with social norms is as powerful and common as a desire to maximize utility
(seerational choice theory). What they all have in common is a rejection of
the core principle ofliberalism, which can be taken to mean that each
individual is the sole legitimate decision maker in what counts as good for
himself. Liberal capitalism andliberal democracywish to maximize the
actor’s ability to pursue his own goals and endow him with rights for this
purpose. Communitarians, in contrast, see the community through tradition
and history, socializing people into its moral values, and see actors as most
content when they live out the values of this community and assist in its
development. Communitarians, in their own language, wish to stress the duties
of the citizen as much as the rights.
There is, of course, nothing new at all about communitarianism. It is
Conservatismof the hue associated withBurke, common in European
social thought after the French Revolution. However well-intentioned some
of its proponents may be, there is no way of disguising the fact that commu-
nitarian theory, by denying the primacy of the individual’s rights, involves or
implies imposing some metaphysical entity, now called the community but
indistinguishable from the state above the individual.
The attractions of communitarianism increase with the belief that modern
liberal democracies are becoming impossible to govern as the pursuit of
individual preferences makes the social order weak and produces increasingly
difficult problems of collective action. Thus in Europe the attraction is seen by
those whose aim was formerly a socialist utopia (however vague and far into
the future), but who are now forced to rely on capitalist market economics.
The attraction to communitarianism in the USA is largely because there has
never been an orthodox European-style brand of conservatism; US conserva-
tives have simply been liberal capitalists with less concern for the victims of the
system than other liberals. It is no accident thatRoman Catholicismis
influential in communitarianism, both in that many of its ideas come from
Catholic social philosophy and many of its leading thinkers are Catholic
intellectuals.
Community
The word community has a variety of political uses. It can be an ideal, evoking
a political order characterized by warm, fraternal and caring social relations of
an almost family-like nature. In this usage it resembles the idea offraternity,
one of the three parts of the French revolutionary slogan, along withliberte ́and
egalite ́. It can be a purely descriptive term merely referring to the informal
relations of people who live in some sort of a group, rather than to any formal
political system or state they may set up to run their society. It may refer,
however, to a small self-supporting group where this previous distinction is not
Community