplification: revisiting Tainter's theory of collapse (part 1) by Samuel Alexander - complete 
Resilience through simplification: revisiting Tainter's theory of collapse (part 2)
More from the Simplicity Institute 

Korean Consumerism:  Photos Highlight Korea’s Plastic Surgery Obsession

Music: Froberger Suites And Toccatas By WENDY GILLESPIE

Catholic: Community and Christian Life by Br. Vincent Ferrer Bagan, O.P.
Eastern Christian "Introduction to the Liturgy" (Part 2)
Gift and Greed: Why Benedict Is Right and Mandeville Was Wrong by John C. Médaille

Misc: Triple Aught Design shop visit :: San Francisco, CA 

McAllister on Robert Nisbet and Communitarianism

Ted McAllister, Toward a New Form of Laissez-Faire

At the heart of Dionne’s framing of American conservatism is a deep confusion about the meaning of community and communitarianism. Indeed, the distance between Nisbet’s and Dionne’s species of communitarianism is greater than that separating Dionne and his contemporary Republican targets—the label supplies a convenient cover to hide vast differences in meaning. Left communitarians envision communities organized by government and having as their moral justification the public crusade against private vices. At the heart of this vision of community is the protection of the individual from social forms of authority—family, church, or any number of local and face-to-face social networks—in order for individuals to stand as equal clients before the state. This liberated individual is educated by the state and toward the ideals of the state; is provided extensive protections through laws and bureaucratic regulations against any and all non-governmental institutions; and is supplied with economic and health protections by the state. The state as community becomes an expression of the will of the “people” and the individuals of this political community are supplied with the meaning of this public will through the therapeutic and coercive means of the state

If contemporary Progressives dismiss this characterization of their vision of community, it is worth noting how frequently they rhetorically conflate “society” and government and how much they think of government institutions as serving public purposes despite having no meaningful public (non-administrative) check on their function (public schools are the best example of this as government schools are responsible to state-level administrators rather than local citizens—the very people they presumably serve). Consider how often these Progressives speak of government (public) in terms of community values that private institutions threaten. For all Progressives, the attack on “individualism” is really an attack on economic systems that are insufficiently regulated or controlled on the belief that private individuals and institutions ought to be checked by public power in the service of the public good. For this species of communitarian, community really means public provision and public virtues should always be understood in contrast to private vices

Against this conception of community Robert Nisbet took his stand. Rather than the state being the remedy for individualism, Nisbet understood the state to be a major cause for that atomization of modern life. While many other forces have eroded the complex network of social institutions to which people had loyalty and in which they could develop their distinctiveness, since World War I the destruction of mediating institutions has been overwhelmingly a project of the state. The modern presumption of the ethical superiority of the state over society (as well as over more localized forms of government) has spurred a relentlessly more bureaucratic, more centralized, and a more legal-centric political community. Such a conception of community can only develop when the mediating institutions have been pulverized, leaving individuals separate and apart, equal and vulnerable. Political community is not the solution to individualism but the perverse expression of deracinated citizens

However much the rise of the political community in the West was the product of a monistic political vision that wished to transform all human relationships into equal, interchangeable, and legal or contractual relationships and sought to impose a socially just and equal distribution of goods and power on the public, the project of a political community must rest on public resources to satisfy the demands of the citizens. At some point in the development of a political community it must cease being essentially political and become administrative. An administrative state retains legitimacy only insofar as it has the economic resources to satisfy its citizens. Once the state has reached this stage it cannot easily tap into the patriotic sentiments of the people since they have largely separated from the institutions that supply them with the values, purposes, and higher goals that loyalty and patriotism produce. When disconnected from relationships that require small and regular duties and when people become undifferentiated individuals who stand equally before the administrative state, citizens turn into clients.

Douthat on Nisbet

The Quest for Community in the Age of Obama: Nisbet’s Prescience by Ross Douthat

What was Nisbet’s insight? Simply put, that what seems like the great tension of modernity—the concurrent rise of individualism and collectivism, and the struggle between the two for mastery—is really no tension at all. It seemed contradictory that the heroic age of nineteenth-century laissez faire, in which free men, free minds, and free markets were supposedly liberated from the chains imposed by throne and altar, had given way so easily to the tyrannies of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But it was only a contradiction, Nisbet argued, if you ignored the human impulse toward community that made totalitarianism seem desirable—the yearning for a feeling of participation, for a sense of belonging, for a cause larger than one’s own individual purposes and a group to call one’s own.


In pre-modern society, this yearning was fulfilled by a multiplicity of human-scale associations: guilds and churches and universities, manors and villages and monasteries, and of course the primal community of family. In this landscape, Nisbet writes, “the reality of the separate, autonomous individual was as indistinct as that of centralized political power.”


But from the Protestant Reformation onward, individualism and centralization would advance together, while intermediate powers and communities either fell away or were dissolved. As social institutions, these associations would be attacked as inhumane, irrational, patriarchal, and tyrannical; as sources of political and economic power, they would be dismissed as outdated, fissiparous, and inefficient. In place of a web of overlapping communities and competing authorities, the liberal West set out to build a society of self-sufficient, liberated individuals, overseen by an unitary, rational, and technocratic government.

Consolidation and aggrandizement, leading to oversized polities... still, should we put the blame on "liberalism" or on tyrannical governments?

Items of Interest, 25 September 2011

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions: Guideposts of Limited Government
by WILLIAM J. WATKINS, JR.*

David S. D'Amato, Politics as Rich Man’s Sport

Ignoring Daniel Yergin by Kurt Cobb (EB)

There is a vast audience of people out there who, as I said, have never heard of Daniel Yergin, and who have never even heard the words "peak oil." The elected officials who guide our policy will do little to address peak oil and related issues until voters communicate that these are top priorities that will affect elections. Beyond this there is the issue of encouraging personal preparedness, something that is in large part outside the scope of government policy.

Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community by Fred Donovan Hill

Chef Mark Newsome at the Joshua Wilton House

Jimmy Moore, Book Review: Paleo Comfort Foods by Julie & Charles Mayfield

The LLVLC Show (Episode 500): Celebrating Our 500th Episode With 40 Former Interview Guests (mp3)

John Hartford, "Oh Yeah": Documentary of his life and music

Patrick Deneen, Community AND Liberty OR Individualism AND Statism

Before exploring this dynamic in more detail, let me first contrast two competing understandings of liberty, one largely developed in the ancient and Christian world, and the other centrally developed in the early-modern period by, among others, the philosopher John Locke. Both claim the “language of liberty,” but if one is true, the other is false, but, importantly too, it is only from the perspective of ancient liberty that one can see more clearly the close relationship between the individualism of classical liberalism and the collectivism of progressive liberalism.

Modern liberalism begins not – as might be believed if we were to follow the narrative of contemporary discourse – not in opposition to Statism or Progressivism, but rather in explicit and intense rejection of ancient political thought and especially its basic anthropological assumptions. Hobbes, among others, is frequently explicit in his criticisms of both Aristotle and “the Scholastics” – that Catholic philosophy particularly influenced by Aquinas, who was of course particularly influenced by Aristotle. Modern liberal theory thus began with an explicit rejection of Aristotelian/Thomist anthropology.

According to Aristotle, and later further developed by Thomas Aquinas, man is by nature a social and political animal – which is to say, that humans only become human in the context of polities and society. Shorn of such relations, the biological creature “human” was not actually a fully realized human – not able to achieve the telos of the human creature, a telos that required law and culture, cultivation and education, and hence, society and tradition. Thus, Aristotle was able to write (and Aquinas after him essentially repeated) that “the city is prior to the family and the individual” – not, of course, temporally, but in terms of the primacy of wholes to parts. To use a metaphor common to both the ancients and in the Biblical tradition, the body as a whole “precedes” in importance any of its constitutive parts: without the body, neither the hand, nor foot, nor any other part of the body is viable.

Within human societies, to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations, starting of course with the family. An essential component of our capacity to achieve human flourishing is our learned ability to place ourselves under rule and law. At first, as children, we are expected to obey because of the claims of authority – we follow rules and law because we are told to do so by our elders. As we grow in maturity and self-knowledge, we assume the responsibility of self-government – ideally in a form that is continuous between the individual and the city. For the ancients, liberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.

The various practices by which we exercise self-limitation and self-governance is comprehensively called virtue. By contrast, for the ancients, the inability or unwillingness to exercise virtue was tantamount to the absence of liberty. The unbridled or even extensive pursuit of appetite led necessarily to a condition of servitude and even slavery – slavery to one’s passions. Thus, for the ancients, law was not an unnatural imposition of humanity’s natural freedom; rather, law (ideally, a self-imposed law) was the necessary and enabling condition for liberty.

Daniel McCarthy on Thomas Molnar

He compares him with Robert Nisbet and Tocquevillian conservatives: State and Society. (The link obtained from this post: Thomas Molnar, RIP.)

Mr. McCarthy provides a taxonomy of views:

To gauge the distance between Nisbet and Molnar accurately, it may be useful to draw back and look at three general views of state and society that have won currency since the French Revolution. The three do not correspond exactly to the philosophies of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, but there’s a rough match. The “liberal” view of state, society, and the individual holds that society is naturally harmonious, with the interests of diverse individuals (who are the reality behind such secondary institutions such as the family, church, etc.) coinciding to the benefit of all. Crime and war are therefore aberrant and pathological rather than systemic and recurrent. The place of the state, if it has any place at all, is to suppress these incidental eruptions of violence and maintain a set of legal rules that apply equally to all — which is to say, the law is not a battlefield. The latter-day anarcho-capitalist variant of this view says that the state is not in fact necessary to maintain rules and suppress sporadic violence; even those functions can better be performed by non-state agencies.

The “socialist” view, by contrast, holds that society is persistently (if not naturally) disharmonious, divided into classes of exploiters and exploited. Institutions reflect this fundamental social division, with the state, established churches, and property in land being instruments by which the exploiters extract the very lifeblood of the exploited. The social struggle is primary, institutions are merely tools, and it may be possible — through reform or revolution — for the exploited class to turn the instruments of oppression against their oppressors. In the utopian Marxist vision, the need for tools of exploitation finally disappears altogether once the exploited no longer have to use them to defend themselves or to achieve justice against their exploiters. But for now, the state either reflects the demands of the oppressor class (according to the more radical opinion) or else is an arena in which good and evil originating in the socioeconomic sphere must contend.

By way of an example of this “socialist” view, consider the fight over corporate spending and “campaign finance reform.” Modern “liberals” — that is, reformist social democrats — believe that through free and fair elections the public should be able to put in power honest representatives of the people’s (i.e., the exploited class’s) will, who will then use the state to restrain the exploitative tendencies of the private sector (which likes to cheat workers, pollute the environment, etc.). Corporations tend toward evil, in this picture, because they represent the few who have more wealth or power than the many (as a result of exploitation or, at any rate, some kind of unfairness), while democratic government supplies a means by which the many can keep the few in check. But democratic government constantly has to be guarded against perversion into non-democratic government — through the influence of corporate corruption, for example — which would turn the tables and allow the state to become once more not a defensive mechanism for the many but an extractive mechanism for the few.

The radical or anarchist variant on this “socialist” view of society and government says that government and other long-established institutions inherently favor the exploiting class, indeed are inseparable from their interests, and must therefore be abolished rather than reappropriated. The left-anarchist criticizes the anarcho-capitalist for wanting to close only one of the channels of oppression, the state, while leaving others, such as land ownership, untouched. Indeed, left anarchists who believe (as Noam Chomsky seems to do) that the state more amenable to democratic pressure than are other institutions may even accuse the anarcho-capitalists of creating a worse system than the one that already exists by removing a potentially public institution and giving more power to private interests.

The third view of society and state roughly corresponds to conservatism, but overlaps with a few other philosophies or ideologies as well. This is the view that society is naturally disharmonious, but can be brought to a degree of harmony through the action of certain institutions, particularly the state. The “liberal-conservative” variation on this view says that ultimately reconciling the conflicting interests within society is beyond any state’s power, therefore the best that can be achieved is a temporary suppression of conflict by balancing forces. This is, of course, quite similar to, but less optimistic than, the pure “liberal” view of society and state — the difference comes down to how persistent and regular one believes social conflict to be. The fascist or nationalist variation on this view says that the coercive power of the state can successfully harmonize society, if only by eliminating foreign influences and disruptive “intermediary” institutions. Finally, the “traditionalist” variation on this view is that perfect harmony cannot be achieved, nor can much long-term peace be achieved by balancing competing interest groups within civil society, therefore all power must rest in the hands of established authority (church and state). The traditional view is suggested by this passage from Molnar’s “The Liberal Hegemony.”

Is McCarthy's characterization of Molnar correct? As for the attempt to match the three views of state and society with liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, it doesn't seem to me that it really works. It is much more difficult to make generalizations when one is not examining specific authors who are taken to be representative of certain points of view.

American Conservative: Hometown Hero by Susan McWilliams
Robert Nisbet’s conservatism of community against the state

Patrick Deneen, Robert Nisbet's Quest

As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being. Shorn of the deepest ties to (extended) family, place, community, region, religion, and culture - and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy - we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man - the State. Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities - shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man sought belonging through distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious belonging, now in the Church of the State itself. Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation. It would provide for our wants and ; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and incomplete allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes - following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville: ”It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”

Nisbet understood that a radical disjuncture had been introduced by modern theories of “social belonging” that seemed to resemble some aspects of older Aristotelianism, but which in fact were fundamentally distinct. Aristotle, and Aristotelians like Aquinas, insisted that such any conception of a good and flourishing human community required a basis in familiarity with a particular people and one that had continuity over time. Theirs was an argument about human scale: our ability to comprehend a common good, and our willingness to act on its behalf - to feel a sense of obligation and indebtedness to our inheritance from the past and a sense of duty born of gratitude toward the future - requires a fairly intimate, on in which we can have some sensory connection of our actions upon others and theirs upon us, and a setting in which memory plays a large role. Such a community has an enlarged sense of humanity’s temporal dimension, one that expands beyond merely one lifetime instead to include a strong sense of generational gratitude and obligation. Only in such a setting can we intuitively understand that without our forbears, we would not have achieved our own humanity, and thus that we are obligated to give as good as possible to future generations.

Russell Arben Fox discusses communitarianism -- Communitarianism, Conservatism, Populism and Localism: An Updated Survey:

Like “liberalism,” “communitarianism” can refer to both an ideology–a set of more or less organized set of claims or ideas about political positions and actions–and a philosophy. The range of arguments and proposals that can be plausibly identified as “philosophically communitarian” is, I think, much greater, culturally and historically, than is the case with liberalism. Practically all core liberal ideas are associated with the growth of personal and social liberation from the modern history of Europe: the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism and dogma-debunking science in the context of an increasingly rambunctious public sphere, with a skepticism of royal, church, and ultimately government authority which followed. Of course “liberty” (though Lew Daly would probably prefer to say “freedom” here) has its positive connotations, with economic and moral empowerment and equality being treated as a necessary requirements to the realization of liberal rights; T.H. Green made that argument in the 19th century, and John Rawls did the same in the 20th. But by and large, notions of rights (whether natural–John Locke–or categorical–Immanuel Kant) operate in a negative way, asserting what should not be done to a person or be imposed upon her interests or preferences in the name of a religious truth, a local tradition, a community norm, or a political goal. Liberalism–as a philosophy and ideology–is thus to a great degree a carrier of the individual liberation and social deconstruction achieved in the modern West to the rest of the world.

Communitarianism, by contrast, can be applied to any of a great number of philosophical presumptions that do not aim to justify individual liberation from tradition, authority, religion, society, necessity, and so forth, but rather to positively assert the embeddedness of the self in a community. The “liberty of the ancients” as described by Benjamin Constant–in which the existence of slavery made possible the regular participation of citizens in the collective formation of civic life–is basically communitarian, and rightly so; Aristotle and others like him are complicated thinkers that don’t easily fit into any one (especially modern) category, but only a seriously misinterpretation could discover in their writings a condemnation of the cultural and hierarchical claims of one’s community and the affects it has on individual lives. Similarly, one can discover communitarian ideas in classical Confucianism, medieval Christendom, or in almost any other premodern worldview. Practically any theology or ontology or epistemology which criticizes or undermines individuated, critical, unprejudiced (and therefore alienated) action or cognition, and considers to be natural or good or necessary its opposite (a dependence upon revelation, an emphasis on group-ordained roles, the prioritizing of mutual benefit and progress, etc.) is communitarian. Still, such broad descriptions–which could presumably equally fit Han dynasty China or ancient Sparta or 16th-century Swiss villages, to say nothing of their modern incarnations–leave much unexplained. Thus, figuring out exactly how any person or policy identified as communitarian comes to that label is at least as important as identifying it as such in the first place.

This is where things become particular interesting (or difficult, if you prefer) for populists and localists, or those sympathetic to such: do they insist upon a restrictive definition of community (as Jason Peters and Katherine Dalton do) as a specifically localized and peopled place, and deny the kind of thinking which suggests the applicability of orienting oneself towards an attendance upon cultural and collective norms which emerge from contexts other than extended families and small towns as having anything to do with “real” communities at all? Or do they (as I suggested in connection with public schooling) acknowledge there can be spheres of collective action and feeling that include broader, more “public” groups than those aforementioned, intimate ones, which would mean that the communitarian critique can be made use of in a diversity of settings–include, perhaps, even national ones? If the former approach is taken, then the very idea of communitarianism as anything other than an ontological category, much less as something sufficiently grounded as to be able to suggest moral and political possibilities at our present moment, seems ludicrous: Christopher Lasch’s old (I think somewhat unfair, but not entirely inaccurate) condemnation of communitarianism as too broad, too concerned in a sociological sense with “humanity” to be able to provide the specific judgments needed to revive the virtues that political freedom and economic security depend upon, would seem to be conclusive. But I suspect the latter approach can work as well–assuming that one can recognize and distinguish between the types of communitarian thinking one engages in.

Michael Walzer suggests in an old essay of his that contemporary communitarian perspectives can be sorted into two fundamental camps. The first perspective “holds that liberal political theory accurately represents liberal social practice.” That is, it affirms that the doctrines of liberalism–the notions of self, rationality, and nature which emphasize economic, social, moral and political liberation–have in fact resulted in the fragmentation of civilization: we have lost our ability to connect with one another, lost even the ability to coherently explain that loss, and consequently live materialist, egotistical, self-interested, isolated lives, with no sense of a common good, no moral standards for judgment, no solidarity, no traditions, no hope for transformation or better ends. The second perspective, by contrast, “holds that liberal theory radically misrepresents real life”–that the “deep structure of even liberal society is in fact communitarian.” Being born into a state of sovereign and independent nature, outside of embedded relationships of power and meaning, is of course impossible; the way we work through our families and languages and cultures to evaluate and make sense our lives proves that. Hence, according to this perspective, liberal theory is not so much destructive as it is confusing (though that confusion could do a fair amount of destruction along the way).

There are problems with both types, as Walzer notes; they struggle when they try to turn themselves into productive critiques of our undeniably liberated world. In regards to the first, if it is true that the modern flight from norms of obligation and belonging has destroyed our ability to articulate and attend to community, why exactly would we want to subject ourselves to communitarian policies which presumably would be in vain? In regards to the second, there is the fact that, as Walzer concludes, “if we are all to some degree communitarians under the skin…the portrait of social incoherence loses its critical force.” Still, Walzer believes–and I agree–that there is a lot of wisdom and truth in both types: if nothing else, recognizing them can help us humbly consider how much communal sensibility and appreciation for the public good the modern West has lost–even in its current nation-state (or post-nation-state!) contexts–and it is valuable to see how much of that sensibility nonetheless still haunts our moral and political thinking.

Assuming we can use communitarian labels in this broader way, who amongst philosophers and writers would fit with which perspective? On the basis of my own reading of them, I would describe Wendell Berry, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert Nisbet as communitarians of the former sort. (The residents of Front Porch Republic might insist that Berry would have no part of this, preferring instead to see his arguments as operating solely within the explicitly restrictive understanding of community mentioned above; however, if that were the case, then one might be a little hard-pressed to explain his not unoccasional willingness to recommend clearly “communitarian” command reforms of the national economy, and his wistfulness for ambitious New Deal-era efforts to preserve collective control over regional economies, such as through the Burley Tobacco Program.) On the other hand, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and Walzer himself would be in the second camp–though it should be noted that, in any case, almost none of these people would use ever the word “communitarian” to describes themselves politically or economically.

And “conservatism”? Well, the ontological supports that advocates of these various communitarian critiques have philosophically drawn upon range across the above divide, and of course plenty of agitators for one or more of the above theories of government and society don’t feel a necessary connection to any particular sustaining philosophy at all. However, generally speaking, it seems to me that the more a person’s criticism of liberal modernity is based on conceptions of the natural world or revealed religion, the more likely it is to be “conservative” in the political sense, and thus tending towards the first type of generally applicable communitarian thought. This is the sort of communitarian ideology most Americans are used to, even though it’s rarely called by that name: this is where you find many advocates of traditional marriage and gender roles, opponents of artistic expressions and media that ignore local values, supporters of protectionism and small-town agricultural economies, and people critical of the language of rights and grievances. With them usually also comes both a sense of nostalgia or lamentation and, until the most recent election, perhaps, Republicans trawling all too successfully for votes. Of course, many of those who are persuaded by elements of this critique are not truly critical of philosophical liberalism at all; so long as the government stays small or they are able to keep a few socially conservative regulations on the books, they are content with the liberating, “creative destruction” of capitalism and individual rights.

On the other hand, if one’s critique of modern liberalism is based on social observations, such as about the importance of civic trust, national service, or class equity, whether derived from Karl Marx or Alexis de Tocqueville, then one’s communitarianism is, I think, likely to be more inclined to the second perspective. This is the kind of communitarianism that, in contrast to the former and more politically common type, more political theorists will be familiar with: Sandel, of course, but also Philip Pettit, William Galston, and Richard Dagger have been key figures in a small but significant “neo-Tocquevillian” revival, in which a re-attachment to the virtues that the liberal order presupposes, and a recommitment to its participatory demands and possibilities, are seen as crucial to restoring legitimacy to the modern democratic welfare state. Most of these individuals, strongly influenced by the social democratic left, see themselves as liberals or civic republicans rather than communitarians, a word which they (probably rightly, I think) associate with conservatism and (probably wrongly, I think) religious and political authoritarianism. Sometimes those in this group are categorized as “left” communitarians, as opposed to the previous, more “right”-leaning kind, and there is a certain logic to that usage (though I think both “left” and “right” can be used to explore conservatism, and thereby separate the pure traditionalists from those of a more explicitly communitarian focus as well). More usually they have eschewed such labels altogether, and defined themselves instead as representing a “Third Way” or a “Radical Center,” and in so doing have blurred to the point of indistinguishability the difference between themselves and scholars like Will Kymlicka who take community and culture seriously, but only on explicitly liberal terms. Nonetheless, even these left-leaning communitarians, by opening themselves up to necessity of tradition and attachment, usually find themselves less than instinctively supportive of modernity’s project of liberation, and in that sense, they are friends to FPR types.