The Nature of Political Theory

158 The Nature of Political Theory

forces were radically undermining and diminishing ‘social capital’. It was therefore
seen as undermining those networks of norms, which facilitated cooperation and
mutual benefit. In this context, as theHabits of the Heartcommunitarian group noted
despondently, ‘we have moved from the local life of the nineteenth century—in which
economic and social relationships were visible and, however imperfectly, morally
interpreted as parts of a larger common life—to a society vastly more interrelated
and integrated economically, technically, and functionally. Yet this is a society in
which the individual can only rarely and with difficulty understand himself and his
activities as interrelated in morally meaningful ways’ (Bellah et al. 1996: 50). This
sense of social and moral anxiety translated, in turn, into an attraction and longing
for a mysterious language of predictable, warm, inertial, safe, consensual community,
top-dressed with lashings of social capital. This language promised much—a growth
of mutual awareness, active concerned citizenship, healthy caring neighbourhoods,
and heightened civic awareness. In some ways part of this language has subtly mutated
into the more recent concerns of deliberative democracy.^16
The problem with this language, despite its seductive appeal, is that it also relies
upon a remarkably vague and indeterminate concept, namely, ‘community’. Prim-
arily, the naturalness of community implies, on one level, a simple anthropological
or sociological statement of fact, that is, humans, as a biological species, have ten-
ded to live in groups, for various survival-based reasons. Although important on an
empirical level, this fact carries no obvious normative implications. One should not
confuse the value of community with the fact that we do live in groups. Further,
quite obviously, not all groups are communities. Much of what we might impute
to community is not natural, but is rather a normative and artificial addition to an
anthropological detail. Community has been claimed (as indicated) by virtually every
nineteenth and twentieth century ideology. Its ideological complexion remains there-
fore kaleidoscopic. Some communitarians have even made a virtue of the openness
of the communitarian perspective to all manner of understandings. However, there
is something evasive in such ideas. As a matter of basic fact, modern communitarians
arenotopen to all understandings of community. They would be psychologically
unbalanced if they were. Further, as suggested, there is little, if nothing, that could be
described as actually organic or natural in most communities. The terms ‘organic’ or
‘natural’ carry many exciting valorizing expectations, but they are all suspect, unless
one holds a very catholic understanding of nature.
In addition, because of the sheer range of ideological claims to community, it is
clear, minimally, that there are different senses of community. On a fairly simple level
there are strong, richer, or thicker senses of community and much weaker, thinner
senses. The thicker and stronger senses envisage deep-rooted consensual cultural,
moral, or religious values characterizing community. The human self blends and
merges into the whole community. For its critics, this idea is impossible to maintain
in an advanced industrialized society, with rapid economic change and social mobility
(Lesser et al. 1980: 243). The stronger sense of community would therefore be accused
of an unnecessary reactionary nostalgia. The weaker sense of community—which in
fact characterizes the bulk of 1980s communitarianism—makes much more tentative