Civil Society Watch

I will offer some very general reflections on why certain communitarian ideas have been raised in the national debate and why the communitarian agenda on its own cannot be the full story of what we should be doing and thinking. It strikes me that we ought to begin with the very general question: why is it that communitarianism has suddenly been appearing on the political and philosophical landscape in the way that it recently has? In trying to answer this question, I am going to do three things. I am going to begin with an anecdote, end with a slogan, and in the middle I am going to say a bit about Hegel.

My own departure from socialism occurred almost fifty years ago. In 1940 I broke with a small Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist group and for a while belonged to the Norman Thomas socialists. However, by the time I returned from service in the army in 1946, I was convinced that the idea of socialism, at least for the United States, was no longer something I could really support. I retained very warm feelings for Norman Thomas, and felt a strong moral continuity with his concept of democratic socialism.

Nevertheless, I could no longer accept socialist economic doctrines, and since 1948 I have been something like a Truman Democrat. I take modest comfort from this long period of consistency, but I have not been happy with the attenuated moral vision that afflicts American liberalism.

Is there a common idea of the "left" in Europe and the United States? And should this idea be a "communitarian" one? Or is this "just another label"--as many people (especially in Eastern Europe) have also come to think about the common label "left" (used by both social democrats and communists)? Is there in the United States a coherent "communitarian" school of political thought, moral philosophy and even of economic analysis? Does this "communitarianism" have well-defined rules of methodology (in research) and membership (who is to be regarded as a "communitarian" and who not)? One might doubt it--even if the rumor about American "communitarianism" was not only commented on in American journals, e.g., The Public Interest (as a more or less disguised version of "socialism" or "postmodern populism"), but has also already been the occasion for articles and debates in major European newspapers, e.g., the Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.