Communities and the individual: Beyond the liberal–communitarian divide

Beyond the liberal–communitarian divide

This first section seeks to pave new philosophical avenues that go beyond the liberal–communitarian divide. Michael Walzer argues that liberalism with its emphasis on the human rights of life, liberty and property tends to give rise to capitalist oligarchies with strong inequalities. However, communitarianism stressing obligations rather than rights might and actually does sacrifice too much of individual liberty.

Therefore, Walzer pleads for a middle ground between liberalism and communitarianism that he identifies in social democracy. Social democracy requires, on the one hand, a strong redistributive state that presupposes a kind of given national community with forms of solidarity among its members. On the other hand, a social democratic state does not intervene in civil society and the economy and grants the full range of entrepreneurial and associative freedoms.

Yet, Walzer is aware that social democracy does not sublate the existing tension between freedom and equality. State and civil society pull into opposite directions. A strong state weakens civil society, as much as a strong civil society undermines the state. Therefore, Walzer is much in favour of a strong dialectic between employers and employees, capitalists and working class within civil society to realize the ever fully achieved promise of social justice.

Sudipta Kaviraj suggests that the difficulty to go beyond the liberal–communitarian divide might be related to the very concept of community. Once the transition from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society), that Ferdinand Tönnies so forcefully describes, is completed during modernity and most people left the idyllic village from the Breughel paintings for the anonymous city, what remains of the ideal of the community? Kaviraj shows, reconstructing the radical tradition from Hegel to Marx, how difficult it is for modern individualist thought to find a place for community. The two key concepts of modernity, freedom and equality, are in fact both quite irreconcilable with community.

Hegel stands in the social democratic tradition lined out by Walzer here above. The freedom in civil society needs to be counterbalanced by a strong, regulative state. But the question is where in a deeply divided liberal society of corporations, estates and eventually social classes a sense of community could arise. Kaviraj argues that ‘capitalist economies and bureaucratic states bind human beings and classes in a common framework of institutions which colonize their lives – but, without producing any shared – communal – experience’. Interestingly, Hegel locates solidarity in the corporations and not society as a whole and to some extent anticipates the idea of class consciousness or, in his case, estate consciousness, the necessity of social movements in a liberal society already pointed out by Walzer. A liberal society therefore might have more place for social identities and identity politics than community as such.

Yet, also communism, the most radical modern conception of equality, leaves little room for community. In a communist state class consciousness and in fact any kind of group consciousness is supposed to disappear with the socialization of the means of production. Real equality stands at the antipodes of identity politics. But it is unclear how something thicker than just relations of production could arise in a communist state. Kaviraj concludes that

the socialist tradition deplored the degradation of community under capitalism, and stressed its need, but, paradoxically, did not think of any other device for the realization of community except the state. Production of the affect of community by the abstract apparatus of the state is not a plausible idea.

Adam Seligman does not want to give up on the ideal of the Breughel village. He believes that the only viable and possible form of community is the one described by Walzer: In a community ‘men and women are already together – if not politically then culturally, linguistically, religiously – and have been together for a long time. They constitute a people or a nation or perhaps a cluster of peoples who have inhabited the same territory for centuries’. Communities are not the result of a political process or will, a modern construction that fulfils certain functions, but historically given, not up to any political experiment, be it in the name of freedom or equality.

As a consequence, Seligman disagrees that modernity has put an end to Gemeinschaft in favour of Gesellschaft: ‘We believe that both continue to exist concomitantly’. On the contrary, ‘our contemporary world is characterized by identity politics and demands for recognition put forward by many different groups – religious, ethnic, and tribal, as well as those organized around sexual preference – the emergence of which has revealed the limits of the modern approach and highlighted the need, whether we like it or not, to accommodate group belonging and identity in the shared sphere of our public culture’.

However, Seligman is aware that community, despite our human need for belonging and roots, ‘is also, often enough, oppressive’. And he repeats, ‘often it is oppressive and restrictive’. Therefore, he asks how we ‘can articulate a politics of belonging – which we recall, always embraces some exclusionary element – without succumbing to the rhetoric of the extreme right both at home and abroad’.

As a first point, Seligman suggests that the ‘wide-spread revival of exclusionary, xenophobic, self-referential politics and ways of life’ must be understood as a reaction to the continuous deprivation of communal life forms through the global triumph of the disruptive human rights discourse. ² Accordingly, ‘it is strange and rather self-defeating for those who oppose these developments to respond by ever more stridently advocating those very policies whose political ascendancy has in fact led to the current situation’.

Yet, communities might be and remain oppressive quite independent from the modern assault on community and belonging. As a second solution to the well-known communitarian problems of freedom and tolerance, Seligman therefore proposes that ‘we must henceforth produce our social classifications of the other within the crucible of particular experience, rather than through abstract schema including those of human rights’. In practice, this means that communities need not to seek common grounds that might be given by their common humanity, but have to share the experience of their difference, attending for example each other’s rituals.

Ramin Jahanbegloo shares Seligman’s scepticism with regard to liberalism and a theory of rights, although he recognizes that they might provide important resources in the fight against discrimination and oppression. However, in line with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the two protagonists of his analysis of ‘individual’ and ‘community’, Jahanbegloo rejects ‘capitalism’s inherent Darwinian principle of “the survival of the fittest”’ and the ‘individualistic and utilitarian vision of self-interest which is associated with the social and economic evolution of modern capitalism’.

In place of individualism, Jahanbegloo puts Martin Luther King’s concept of the ‘beloved community’ that King describes as follows: ‘But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community’. It is interesting to note that both Gandhi’s and King’s approaches to the community, though highly critical of liberalism, have little in common with the communitarianism defended by Seligman. Though both might agree that communities are historically given entities, ‘where there is no such thing as “nobodiness”’ (King) and in which duties might come before rights, they do not trust the existing ethical systems of communities and propose instead a ‘revolution of values’ and insist on the ‘spiritualization of politics’.

Communities are riddled with injustices and inequalities and therefore there must occur ‘fundamental changes in the moral and political attitudes’ of its members. A process of ‘spiritualization’ based on the Gospel in the United States and Hinduism in India as well as a politics of self-reliance are supposed to bring about those necessary acts of self-transformation, where ‘the individual’s sense of responsibility to community and concern for its welfare are at their highest’.

Communities and the individual in times of populism and the pandemic

Both the rise of populism in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the recent Covid-19 pandemic changed drastically the relationship between individuals and their communities. Despite the global character of both crises, aggravated by the problematic of climate change and global warming, many commentators tend to see the nation and a stronger form of communitarianism as a possible solution to what they consider the result of a liberal outstretch. The financial and public health crises necessitate a return to the community and national solidarity rather than just the protection of individual rights (Thierse 2021). How does liberalism respond to this challenge?

Stephen Macedo argues that the rise of populism can at least partly be explained by the decline of local and rural communities brought about by globalization. One could of course hold as Tony Blair and many like-minded liberals that globalization’s indifference to tradition and custom is no loss at all and celebrate its ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter) as moral progress. After all, it is the result of a liberal-cosmopolitan revolution that values individual freedom and autonomy and is an undeniable source of global prosperity. Yet, Macedo believes that liberals have lost sight of the fundamental value of community. Liberals have reason to defend communities not so much for their inherent value, but as valuable sources of individual freedom. It is the value of individualism that should us put communities again at the centre of our moral concern.

Macedo bases his claims on recent ethnographic research in rural US communities. These studies come to confirm that populist voters have ‘strong place-based identities’ that were ‘pre-eminent over economics’, while ‘rural consciousness’ (Katherine Cramer) cannot be boiled down and reduced to race and racism alone. Robert Wuthnow’s argument ‘is that understanding rural Americans requires seeing the places in which its residents live as moral communities’. According to Macedo, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson claim in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism ‘that their subjects’ communities are important to them, and that understanding them requires understanding community characteristics and challenges’. In short, ‘the mutuality, solidarism, neighborliness, and civic mindedness’ of rural communities should not be confused with ‘racialized resentments that are prominent in surveys of individual attitudes’.

Now the question is why liberals should attribute moral value to those subjective identities of the localist mindset and how much morality we find in those communitarian relationships. Macedo makes a consequentialist and institutionalist argument in favour of the morality of the community. First, communities are beneficial to individual well-being. Second, communities favour the development of political and democratic virtues as well as reciprocity and equality. That is, at least some of the virtues and attitudes on which liberal democracies rely are brought forth in local communities. Similar to Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007) but also Peter Singer (2016), Macedo believes that local identities do not stand in any obvious opposition to more cosmopolitan outlooks, although he clearly underlines the often racist and parochial attitudes of localism.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Seyla Benhabib fears that the rudimentary cosmopolitan and democratic principles that characterized international relations over the last decades become more and more abandoned in favour of more nationalist and authoritarian approaches. She asks: ‘Can one ever recover a sense of renewed global solidarity, after nation-states have seized on the pandemic to further militarize their borders, restrict travel, shut out refugees and asylum seekers and demonize foreigners and strangers who live within their borders? Will “vaccine nationalism” be the way of the future or will the nations of the globe move toward more intelligent forms of solidarity and sharing?’ Moreover, Benhabib agrees with Giorgio Agamben that the pandemic has accentuated a certain tendency in global politics towards using fear as a political instrument and ‘the state of exception as a normal mode of government’.

Benhabib believes that we need to review and reformulate Hobbes’ original social contract that gave rise to and so fundamentally shaped modernity and that to some extent she makes responsible for the current political pathologies. Benhabib sees in Hobbes’ behaviouristic conception of man the foundations of both unfettered capitalism but also authoritarianism, the Leviathan. Capitalism has soon given rise to colonialism and globalization and introduced a new, human-made geological era, the Anthropocene, eventually facilitating the pandemic and bringing about climate change. Whereas early materialist modern science can be said to have to a large extent legitimated these developments, Benhabib sees today ‘science denialism rather than scientific truth [to] have become a tool for expanding the ever-more rapacious growth of capitalism’. Accordingly, she argues that contemporary science needs to contribute to a new social contract that has at its centre sustainability, equality and democracy.

Also Toshio Miyake holds that the pandemic is about to aggravate existing communitarian and identitarian divisions. He analyses the case of Italy where the pandemic has triggered and exacerbated already prevalent forms of racism and orientalism targeting people with Asian background. He recounts the many local episodes of violence, prejudice and discrimination against Asians and their racialization in the Italian media after the outbreak of the pandemic in China. He exemplifies his point analysing the expression ‘cin ciun cian’ that ‘could be considered as a strategic linguistic and performative mark (it is usually shouted), highlighting crucial aspects in the essentialist overlapping of biological and cultural racialization of the “Oriental” or “yellow” other’.

As Benhabib, Miyake underlines the pernicious role that early modern science played, institutionalizing the racist discourse. However, he does not see any immediate possibility that anti-racism contributes to a new universalism. Anti-racism is trapped in two complementary kinds of communitarian essentialism. On the one hand, anti-racism often relies on some form of multicultural particularism that celebrates difference and thereby is ‘ultimately complicit in neo-essentialist racialization as a primary principle of collective othering and identity’. On the other hand, as Charles W. Mills (1999) shows in The Racial Contract, any kind of individualist social contract risks to remain racist in nature, ignoring ‘hegemonic whiteness’ and ‘the blind spot of Eurocentric perspective sustained by “white” privilege’.

Miyake proposes various solutions to this dilemma. First, Italian citizenship should be conferred on the basis of jus soli and not jus sanguinis, as it is currently the case. This would increase ‘the possibilities for expressions of mixed or multiple identities’. Second, Miyake advocates a stronger bottom-up engagement of the Asian community in Italy, referring to the ‘counter-discourses and affirmative actions by Asian-American politicians, intellectuals, organizations opposing anti-Asian racism, during and before the Covid-19 pandemic in the US’. Last but not least, he stresses ‘the crucial importance of critical self-reflexivity’, in particular with regard to the blind spot and privilege of whiteness. To conclude, in Miyake’s theory, communities play a crucial role in overhauling dysfunctional collective identities and combating racism.

The liberal–communitarian divide from a global perspective

Liberalism and individualism are still prevalently a Western history and postcolonialism tends to be rather sceptical about them and more oriented towards some form of identity politics (Maffettone 2011). But what exactly is the relationship between the individual and communities in non-Western contexts?

Lisa Anderson’s analysis largely confirms the communitarian trend in the Middle East and North Africa. ‘The myriad political expressions of social solidarity in the community of the faithful in Islam – from the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Saudi king’s role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qa’ida and ISIS – in the continuing debates about Israel’s status as the Jewish State, or in the political mobilization of Kurds in Iraq, Alawis in Syria, Berbers in Morocco, Houthis in Yemen all attest to the importance of communal identity’.

Yet, according to Anderson, the sociology of communitarianism should not be confused with an ethics of community. In her analysis, communities play merely a functional role for the individual and are not sources of normativity. Anderson claims that ‘identity formation is shaped by duress’. Referring to the work of Christian Welzel in relation to the World Values Survey, she argues that collective identities and community become particularly important in contexts of poverty and lack of welfare.

The neoliberal Washington Consensus introduced precisely this context of precariousness in the MENA region that makes identity politics such a rational choice. ‘Small wonder that most people in the region clung to communitarian networks – those relationships were a matter of survival’. ‘The fortunes of isolated individuals are difficult to imagine, much less pursue, in the absence of the stable, secure and effective state that produces and sustains the option of citizenship’.

Given her malleable and functional conception of identity, Anderson does not believe that individualism is forever lost in the Arab world. Although liberalism has historically been an elite phenomenon, embraced by the upper classes profiting from colonialism, today young people’s massive use of social media is ‘corrosive of the communitarian bonds of patrimonial authority’. As a consequence, the Arab Spring and the political turmoil in its aftermath reflect after all ‘liberal, participatory, deliberative demands for citizenship’. The outcome of this liberal–communitarian divide will also depend upon how much the liberal elite, but also the Western power brokers ‘bear witness’ to the grievances of the underclasses, instead of simply ‘championing the cause of the Enlightenment in the Arab world’.

Najib George Awad, though he endorses Anderson’s individualist stance on the Arab world, is much more sceptical about the possibility of liberal democracy in the Arab world. He does not attribute the lack of democracy to the disastrous socio-economic conditions in Arab countries, but above all to the rise of political Islam. ‘The careful and meticulous observer can easily find out that political Islam’s adoption of democracy is no more than a purely pragmatist, beneficial strategy. Their slowly growing interest in the usefulness of democracy conceals in fact an aspiration at creating alternative hegemonic, exclusivist, monolithic political systems’.

Awad’s rejection of political Islam and religion more in general in politics is based on a particular metaphysical conception of both identity and religion. Awad affirms that ‘the individuals’ religiosity is not one of the constituents of the human person’s personal identity and it should not be so. The basic constituent of human identity is: a human person’. For Awad, personal identity can never be a collective identity that binds an individual to a group of people or community. In this sense, ‘one’s religious belief is a personal, private and existential choice. It has to do only with one’s self-reconciliation and self-relation’.

At the same time, religion cannot be reduced to an individual’s will. ‘If the term “Christian” or “Muslim” defines the “me” or the “myself” truly, this will make one’s own “self” the subject and the object, that is the sole content, of the thing that is called “Christianity” or “Islam”. It implies that the person worships him/herself, he or she is the core-focus of one’s own self.

Given this radical subjectivity of identity and at the same time objectivity of religion, religious identity claims are simply meant to exclude, to be ‘a tool for otherizing and contrariety, (…) an expression of confrontational and contrasting alterity’. Therefore, only the acceptance of the existentialist predicament can help to recover democracy in the strongly religious context of the Arab world.

Chunrong Liu analyses the interesting case of community-building in post-communist China. As we have seen with Kaviraj, communism does not presume and is actually not built on any kind of pre-existing community. As a matter of fact, in China occupation-based communities, the danwei system, and neighbourhood-based communities, the Residents Committee (RS), needed to be constructed first by the socialist state in 1950s and were used ‘as an all-encompassing mechanism to secure its planned economy and sociopolitical control’. In communism, communities revealed as a useful instrument for redistribution and to tie the individual to the state, but lacked the individual commitment characteristic of historic communities.

Liu is asking the question if community-building efforts by the state after the important market reforms in the 1980s changed the nature of the communities or if they remained ‘a tool for governmentality and the extension of infrastructural power of the Party-state’. Liu is interested if the combination of political authoritarianism and market economy might give rise to something of a more liberal community, where individuals feel to have a stake.

Liu argues that market economy in fact has had a beneficial impact on communities in China, although ‘market transformation also witnessed a sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns, resulting an increased strain of urban unrest’. Community-building is still a matter of the state, initiated by the Ministry of Civil Affair (MoCA) under the name of ‘Community Service Program’, intended to ‘mediate local interest articulation, solve social problems, promote harmonious and sustainable development of politics, economics, culture and environment, improve the life quality of local residents’. Yet, the greater freedoms that a market economy entails perhaps together with an increased well-being have contributed to an ‘associational revolution’ in post-reform China. Liu concludes that ‘our observations and interviews demonstrate a pattern of “mediated spontaneity” where small groups form spontaneously with responsive grassroots engagement from the state’.

Conclusion

I believe we can conclude with three observations from these analyses. First, the Breughel village evocated by Kaviraj might be forever lost in modernity, although the human need for roots stressed by Seligman is anything but obsolete. It remains a question if traditional, nation state-based social democracy can effectively tackle the challenges of populism and global capitalism and how much of Jahanbegloo’s proposed moral perfectionism modern societies can accommodate.

Second, with the rise of populism and the pandemic, communities are undeniably playing a more prominent political role. The questions are how much any morality of local communities can avoid racism and exclusion and to what extent it stands in opposition or in continuity with more global solutions, such as a global corporate tax recently proposed by the US Secretary of Treasury, Janet Yellen. Last but not least, individual rights claims emerge also in more communitarian-oriented contexts such as the Arab world and China. The issue is if the protection of human rights is more a matter of identity, as Awad suggests, or a social achievement, as Anderson proposes.