WHAT FOLLOWS IS NOT MEANT to be the last word on the “liberal-communitarian debate.”1 It is, however, an attempt to change the terms of that debate.2 My strategy is simple. Part I argues that the conflict between liberalism and communitarianism that the “debate” supposes is a figment of the imagination; many paradigmatic liberals have been communitarians, and many paradigmatic communitarians have been liberals.3 A sample is offered, biased to my purposes. Though the sample is biased, I emphasize some illiberal-sounding remarks of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse in order not to cheat. Part II argues that epistemological, methodological, psychological, and moral issues have been muddled together, and when they are unmuddled, it emerges that there is no one general issue at stake. Nonetheless, the various issues I uncover are connected, and I say something about how they are connected. Part III offers a sketch of a liberal community and its social, economic, and political attachments, and finds several tensions that could properly be called tensions between liberty and community. In this part, I also say a little about community and democracy, though hardly enough to satisfy even myself.
An undernoticed feature of the so-called liberal-communitarian debate is its resemblance to two late nineteenth-century debates.4 The first debate was over the empiricist conception of the self; the second over the idea of the social contract. One episode in the first debate was the assault launched by the English Idealists on their utilitarian predecessors; one episode in the second was Émile Durkheim’s assault on anyone who denied the autonomy of sociology. The implications of these arguments concern us in Part II. Here we need notice only that Durkheim and most of the Idealists were unequivocal political liberals, whereas one of their main targets, J. S. Mill, was not backward in recognizing the claims of community.5 It is, of course, commonplace that turn-of-the-century British “New Liberalism,” which coincided with Durkheim’s heyday and with the last years of the Hegelian revival, was communitarian in both its politics and its epistemology.6
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Idealist critics of Mill and Bentham attacked what they called “one-sided” or extreme individualism, a term sometimes replaced by “atomism.” This was not primarily a political criticism; in economics, Bernard Bosanquet was more an individualist than Mill, and it is a fine call whether Green was not also.7 The crux was epistemological, or metaphysical, though it carried moral consequences. The battlefield was conceptions of the self. The best brief statement of the Idealist case came in one of F. H. Bradley’s footnotes: “Mr Bain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever thought who collects Mr Bain?”8 To put it more lengthily, the Idealist target was what has come to be known as the “punctual” or “serial” view of the self. If a person was merely a succession of instants of consciousness, together with some cumulative memory of those instants, there could be no genuine personal identity.
Mill was a tempting target, directly or through his follower Alexander Bain. Mill’s analysis of the external world in terms of “permanent possibilities of sensation” invited the question, if a sensing self creates the identity of external objects, what provides the sensing self with its unity?9 Idealists thought these questions unanswerable in an empiricist and associationist framework.
Their criticisms mirrored Kant’s criticisms of Hume, and when they edited Hume, Green and T. H. Grose made much of Hume’s avowed incapacity to find his self within, but distinct from, the flow of sensory experience.10 The connection with political issues was indirect. The Idealist view was not that Mill’s political and social views were simply wrong, but that even their merits showed up the defects of their metaphysical (or psychological) supports. Bradley was unusual among the English Idealists in thinking Mill’s liberalism was mischievous, but Bradley’s arguments against it were independent of his arguments against Mill’s conception of personal identity. Ethical Studies was unkind to all of Mill’s opinions, but even Bradley did not suggest that the wickedness of Mill’s politics followed deductively from the incoherence of his view of the self. The case was more broad-brush. Mill’s system was incoherent in its foundations and its superstructure. Green, D. G. Ritchie, Edward Caird, and liberal Idealists were no kinder about Mill’s metaphysics, but shared most of his political ideals.11 Green was even ready to agree that utilitarianism had done much for moral progress, at any rate when it was detached from a hedonistic theory of motivation.
No liberal Idealist deplored the ideals of On Liberty. Liberal Idealists, too, thought a morally serious agent must keep his or her life permanently under review, assessing it by the ideals of autonomy, rationality, and openness to the claims of novel experience. When Mill insisted that his defense of individual liberty was not a defense of “mere selfishness,” they believed him. They knew that when Mill based the doctrines of On Liberty on “the utility of man as a progressive being,” he espoused a wholly congenial vision of the unity of a well-lived life. They complained that such ideas were impossible to ground in Mill’s atomistic psychology—not that Mill did not believe in them, nor that they were worthless. Where they differed with him, it was because they were more nearly orthodox Christians than Mill and did not see religion as a threat to liveliness and variety. This, and their belief—perhaps the same belief—in the ultimate rationality of the universe certainly gave their views a different coloring from Mill’s. Bradley’s demand that we must live life as a whole, and make of ourselves a more perfect whole, displayed an optimism about the attainability of harmony that Mill did not share, as did Green’s account of the way individual good shared in the goodness of the world as a whole.
Otherwise, the Idealists’ idée maîtresse owed as much to Aristotle as to Hegel: to describe someone as happy or unhappy, vicious or virtuous, involves the appraisal of long-run dispositions and experiences. Something, as already suggested, carries over from the metaphysical disagreement; Mill was quicker to look for disagreement between one individual and another, and slower to look for conciliation, than T. H. Green, say. There are ways in which Green did and Mill did not think that the highest good was a common good. Further than that it is impossible to go. They were at one in their view that moral analysis looks at life holistically and in the long term. Take Mill’s emphasis on character: in the System of Logic, Mill tackles the Owenite argument that because our characters are the product of education and our actions the product of our characters, our actions are not under our own control.12 Mill replies that we can make our actions our own by making our character our own. It is not the plausibility of Mill’s answer that is at issue, but the readiness with which Mill invokes the idea of character.
Utilitarianism offers another striking instance. When Mill considers the objection that persons whose decisions are based on self-interest cannot act morally, he replies that we create a moral character that tides us over the temptations of self-interest. The plausibility of this reply is again not at issue, merely the way Mill appeals to the work of a fixed moral character in explaining how distinctively moral motivation squares with his hedonic theory.13 A last example is provided by Mill’s account of punishment and guilt in his Examination of Hamilton. There he writes of the criminal momentarily succumbing to temptation and being reproached for the rest of his life by the better self that deplores his bad behavior: “After the temptation has been yielded to, the desiring ‘I’ will come to an end, but the conscience-stricken ‘I’ may endure to the end of life.” Again, the issue is not whether such a self can emerge from Mill’s raw materials, but what his conception of moral agency, responsibility, and character is.14
This does not settle the question of how “communitarian” Mill was. It shows that his conception of moral agency was not dictated by the “punctual” or “abstract” conception of the self that recent writers have deplored, but that is only the first step.15 The second step is to recognize that he insisted that we develop our fixed and persistent characters because we are embedded in our social relations; indeed we can hardly think of ourselves apart from them. This deep social connection develops the conscience, since we internalize the known or assumed disapproval of others for actions that damage their interests. Mill was also anticommunitarian, but in such a way that only someone who was so impressed by the capacity of society to make itself felt within its members’ souls could be.16 Far from ignoring the reality of community, Mill was so impressed with the community’s power over its members that he devoted On Liberty to ways of holding that power in check: not by destroying it or denying its existence, but by teaching his readers when they ought and when they ought not to deploy that power.
The third step is to notice that later liberal writers, such as L. T. Hobhouse in Britain and John Dewey in the United States, had no doubt they were defending liberalism even if it was a communitarian liberalism. They were liberals because they justified political and social action by reference to liberty rather than simple welfare. T. H. Green claimed that the wage laborer was to all intents and purposes a slave, and in need of liberation, whereas Hobhouse defended the nascent modern welfare state as an essential support to freedom.17 The romantic prose aside, Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction, although overtly committed to guild socialism, is in the same vein.18 Neither Green, nor Mill, nor Hobhouse, nor Russell thought a simple opposition between individualist and communitarian social theories reflected a conflict between liberalism and communitarianism.
Several things explain the appearance, and often the reality, of conflict in this field. First, T. H. Green (and Hobhouse and Dewey) said things that seem illiberal to the last degree. Green famously insisted that we could not have rights against the state because the state was the precondition of our moral identity and existence.19 He analyzed an individual right as representing “a capacity for contributing to the common good,” and Hobhouse followed him. John Dewey explained rights in almost identical terms. According to Bradley, “Have I a right?” means “Am I in this the expression of law?” No present-day American reader can help flinching at the thought that we have no rights against the state, and no one who thinks of rights as “trumps” can help flinching at the claim that rights are to be explained as features of our duty to promote the common good. To some extent, these anxieties can be palliated: the state against which one can have no rights is not an actual government, but the ideal embodied in the community’s social and legal arrangements. The claim that we have no rights against this entity is less illiberal than tautological. Nor is such a theory of rights indefensible. If one supposes, as John Rawls does, that rights can be claimed only by rational agents who interact with similar agents in a network of rights and duties, one is halfway to the Green-Hobhouse view. I think the view is wrong to leave out the way rights protect interests regardless of a capacity to contribute to anything. Still, it is not indefensible.
The other contributor to these deceptive appearances is the rise of sociology during the last half of the nineteenth century. Durkheim sometimes seemed to think sociology had shown that there was simply no such thing as an individual. If there were no individual, it would be hard to make sense of liberalism’s concern for individual liberty. Durkheim’s unrelenting emphasis on the priority of society over its members, on the coerciveness of social facts, and his hostility to using psychological and biological considerations in explaining social behavior can easily make one think that Durkheim must have been a political collectivist and authoritarian. The truth is quite otherwise.
Durkheim’s conception of the imperative power of morality relied on his view of the connection between the conscience collective (common consciousness) and the individual conscience. Unless so linked, an individual’s moral views would not be moral views, but personal whims or tastes, which is echoed in the arguments employed by Charles Taylor in his recent work.20 But, Durkheim never suggested that the conscience collective is or must be or ought to be employed on behalf of authoritarian or conservative moral sentiments. Modern morality regards the individual as sacred and treats his or her projects as demanding moral respect. The difference between Durkheim and other moral theorists lies in his understanding of how morality is dictated, not in his view of its content. The principle of respect for persons that Kant enunciated and on which Dworkin bases his liberalism is the dictate not of the noumenal self but of the conscience collective.
Mill and Durkheim did not see eye to eye on everything, but they agreed on more issues in social theory than one might expect. Mill agreed wholeheartedly that society had to be a felt unity if society was to exercise moral authority and governments were to be able to draw on that authority.21 He quoted Coleridge to this effect when he wrote his famous essay on him, lifted the passage bodily for the System of Logic, and treated it as the intuitive statement of a fundamental truth of political sociology.22 In his treatment of representative government, Mill anticipates Durkheim’s enthusiasm for secondary associations as schools of public spirit, drops his father’s suspicion of “sinister interests,” and treats local government and local forms of organization as training grounds where individuals develop public spirit by performing public tasks.23
Even on the methodological front, Mill and Durkheim shared antipathies. Durkheim was fiercely hostile to any appeals to social contract. It was absurd to think society could be constructed by a contract between individuals. The very idea of a binding contract presupposed a social setting where pacta servanda sunt (“agreements must be kept”) was already accepted. But utilitarians had always thought contract theory absurd. Mill agreed it might be useful to think of our duties to society in a quasi-contractual way; we receive the protection of society and owe a return for that help. But before conceding even as little as this, he insisted that no good purpose is served by explaining rights as arising from a social contract.24
Durkheim and Hobhouse wrote very different sociology, and had very different moral styles, but it would be hard to separate them on the issues that defined the “new liberal” position. Both agreed that the modern world’s conviction of the importance of the individual was essentially a moral conviction. Both agreed that it involved individual liberty understood both positively and negatively. La carrière ouverte aux talents (careers open to the talented) meant that individuals ought not to be shoehorned into traditional occupations and statuses and that a positive effort was required to find them occupations in which their abilities would be employed to the advantage of society at large, and in which the combined economic and psychological rewards for conscientiously doing their job would be and would be felt to be a just return for their contribution.25 Unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism was a poor background for this ambition; the anomic distribution of success and failure unrelated to merit and contribution that characterized a regime of boom and slump was morally intolerable, and state intervention was required to bring some order to it. On the other hand, the individualism of their moral positions meant that neither thought the state should literally own and run any substantial portion of industry or commerce. Like many others of their kind, Hobhouse and Durkheim were welfare-state liberals, hard to separate from moderate socialists, not wholly at odds with Christian democracy, but entirely opposed to traditional conservatism or Marxian socialism.
Liberal views have always had a communitarian component, and many liberals have launched their liberalism from a basis in communitarian sociological theory. The so-called liberal-communitarian debate cannot be what its name implies, a debate between liberals and communitarians. I suggest there are at least four different debates, of which two are not liberal-communitarian debates at all, although two might be so described, but not entirely perspicuously. Nothing hangs on the labels offered here, but for present purposes, we can distinguish, first, an argument about accounts of the self that could be called “atomist-holist”; second, an argument about sociological and moral inquiry that could be called “holist-individualist”; third, an argument about substantial moral commitments that might be called “collectivist-individualist”; and last, an argument about social, moral, and political change that might be called “traditionalist-innovative.” The last two will be glossed as a conflict between communitarianism and liberalism by those who think liberalism must be both individualist and innovative and that any invocation of communal values is necessarily collectivist and traditionalist. In any account, only the first two issues are genuinely dichotomous. The last two cry out for resolution by “more or less.” None of the four is so conceptually intertwined with any other that there are relations of implication between a stand on one issue and another; but there are affinities stronger than merely accidental connection between them.26
As pointed out in the first section of this essay, the relation between conceptions of the self and society on the one hand and substantial moral and political positions on the other is indeterminate. Most of us have views, however inchoate, about human nature and social structure, and we use them to justify our moral and political views. But it is an open question how far our views about social nature and human nature demand philosophical justification or imply a definite social theory. Certainly, we have to believe that people possess whatever characteristics it takes if they are to be suited by the social values we are defending, socialist, conservative, or liberal as they may be. But we may hold views about what features people have and about what suits them without being able to say much about why they are in fact like that, let alone being able to say why they must be like that.
Thus, it is not an objection to Rawls’s account of justice that we cannot imagine what it would be like to be one of the individuals placed behind the “veil of ignorance.” An individual who knew neither where he or she was, nor what sex he or she was, nor what abilities or tastes he or she possessed would find it hard to give sense to being anyone in particular. The “rational actor” who features in theories of rational choice, and his cousin, “rational economic man,” are in the same boat. Orthodox economic theory has prospered by adopting this austere notion of the rational actor, even though it is as hard to imagine what it would be like to be one as to imagine life behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance. Empirical remoteness is not an objection to a theory. We make sense of economically rational man by treating his behavior as a limit case, and we can make sense of the abstraction from our present identities required by Rawls’s theory by treating that as a limit case of what we do when we set aside self-interest and consider what is fair. To attack Rawls’s procedure, we must show not that it embodies a counterintuitive conception of personal identity, but that a procedure successful in economic analysis is unsuccessful in moral and political argument.
The claim that abstraction is misguided leads us to the second of our four kinds of argument, the defense of holistic approaches to social and moral theory. Here Michael Sandel’s objections to Rawls’s approach in A Theory of Justice bite as they do not when the subject is personal identity, though the fact is obscured by the way Sandel moves from criticisms of what he calls “deontological liberalism” to criticisms of liberalism sans phrase. The arguments for holistic and “unabstract” moral theory are many and varied, but the possibilities are readily illustrated. Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy criticizes Kant’s search for a demonstratively true moral theory that is rationally rather than morally compelling, and binding on agents who share few of our human characteristics. Kant’s error was not that he believed in a “noumenal self,” but that he failed to see that ethics has a history; that moral considerations apply to embodied creatures with particular hopes, beliefs, and aspirations; and that ethical demands cannot provide reasons for action for creatures too radically different from ourselves. The message is that we must start in medias res. We must recall the ways in which we differ from the members of other, earlier cultures; we must, in a manner of speaking, employ Aristotle’s understanding of ethical argument without Aristotle’s finite and local conception of human nature.27
One could call this “antiabstractionism” rather than “holism,” except that what underlies the attack on abstraction is the claim that individuals do not invent morality by legislation ex nihilo but by striking out from the commitments they find in the language and life of their own social setting. This idea reappears in the recent work of Charles Taylor, whose Sources of the Self is an ornament of communitarian liberalism.28 Taylor recognizes the difference between holism as a methodological commitment and collectivism as an ideological commitment, and argues for the sanctity of the individual via a historical phenomenology whose form is Hegelian, though its exposition is blessedly less portentous than the master’s own. Taylor claims that we must accept some form of liberalism; social and conceptual change, mutually interwoven, have made it true that our best reasoning yields a liberal account of the tasks of the individual and the social setting in which to pursue them.
Taylor’s political allegiances are not implied in his methodology. The conservative or socialist may share Taylor’s tastes in moral reasoning even though reading the same record teaches a different lesson. Political agreement can, by the same token, coexist with methodological disagreement. Durkheim’s account of the division of labor in modern society and its moral implications is methodologically and politically close to Taylor’s, for both believe that what is revealed by the appropriate moral inquiry is what it is that forms the moral ideals of the modern individual. Both eschew the state of nature inhabited by the heroes of A Theory of Justice and the passengers on Bruce Ackerman’s spaceship.29 That is how holistic liberals differ from contractarians.
One last point. The criticism to which A Theory of Justice was subjected inspired its author to further explanations and reformulations. Those reformulations move the discussion of the positive doctrines of A Theory of Justice onto the terrain occupied by Williams and Taylor. Rawls now says that the conception of the self implicit in the book is “political not metaphysical”; he did not commit himself to any theory of personal identity, but only to whatever would best illustrate the conception of justice to which “we” subscribe.30 The idea that a theory of justice should seek an “overlapping consensus,” again, is a recommendation especially apt to anyone working in the unabstract, holistic, contextual way Rawls’s critics commend. To build liberalism on a presumption of ignorance about the good is, in the abstract, very odd advice. Decoded, it turns out to be a reminder not to think a liberal regime will be sustained in the contemporary United States by a mass commitment to the ideal character portrayed in Mill’s essay On Liberty.
A certain briskness in pressing on may be excused by the need to leave methodology for substantial moral and political issues.31 These are even slipperier than those already encountered, because the number of ways of being a moral and political collectivist is certainly large but probably indeterminate. I split off an analytical issue that preoccupies some theorists, most notably Charles Taylor, then take up two collectivist claims, one for the importance of certain sorts of collective entities, the other for the superiority of goods provided and enjoyed in common to goods provided and enjoyed privately. I wish to inspect the claim that some goods are misunderstood if they are not understood as essentially collective. Taylor suggests as an example the experience of an audience listening to an orchestra giving a live performance, in which the orchestra’s consciousness of the audience and its response to the audience enter into the quality of what we experience. It is not the experience of an aggregate of individual goods.
What is at stake is obscure. Taylor contrasts the provision to a large number of people of some good that each values self-interestedly, such as garbage collection by the municipality of Montreal, and common goods like concertgoing. His invocation of self-interest clouds the issue. There is nothing unself-interested about listening to a concert. The distinction seems to lie between an instrumental and noninstrumental view of the presence of one’s companions; six of us may pool resources to share the cost of a taxi while each wishing to be able to hire it for himself or herself alone, and this is different from wishing to be part of an appreciative audience, in which everyone else’s presence and pleasure is an element in one’s own. But if that is all that is at stake, a moral and political individualist may set as high a value as you like on such goods.32
We can now turn to positive collectivism. Its first element is the view that some collective entities, such as the state, or the local community or the family or the church, are the proper objects of one’s ultimate loyalty, and certain virtues, such as submission to their authority or a deep understanding of their purposes and natures, are the greatest virtues. Hegel understood the Greek polis to embody a claim of this sort. The individual was submerged in the political and social life of his own city, his virtue a matter of his contribution to the city’s life. There was an immediate identity of individual and community.33 The deeds of great individuals were the stuff of Greek poetry and history, but they were not following what we think of as individual moral projects; they were fulfilling roles already laid down by and implicit in the nature of the social or political whole to which they belonged.
The second element is the view that collectively provided and enjoyed benefits are to be esteemed more highly than individually enjoyed benefits. Public health care may be held to be intrinsically superior to private health care because one thing that unites the human race is the common hazard of ill health and eventual death. Because society exists to unite our resources in the face of the hazards of nature, common provision by a national health service is an apt expression of a determination to tackle a common fate. The individual receives medical attention, but also an assurance that he or she is valued by the community, that he or she will continue to be cared for regardless of his or her ability to pay, and so on. Those who provide help make just such morally reassuring gestures as well as providing treatment.
It is easy to see how the argument must proceed. The individualist who repudiates the argument from the value of a collective entity may insist that the state in particular should not be an object of loyalty, because it is violent and thrives on the human disposition to find enemies. Or the individualist may agree that we owe it some noninstrumental loyalty, but argue that it is more often worth only an instrumental loyalty, to be rationally valued for its aid to non-state-related individual virtues, such as kindliness, imagination, and intellectual curiosity, and thus to other collective entities such as churches, universities, and clubs. The individualist who repudiates collective goods may, in the extreme, regard collective activities with a sort of fastidious loathing, as Nietzsche sometimes seems to have done, or not see their point, as Edward Bellamy did not when he preferred piped music to concertgoing.34 He may more moderately argue only that there is no general reason to prefer collective goods to private, individual goods. Its collective qualities may make concertgoing attractive in just the way it is, say, but the only question about health care is whether people get decent treatment at a nonexorbitant cost. Private insurance and national health services are to be compared strictly instrumentally.
Now we can broach the fourth of my dichotomies. Rarely will this be an all-or-nothing struggle between those who insist on the absolute subjection of the individual’s moral judgment and imagination to the traditions embedded in his or her community’s existing understanding of their moral and political condition, and those who insist on every individual’s absolute obligation to think out afresh every item of their moral system. Nor is it necessary that an insistence on the role of tradition be tied to a community that bears that tradition. Still, most writers who insist on the role of tradition insist also on submission to the community’s understanding of that tradition or to community practices in which the tradition is embedded.
Enthusiasts for tradition change their minds, too. Alasdair MacIntyre now makes more of tradition’s role as tradition than he does of its relation to any particular community that embodies it or to that it gives substance to. The “Thomist tradition” in Catholic thought is more strongly recommended by its intellectual power and its ability to absorb the merits and correct the demerits of other systems of thought than by its embodiment in the community of the Catholic faithful.35 This is a more intellectualist and less communitarian defense than one found in After Virtue, where it was their qualities as communities that commended Benedictine monasteries or the Icelandic settlements of the Norse sagas.36
Ideals of moral and political innovation on the one hand and ideals of faithful submission to tradition on the other do not divide the terrain neatly and do not align at all with positions on either the nature of personal identity or the sociological analysis of ethical systems. What is involved in moral innovation and inventiveness may be as cautiously spelled out as it was by Mill or as recklessly demanded as it was by Nietzsche; equally, submission may be demanded with all the blandishments of Edmund Burke or at the point of the sword by Hobbes. For Burke, submission flows gently from an acknowledgment of our sociability; for Hobbes, the demand comes most urgently from our need to escape from a war of all against all.
The most dramatic demands for moral innovation, Nietzschean or Sartrean, are beset by paradox. They need as a background a general belief in the fixity and permanence of our identities that Taylor makes so much play with, but have to claim that it is an illusion we subscribe to out of cowardice. Anyone with a more moderate taste for change, a respect for innovation, and a taste for an expanded moral imagination can agree that our selves are, at any given moment, more or less fixed. They need observe only that our present selves can always be the starting place for the process of becoming something else. If the method and prescription are not confused with each other, the most that ontological or methodological considerations can tell us is how hard it will be to behave in one way rather than another, or how to find out how hard it may be. Only if the prescriptions are smuggled back into the ontological or methodological considerations—as they often are—can ontological or methodological theses foreclose our moral and political options.37
The “communitarian liberals” on whose existence I have been insisting think that it is possible to draw on tradition but to innovate too. They are not radical innovators in the way Sartre and Nietzsche are, but they insist that human nature is open-ended, that moral and political discoveries are yet to be made, and that the existence of some fixed points on the moral compass does not preclude the existence of open options. Liberal innovators will generally be interested in innovations in novel individual aspirations. They may not be interested only in these. Among the options not foreclosed are varieties of the common good and kinds of association not yet widespread. Individual innovation is not limited to experiments in solitary or self-centered activities. The string quartet was an invention; so was the democratization of concertgoing; and both are “collective” activities. Nor are all calls for innovation calls for liberal innovation. After Virtue ends with an appeal to its readers to create a community not yet born but latent in the insights of Leon Trotsky and St. Benedict.38 When we distinguish between the upholders of tradition and enthusiasts for invention, we must remember that this dichotomy, too, will not lie neatly on top of the others we have been looking at.
My last task is to ask what one can sensibly say about the liberal community. I cannot deal with the view that the term “liberal” has become so degraded by political controversy, and so indeterminate in its application to Britain, Europe, and the United States, that nothing at all can be said about liberalism, nor with the view that we must distinguish between a (good) narrowly circumscribed political theory and a (bad) larger theory of life. It is not that nothing can be said for and against these views, merely that it cannot be said here. My object is only to show how distinctively liberal aspirations may be defended by someone who has absorbed everything the Idealists usefully said against their predecessors, and everything Durkheim usefully said against earlier social theorists.
The theorist who has absorbed these things but believes, like Mill, that mankind is so much a social animal that he needs to be given some breathing space—or who believes, like Russell, that unbridled laissez-faire will not do but that Brave New World is worse—will want to argue for a nonstifling communitarianism. This is not the “dialogical” openness of Bruce Ackerman’s liberal society, nor the rationalism of Jürgen Habermas’s system.39 It is a looser, less philosophically ambitious ideal, content to look for no more precision than the subject allows. For all that, it is more eager to proselytize than Richard Rorty’s aphilosophical defense of “late capitalist bourgeois liberalism”—or whatever tongue-in-cheek characterization he at present prefers—and hopeful that it is possible to lurch less violently between the extremes of abstractness and localism than John Rawls’s successive characterizations of his view of justice have done.
According to the communitarian claim, we each need some complicated emotional, moral, and intellectual support from those we live among. The liberal claim holds that this support should be support for an individuality that goes beyond the fulfillment of a social role. It has many aspects. One is what Charles Taylor labeled “expressivism,” the German romantics’ ideal of a distinctive character whose expression is akin to the expression of the artist’s capacities and vision in his art. A second, more austere thought makes each of us responsible for our own existence and indicates that we must be scrupulous about the burdens we impose on others. This is not just the desire to stay off the welfare rolls that animates so many neoconservatives. It is a fastidiousness about demanding from others more than a fair share of their time, attention, and resources, and a positive ambition to make one’s own way in the world.
A third, more relaxed aspect says we are entitled to pursue the harmless pleasures and interests that the variety of human nature has handed out to us. Mill’s essay On Liberty is a hymn to expressivism, combined with a casual defense of the third view and a strong dose of the second. Mill’s critics have complained of his elitism, arguing that this first ideal demands too much from those who have nothing very individual to express. Yet, the third view bulks as large as any and is emphatically unelitist. Mill says that a man needs a warehouse full of clothes if he is to find a jacket that fits him, and how much more so a whole life. The image is not an elevated one, and is not supposed to be. Still, the point is not to defend or criticize On Liberty. It is to ask what the connection is between these ideas about the individual’s moral and social fate and an appeal to community. The answer is self-evident. Unlike Rawls and Dworkin, the communitarian liberal insists that liberalism needs a community of liberals to flourish.
Writers who merely demand toleration for harmless activities do not demand as much as this. They will be content if they can secure the majority’s indifference. But liberalism has historically demanded much more, for it is clear that reliance on indifference is dangerous. Toleration for the odd pleasures and weird pursuits of others must rest on something more secure than indifference or it will not last the first outbreak of ill temper and dislike. Without a public opinion committed to the belief in a right to toleration, toleration is insecure. Dworkin’s attempt to provide what is needed by invoking the state’s duty of neutrality is not as unhelpful as it may seem, because he distinguishes so sharply between the state’s duty to remain neutral between ideals of the good life, on the one hand, and the liberty we all have as private persons to defend such ideals as and when we can, on the other. Still, something has to motivate the demand for neutrality, and it is hard to see what it can be other than a full-blown defense of the liberal vision of what members of the same society owe one another by way both of assistance and forbearance.
Such a community would be united in defending the negative liberties of its members. The most ambitious vision of a liberal community would go further and hope for a community where we each tried to sustain the positive individuality of our fellow citizens. We might turn Charles Taylor’s image of the orchestral concert to a different purpose. We shall not divide the audience from the performers, but will think of a community as simultaneously audience and orchestra. Each member contributes to the Gesamtkunstwerk that we hope we can make of our social interactions. For some purposes, deciding on the town drainage system, for example, this will be a hopelessly overblown and highfalutin image, but for many it will not. Such an image is not the property of liberals alone. The liberal character of any such vision comes in its taste for innovation (the orchestra does not stick to the standards but improvises, divides into chamber groups, experiments with mixtures of old and new, and so on). This terrain is one on which familiar political divisions are visible. The grimly Hobbesian variety of conservative thinks we have too little time left over from keeping homo homini lupus (“man, a wolf to man”) under control to engage in social play; the disciples of Maistre try to beat us into a submissive recognition of our irreparable sinfulness; the Marxian does not repudiate the aspiration but insists that between us and its realization lies the long haul of proletarian revolution.
This is the aestheticist version of a communitarian liberalism, attractive to Schillerians and enthusiasts for the more romantic facets of Mill’s work, and perhaps catching something of what Rorty defends by celebration rather than cerebration.40 This essay is less concerned to argue for it than to place it in the intellectual landscape, along with the practicalities of the maintenance of a society in which persons are as far as possible self-maintaining, career-pursuing, self-respecting citizens, and the maintenance of whatever combination of barriers and positive support it takes to preserve toleration and the rule of law.
I return to three dry, familiar, central issues. The first is the relation of community to liberty in the economic realm. The role of private property is a central issue. Too rigid an insistence on the sanctity of property takes us back to the kind of contractarianism that Durkheim denounced as morally and explanatorily inadequate; too casual an acceptance of the need to curtail property rights for the sake of public benefits threatens security, innovation, and the motivation to be a self-maintaining member of society. To Durkheim, it seemed obvious that property was both sacred and in need of collective supervision. An argument in favor of the style of argument offered here represents this as an argument within liberalism as well as one between liberals and others. The economic equality that Charles Taylor defends in Sources of the Self may or may not be as important to modern liberalism as he thinks, but it is clear why it may be and clear how this view recapitulates the old view that the emancipation of property from traditional and familial constraints was a needed spur to progress and individuality while the later manifestations of a regime of unfettered ownership and absolute freedom of contract threatened to produce new forms of slavery.
Because the liberal conception of community sees common provision as an aid to individual freedom, the defense of economic equality is not based on considerations of solidarity, whether proletarian or other. Rather, a degree of economic equality and some collective control of the economy are nowadays required to ensure general access to education and employment and to ensure that average wages will keep body and soul together and provide for a decent family life, especially if the family is to produce the kind of individual the liberal wants society to foster. Conversely, the importance of la carrière ouverte aux talents is enough to make the liberal prefer a market to a command economy, to prefer a private-property-based economy to a collectivized economy, and to demand no more equality than is consistent with giving people an incentive to seek employment and to better their condition. It would be foolish to pretend that this yields a determinate result. But if we cast the argument in this way, tensions within the liberal vision are clearly distinct from tensions between liberalism and alternatives. Different facets of individual freedom may come into conflict, may be accorded different degrees of priority on different occasions, but those “intraliberal” arguments are different from arguments between defenders of individual liberty on the one hand and enthusiasts for unthinking integration on the other, and different again from arguments between defenders of individual liberty and enthusiasts for revolutionary solidarity, the historical mission of the proletariat, or whatever.
Second, the politics of communitarian liberalism unsurprisingly turn out to be the politics of a pluralistic representative democracy. The reasoning behind this has two facets. One lies in the considerations eloquently brought out by John Rawls. To exclude anyone from the process of decision making in his or her society is inconsistent with the self-respect we seek for each individual. Nobody has a natural title to rule, and nobody can expect to rule except by way of the consent of his fellows. This is the principled argument for representative democracy. According to the pragmatic argument, the diversity and changeability of our ambitions, as well as our ordinary self-interested desires, can hardly be accommodated in any other system for legitimating our rulers. Both reasons depart quite drastically from some obvious alternatives, such as the thought that in economic class conflict, the superior resources of time, money, and organizational skill enjoyed by the possessing classes will infallibly reduce the laboring classes to poverty unless they can devise a political system to counterbalance those advantages.
Third, consider the question of constitutional restraints upon government and society. Within our framework, there will have to be, de jure or de facto, some analogue to what Rawls secures by talking of the priority of the right over the good. This is not the place for a long discussion of the comparative merits of written constitutions and unwritten conventions. The considerations that lead to a stress on both individuality and community are enshrined in famous essays in advocacy such as Locke’s Letter on Toleration and in famous documents such as the U.S. Constitution. The communitarian liberal is unlike John Rawls in setting more store by social and political action than Rawls does. Whereas Rawls sees politics in essentially coercive terms, and wishes to keep government at bay in all sensitive areas, the communitarian can see government as more creative yet still think that in many areas—religious allegiance and sexual preference being two obvious ones—the community may properly foster a respect for taking such matters seriously, but must not require any particular choice from the individual.41 It is otiose to repeat the demonstration that this will still allow a good deal of dissension internal to liberal theory while drawing a clear line between liberals and their opponents and critics.
In conclusion, two things need to be said. First, this has been an arm’s-length account of its subject matter. No one could take an interest in the topic without some sympathy toward the intellectual and political leanings involved. Still, it has been the intention of this essay to lay out a view in such a way that it can readily be assaulted. My own understanding of democracy, for instance, is closer to the “domesticated class warfare” conception of democracy than to the liberal view. Second, it is time to make good on my opening paragraph. Having denied the existence of any general “liberal-communitarian” conflict, I agreed that within communitarian forms of liberalism, tensions arose that could be seen in that light. This section ought to have revealed how such a conflict arises. A viable community is cherished for the sake of the liberty and self-development of the individuals composing that community; yet occasions must arise when the community must be preserved by measures that frustrate the freedom and self-development for which we value it. A nation at war curtails its subjects’ civil liberties. A nation at peace may preserve the peace by means that violate an ideal right to free expression. Not all liberal societies would allow a Nazi procession to march through a Jewish neighborhood.42 Affirmative action is an issue that reveals an inescapable tension between trying to establish a community outlook that is genuinely favorable to la carrière ouverte aux talents and a regard for the liberty of employers and employees to strike whatever bargains they can. These tensions are part of the messiness and incompleteness of political and social life, not to be deplored nor swept out of the way by conceptual cleverness. I claim that a good liberal can be a good communitarian, not that he will find life simple.