There is no shortage of ideas for making communities better. To consider what communitarian thinking may have to offer, we need to retrace what the key formulations of that thinking involves.
The initial set of formulations appeared around the middle of the 19th century. It related to the ideas and practices of Robert Owen and people who wanted to apply these to the development of cooperative arrangements to facilitate better social and economic relations. ‘Communitarian’ emerged as a common term for describing Owenite efforts to set up new forms of enterprise, work communities, and associations of workers. While a common aspiration was to realise the age-old potential for collaboration and solidarity, the strategies that were tried out pointed, not to a return to some idealised past, but to new rules and structures to deal with the prevailing reality. This was exemplified by the Rochdale Pioneers, formed in 1844, this group of worker-owners pooled their resources to buy goods needed by local people and sell them at a reasonable price with any profit to be shared amongst members of the group. Customers and workers alike could become members and everyone had an equal vote in determining how the group was run.
The next set of formulations of ‘communitarian’ came in the 1980s via the commentary on the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor, all of whom had penned critiques with a common target – the ideas of John Rawls. The four of them came to be considered as sharing a ‘communitarian’ stance in opposing a form of liberalism that is premised on what they deemed a deeply flawed conception of the self. They argued that a person conceptually stripped of all relational connections with others is not the ‘real’ person with the utmost clarity of thought, but an isolated entity with no sense of belonging, obligations, or concerns, without which there can be no meaningful moral reflections. Significantly, all four of these philosophers’ aversion towards the atomistic self is reflected in their objections to economic individualism and the consequent rise in inequality in society.
The third set of formulations appeared in the 1990s from a number of writers who drew on the cooperative ideals of solidarity and reciprocity in putting forward theories of communitarianism. David Miller argued for a communitarian form of market socialism that could avoid the pitfalls of top-down socialism and laissez faire capitalism. Jonathan Boswell set out a theory of ‘democratic communitarianism’, which explains why neither an over-reliance on the market nor the state can solve the problems facing society, and how mutually supportive human relations sustained by multiple communities at different levels should be cultivated through cooperative institutional practices and public policies. These views were echoed by Robert Bellah in The Good Society; while Charles Derber maintained that combining the Scandinavian model of state-citizen cooperation and the inclusive approaches of cooperative enterprises exemplified by the Mondragon Corporation and others, could hold the key to the development of what he called ‘left communitarianism’. And in her article, ‘A communitarian approach to local governance’, Elinor Ostrom noted that “appropriate institutional arrangements for cooperative housing and neighborhood governance are necessary to facilitate co-productive efforts for monitoring and exercising control over public spaces”.
The fourth set of formulations were put forward by a group of public intellectuals who wanted to use the ‘communitarian’ banner to champion a different approach to public policy development. Amitai Etzioni and William Galston were the main driving force behind the initiative, with Philip Selznick and Thomas Spragens amongst the key contributors to its scholarly exposition. The group launched its Responsive Communitarian Platform to set out its main concerns with the lack of balance between meeting demands for individual rights and promoting responsibility for the common good, and went on to issue policy recommendations on strengthening family support, improving schools in value education, engaging communities in crime reduction, focusing government intervention on where it is most needed, and a wide range of other subjects. Their underlying aim is to bolster liberal politics by empowering communities through moral dialogues, civic education, and policies that pursue public goals as defined by an informed public.
The fifth set of ideas emerged in the synthesis of philosophical and policy considerations I developed in my 1998 book, Communitarianism. In addition to drawing out the three key communitarian principles of cooperative enquiry, mutual responsibility, and citizen participation, it integrated theories and practices from a wide range of countries and sectors. These offered a comprehensive critique of both unrestrained market forces and arbitrary state actions, argued for inclusive community development as opposed to the revival of old dysfunctional community relations, and explained the need for more deliberative and participatory engagement to be advanced in government institutions, business organisations, and voluntary groups.
Taken together, these five sets of formulation of communitarian ideas provide a conceptual DNA profile that can help us trace their development through history, understand their significance in challenging prevailing assumptions, and recognise what they offer in reshaping the theory and practice of community improvement.
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You can find out more from The Evolution of Communitarian Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030265571
Communitarianism: a new agenda for politics and citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Communitarianism-New-Agenda-Politics-Citizenship/dp/0814782361
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