The Nature of Political Theory

156 The Nature of Political Theory

After the philosophical flurries of the 1980s, however, communitarianism has
changed quite distinctly in character. In many ways, this change also coincided with a
subtle slowing of interest in the academic debates during the later 1990s. Communit-
arianism moved from the forum of academic contestation and took on many of
the trappings of a proselytizing political movement—particularly in North America,
conversion and commitment are now preferred to being philosophically persuaded.
Communitarianism thus began to shift its focus to the domain of public policy-
making. This has led to the setting up of organizations such as the Communitarian
Network and Centre for Communitarian Policy Studies. The most important organiz-
ing figure here in North America is Etzioni. It is in this context that communitarianism
has attained some loose advisory links within ‘third way’ forms of politics, in both
Europe and North America. Communitarian activists now have their own websites,
think tanks, and journals. All are devoted to recovering this apparently lost sense of
community. Etzioni has also contributed a number of more popular polemical texts,
such asThe Spirit of CommunityandThe New Golden Rule. The aim is fundamentally
more zealous, rather than philosophical. Whether this would be better described now
as a ‘communitarian ideology’ is open to debate. TheHabits of the Heartbook embod-
ies many of the more practical aims of the movement, which is focused on a range
of issues concerned with the everyday problems for any community, namely, educa-
tion, crime, policing, health, and so forth. There is also a strong sense, pervading
throughout the whole text of the latter book, that something has gone fundamentally
wrong in most American communities, which needs to be addressed on the most
basic level. As the book states, ‘most Americans agree that things are seriously amiss
in our society—that we are not, as the poll questions often put it, “headed in the right
direction” ’ (Bellah et al. 1996: vii and xxii).
Another issue here concerns what is meant, implied, or required by the concept of
community. One problem with more recent communitarianism is that it has tended
to be short on history and long on normativity. There is some historical awareness
amongst the philosophers, however, it is still a somewhat selective history. The idea
and value of coherent consensual community has a long complex history in partic-
ularly European thinking. However, the value of community has been a particular
interest of thinkers in Europe over the last two centuries. It has inhabited, for example,
a wide range of political ideologies during this period, including socialism, anarch-
ism, conservativism, feminism, and environmentalism. In most thinkers, from the
eighteenth century, discussions of community were usually punctuated by fixed bin-
ary group contrasts, in order to reveal something fundamental about the notion
of community. Community usually indicated something that was more organic,
natural, or involuntary and this was contrasted to other types of social group which
were artificial, constructed, and voluntarist. Thus, G. W. F. Hegel contrasted the idea
of an ethical communal state to the rootlessness and fragmentation of civil society.
Edmund Burke distinguished a hierarchical, organic, traditional, and stable com-
munity from an anomic and individualistically orientated conception promulgated
by theories of consent-based politics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge held similar views to
Burke, that is, a division between a commercially orientated individualistic society and