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West Coast Publishing 1Communitarianism Good/Bad

Communitarianism Good/Bad

Communitarianism Good – State Coercion..............................................................................................................2Communitarianism Good – Individual Liberties.......................................................................................................3Communitarianism Good – Authoritarianism..........................................................................................................4Communitarianism Good – Democracy...................................................................................................................5Communitarianism Good – Economic Success.........................................................................................................6Communitarianism Good – Racism..........................................................................................................................7Communitarianism Good – Xenophobia/Exclusion..................................................................................................8Communitarianism Good – Violence........................................................................................................................9Communitarianism Good – National Disasters......................................................................................................10Communitarianism Good – Empirically Successful.................................................................................................11Communitarianism Good – Self-Regulating...........................................................................................................12Communitarianism Good – Individualism Bad.......................................................................................................13Communitarianism Good – Alternative – Rethinking.............................................................................................14Communitarianism Good – Alternative – Criticism................................................................................................15Communitarianism Good – Solves Aff Harms.........................................................................................................16

Communitarianism Bad – Individualism Good.......................................................................................................17Communitarianism Bad – Individualism Good – Nuclear War...............................................................................18Communitarianism Bad – Ineffective.....................................................................................................................19Communitarianism Bad – Already Failing..............................................................................................................20Communitarianism Bad – Collapse........................................................................................................................21Communitarianism Bad – Morality........................................................................................................................22Communitarianism Bad – Totalitarianism..............................................................................................................23Communitarianism Bad – Oppression....................................................................................................................24Communitarianism Bad – Fascism.........................................................................................................................25Communitarianism Bad – Don’t Reject..................................................................................................................26Communitarianism Bad – Privacy Protection Good...............................................................................................27Communitarianism Bad – Etzioni is Wrong............................................................................................................28Communitarianism Bad – Etzioni is Bad.................................................................................................................29Communitarianism Bad – Putnam is Wrong..........................................................................................................30


Communitarianism Good – State Coercion

1. COMMUNITIES REINFORCE LAWFULNESS AND MINIMIZE COERCIVE STATE POLICE Amitai Etzioni, Former President of American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, Winter 2004.THE RESPONSIVE COMMUNITY, p.44-45.

The most effective way to reenforce them builds on the fact that people have a very powerful need for continuous approval by others—especially those to whom they have thick bonds of attachment. These bonds, in turn, are found most readily in communities (families and voluntary associations included). Communities, then, can strengthen adherence to social norms, especially when communities endorse pro-social values. Thus the role of the police and the courts can be minimized, and the state and its coercive means are less needed to maintain social order. Law and order can be largely replaced by the informal controls of communities.

2. COMMUNITARIAN VALUES ENCOURAGE DEMOCRATIC-BASED DECISION MAKING IN THE GOVERNMENTNorton Garfinkle, Chairman of The George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, February 1997.JOURNAL OF SOCIO-ECONOMICS, p.1.

In their book The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, Berry, Portnoy, and Thomson endorse the idea of strong democracy, characterized by intensive, ongoing face-to-face deliberation, as a process for community decision-making and neighborhood/government collaboration. They found that participatory democracy "nourishes the democratic spirit of individuals [and] builds community, which in turn nurtures shared values such as compassion, tolerance, and equality . . . and transforms institutions so that they become more effective instruments of democracy." For communitarians, strong democratic participation at the community level is necessary to strengthen shared values, common purposes, and a politics based on "the good society."

3. FRAGMENTED GOVERNMENTAL INVOLVEMENT ONLY SERVES TO INCREASE HARSHER METHODS OF SOCIAL CONTROLJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991.COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 177-178.

The country’s huge size has contributed to a whole series of co-operative disproportionalities: a relatively unconcentrated business system; atomized labour and pressure group organizations; logistical as well as psychological obstacles to achieving unified national representation; and a highly pluralistic, fragmented governmental system. The institutional incompatibilities extend to the mechanisms for both social surveillance and public colloquy. Social monitoring is highly adversarial and even competitive in the sense discussed in Chapter 7. It is greatly influenced by punitive legal probes; by mushrooming, often buccaneering pressure groups; by the commercial criteria of the mass media. As for the forums, these have been singularly lacking at national levels.


Communitarianism Good – Individual Liberties

1. COMMUNITARIANISM PROMOTES DEMOCRATIC VALUES, GRANTING MORE AGENCY TO THE INDIVIDUAL IN REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACIESKevin J. Worthen, Dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, 1st Quarter 2002.BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, p.477.

In the minds of many Americans, when a person joins a group or enterprise, that person surrenders a portion of her liberty in order to enjoy other non-liberty related benefits of membership. Yet, an individual's liberty increases in some ways when she joins a group. Group membership can enhance liberty interests in at least two ways. First, being part of a group in a democratic system enhances a person's liberty by increasing the impact he can have on the political process. To use the current American vernacular -group membership gives greater "voice" to individuals. In a representative democracy like America, where campaigns and legislation are greatly influenced by organized groups such as political action committees, the ability of an individual to actually influence the outcome of political debates is increased considerably by membership in a group.

2. A COMMUNITIES VALUES AND PENALTIES FUNCTION AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO INCREASED STATE CONTROL OF RIGHTSAmitai Etzioni, Former President of the American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, February 1996. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, p.6.

Libertarians are correct in saying that if a community undergirds a norm (e.g., community members ought to attend church on a Sunday), those who violate the norm (as distinct from being exempt for an accepted reason e.g., they are ill) will come under some measure of community censure. However, while libertarians are troubled by such outcomes, most sociologists recognize community censure as a major way that communities uphold members’ commitments to shared values and service to the common good – community order. And indeed community censure reduces the reliance on the state as a source of order, a matter libertarians consider of utmost importance.

3. WHEN COMMUNAL NEEDS ARE DENIED, POPULATIONS OFTEN TURN TO MORE TYRANICAL ALTERNATIVES OF GOVERNMENT SUCH AS IN GERMANY AND FORMER USSRAmitai Etzioni, Former President of the American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, February 1996. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, p.8.

Historically, governments that provide rich legal rights to their citizens have been endangered, not when the community has demanded that those who have rights also live up to their social responsibilities, but when this was not done. The link is that rights, which impose demands on community members, are effectively upheld only as long as the basic needs of those community members are attended to. Thus, during the first third of this century when the needs of the Soviet and German peoples were denied, they supported those who would replace democratic governments with tyrannies.


Communitarianism Good – Authoritarianism

1. COMMUNITARIANISM STRIKES A BALANCE BETWEEN INDIVIDUALISM AND CIVIC ORDER, UNDERMINING AUTHORITARIANISMNicos Mouzelis, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2000. AUTONOMY AND ORDER: A COMMUNITARIAN ANTHOLOGY, p.143.

If the golden rule is applied, there can be no authoritarianism because of communal order taking repressive forms, undermining autonomy, and therefore breaking the order-autonomy balance. More specifically, Etzioni is in favor of a voluntary social and moral order that, without being contractarian, is based on an ongoing dialogue leading to communal consensus. If intacommunal dialogue avoids authoritarianism, relativism for Etzioni can be dealt with by the notion of intercommunal dialogue: respect for the values and ways of life of other communities and the promotion of open-ended dialogue between them will undermine communal isolation.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM ENSURES THAT NEITHER EXTREME LIBERALISM NOR CONSERVATISM PREVAILRussell Muirhead, Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University, Department of Government, 2000. AUTONOMY AND ORDER: A COMMUNITARIAN ANTHOLOGY, p.193-194.

Two values that “speak compellingly for themselves” are autonomy and order, the two core values of any good society. The “communitarian paradigm” is distinguished from common liberalism and conservatism, in Etzioni’s view, by its aim to secure a balance between autonomy and order, instead of exaggerating one at the cot of the other. Each is necessary, yet as David Hume says, “neither of them can absolutely prevail.”

3. STRONG COMMUNAL BONDS HELP COMMUNITIES RESIST TOTALITARIAN PRESSURESAmitai Etzioni, Former President of American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, Winter 2004. THE RESPONSIVE COMMUNITY, p.43.

As Erich Fromm put it in his Escape from Freedom, and as numerous studies of behavior in crowds have shown, isolated people tend to be irrational, impulsive, and open to demagogical appeals and totalitarian movements. One could argue that these movements have risen only in societies and periods in which social integration has been greatly weakened. In contrast, as Tocqueville and the enormous literature on civil society holds, people well-woven into communities (including families and voluntary associations) are able to resist pressures by governments and the seductive appeal of demagogues.


Communitarianism Good – Democracy

1. COMMUNITARIAN CIVICS ARE NECESSARY FOR CREATION OF INCLUSIVE COMMUNITIESHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 8.

Although community life is essential for human fulfillment, not all communities enable their members to attain that fulfillment. Inclusive communities -are to be distinguished from other forms-of community by their operative power relations, which enable all their members to participate in collective- processes affecting their lives. Any community that requires or allows some of its members to be excluded from participating in its deliberations, in effect cuts off the flow of communications without which the potential for mutual enrichment of ideas and feelings cannot be realized. Human beings need to relate to others on a sustained develop their experience of love, collaborate in the discover of truths, establish justice and expand on their opportunities for genuine fulfillment. Only inclusive communities which respect their members as having equal shares of the overall power for determining collective action, and welcome their exercise of that power, can ensure that what people need from community life will be attained in practice. In order to build inclusive communities in every sphere, and at every level of social existence, communitarian politics requires the development of citizens who can take part in co-operative enquiries determining a wide range of issues; who recognize that they share a respect for common values and accept the responsibilities these values imply; and who actively support the transformation of power relations for the common good. Such development must involve changes to the way citizens are educated, engaged in productive work for their communities, and enabled to protect themselves from the threats to their common values.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM CHALLENGES POWER STRUCTURES THAT LOCK INDIVIDUALS OUT OF PARTICIPATIONHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 26-27.

The ultimate goal of all communitarian movements is to transform social and political aspects of community life so that everyone can participate responsibly as equal citizens in shaping decisions that affect them. In place of the superficial form of democracy which, in the name of protecting rights, allows individuals in positions of power to deny their responsibilities to others, there is to be a strong, communitarian form of democracy which, in the words of Benjamin Barber, `relies on participation in an evolving problem-solving community that creates public ends where there were none before by means of its own activity and of its own existence as a focal point of the quest for mutual solutions’ (Barber, 1984, pp. 1SO-2). By anchoring politics to the pursuit of common values through co-operative enquiries, communitarian movements pose a challenge to all power structures which deny citizens a real role in shaping their communities. This applies not just to the superficial democracy favoured by individualist advocates of the free market, but also to every anti-democratic variant advocated by authoritarians. In fact, the options represented by these two groups are rejected as a false dichotomy which has dominated political thinking for too long. While authoritarianism maintains that the power to govern should rest with those who can demonstrate their absolute authority (by force; by invoking some abstract principle or holy text; or by lineage), market individualism insists instead on a conditional selection process that gives power to those who have enough resources to attract more votes than their nearest competitor for any given election. In both cases, the ruling elite claims total sovereignty over the domain it governs. Citizens, in whom the sovereignty to rule truly rests, are denied any real influence over the wide-ranging decisions made by politicians and their officials.

3. INDIVIDUALS CANNOT AVOID BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR COMMUNITY MEMBERSHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 121.

Central to the communitarian message is the notion of responsibility. How individuals behave affects the well-being of others. No citizen of an inclusive community can be allowed to entertain the delusion that responsibility cannot be properly ascribed in the world in which we live. Apart from genuine ignorance when there is no indication that a person should or could have found out about the unforeseen harm of his or her actions, and involuntary behaviour arising from the physical force of others or the psychological


disruptions within a person, there are no grounds for denying that each individual is responsible for his or her behaviour and its effects on others (for a detailed exposition of the concept of responsibility, see Tam, 1990).


Communitarianism Good – Economic Success

1. ECONOMIC SUCCESS IS DEPENDENT ON COMMUNITY PARTICIPATIONJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 200.

If balanced, sustained economic performance is sought, it seems that to desire it primarily for its own sake is unwise, even self-defeating, not to mention ethically unsound. If we seriously want it, it appears that we should want something else far more, namely a social change extending particularly, though not exclusively, to the economic system itself. We would accept that enterprise makes full practical and ethical sense only in and with as well as for community. We would acknowledge that economic health and a community renaissance are inseperable, and that of the two it is a community renaissance that would come first.

2. ECONOMIC COMPETETIVENESS IS ENHANCED BY REDUCING PUBLIC COSTS FOR COMMUNITIESAmitai Etzioni, Former President of American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, November 20, 1998. NEW STATESMAN, p.27, accessed 5/27/2006, http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/B308.html

When people live in communities, and help one another, their lives become less costly and more humane. Critics may scoff at many hundred thousands of self help groups as some kind of a New Age form of groupism. The fact is that the millions of cancer patients, former alcoholics and drug addicts. HIV infected, and others involved help one another in powerful and effective ways, which enrich their lives, make them better people and help them better the lives of others, and--reduce public costs, enhancing competitiveness. Above all, a society needs a better vision than that thousands of little cuts in social services and the amenities of life, with no defined end or limiting principles, will lead to economic well-being.

3. COMMUNITARIANISM ALLOWS FOR SUSTAINED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 190.

Economic communitarianism means more than just ending the pretence which has had such anti-communal, anti-democratic and even corrupt consequences, namely that the economic system is, or ever could be, ‘autonomous’. It means developing a social fabric in and around the economic system which would, at the very least, make such interactions as are bound to exist between economic units and government and society more open, constitutional and accountable. At best, such a fabric would be designed to facilitate fraternity, inter-institutional associateship and democratic participation whilst also nurturing a balanced, sustained form of economic development.

4. SUPPLY-SIDE EFFICIENCY IS INFLUENCED BY PUBLIC CO-OPERATION AND ENSURES ECONOMIC GROWTHJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 76.

Thus, the case for an economy-wide public co-operation goes far beyond its apparent economic utility, for example for steady growth, anti-inflation and ‘supply-side’ efficiency measures (though these things are important). It goes wider than welfare, environmental or anti-poverty objectives which public co-operation can help to promote. The case also related to effects on persons inside the system and their ethical growth.


Communitarianism Good – Racism

1. INDIVIDUALISM STRESSES “EVERY PERSON FOR THEMSELVES”, IGNORING CULTURAL AND RACIAL DISADVANTAGES IN THE LEGAL SPHEREKevin J. Worthen, Dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, 1st Quarter, 2002. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, p.480-481.

African-American males ages 15-24 are more than three times as likely to die from homicide or suicide as are their white counterparts. Over thirty-five percent of all African-American males are drug and alcohol abusers. While the problems represented by these statistics cannot all be charged to the individualistic bent of the current American mindset, in many respects, these statistics represent the natural course of a society that appears to have adopted the motto: "Every man for himself." If nothing else, the dissatisfaction expressed in the 1992 riots in south central Los Angeles reflects a culture that has abandoned the "good of the whole" as the primary societal value. Thus, as both Professors Inoue and Wyrzykowski observe, the American system is more individualistic than communitarian, and this should make a difference in how current American law is shaped to maintain the proper tension between the two competing interests.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM EXPANDS OPPORTUNITIES TO MINORITIES BY BENEFIT OF COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIPKevin J. Worthen, Dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, 1st Quarter, 2002. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, p.489-490.

But at the same time, government sponsored communities can provide some benefits that a system entirely reliant on voluntary communities cannot provide. Most importantly, local governments can provide a permanent form of community that gives "everyone, even those [like many inner-city African-American males] who do not have opportunities to participate in more intimate forms of traditional communities such as religion or family a chance to experience the benefits that accompany community membership." Government sponsorship also ensures that the community will have enough resources to implement community ideals.

3. COMMUNITY-BUILDING IN THE UNITED STATES IS UNIQUELY OPEN BECAUSE OF LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR MINORITIESWilson Carey McWilliams, Professor of Political Science at Haverford College, 2000. AUTONOMY AND ORDER: A COMMUNITARIAN ANTHOLOGY, p.118.

In the contemporary United States, however, repression is a much smaller danger to democratic liberty than fragmentation, privatization, and the conviction that collective action is hopeless. Linked by law-especially given the virtual incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment-and by market forces associated with it, local communities are relatively open societies, often to the regret of their members.


Communitarianism Good – Xenophobia/Exclusion

1. STRONG COMMUNATARIAN BONDS OPEN SPACE FOR GREATER SOCIAL INTEGRATIONPaul Lichterman, Associate Professor of Sociology and Religion at USC, 2000. AUTONOMY AND ORDER: A COMMUNITARIAN ANTHOLOGY, p.135.

People enact civic order and core values through particular community-building customs that have important consequences for the greater community. These community-building customs in themselves produce different kinds of social bonds. A communitarian imagination can sensitize us to these particular relationships through which abstract values achieve their integrative power. Different community-building customs produce different kinds of social bonds, different ways of carrying group responsibilities, different ways of enacting core values.

2. COMMUNITY EXCLUSION IS TEMPORARY, IN ORDER TO SEE WHO IS FUNCTIONING WITHIN ITJuan C. Judikis and George S. Wood, Professor at Ball State University, 2002. CONVERSATIONS ON COMMUNITY THEORY, pg.60.

With that as our fundamental vision, communities are exclusionary only in a temporary way in order to know who is and who is not functioning as a community member at any given time. Communities aren’t closed groups at all, but instead are fundamentally open groups that are always eligible for being redefined, in terms of membership, purpose, and operation.


Communitarianism Good – Violence

1. STRONG PUBLIC COOPERATION IS ABLE TO OVERCOME ANARCHY AND WARSJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 74.

First, many day-to-day acts of public co-operation already have some significance for associativeness in liberty. They help to avert sheer moral anarchy, a Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all. They put up barriers to much cheating, lying and bullying. They are far from valueless.

2. MASS COMMUNAL COOPERATION IS KEY TO STOPPING FACTIONALIST CONFLICTJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 75.

An economy-wide critical mass in public co-operation which greatly assists the cause of social control through conscience, compatibility and consent. The existence of national-level ententes, even with elitist overtones, is a decided advance on situations of sectional apartheid or factionalism where the assumption is that all the healing, harmonizing and concerting that needs to be done can, will, or even should be done by the state. That large numbers of people should practise mutuality in certain critical fields, moderating their immediate economic demands, is a benefit to democratic community, not just the economy.

3. COMMUNITARIAN IDEALS ARE NECESSARY IN ORDER TO SOLVE LONG-TERM CONFLICTS Jonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 89.

Assume at the very least that the country has moved beyond the disasters which constituted the ‘emergency’ in the first place (war, civil war, dictatorship or whatever). It would not be enough for the worst dangers or divisions to be overcome, even for the political atmosphere to be steeped in concesus. The obsession might well be with short-term management, not the building of long-term cooperation, with ‘getting the economy back on its feet’ rather than reforming its institutions and structures with some sort of sustainable economic community in view. Ideological blockages could supervene: obsessions with automatic markets or mechanical controls, or, more seductively, one-sided individualism, libertarianism or egalitarianism. These considerations suggest that an ‘ideal’ underpinning for public co-operation would have to combine the three sets of factors, in some complementary fashion. There would have to be a mixture of facilitative frameworks, emergency, and democratic communitarian ideals.

4. COMMUNITIES SUCCESSFULLY CURTAIL GANG AND MILITIA VIOLENCEAmitai Etzioni, Former President of American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, Winter 2004. THE RESPONSIVE COMMUNITY, p.39.

Mountains of data was recently reviewed and augmented by Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama, and long before them by Robert Bellah and his associates, and scores upon scores of other sociologists from Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim, and Martin Buber on. It all shows that when there is little or no community, people suffer physically (e.g., are more prone to have a great variety of major illnesses including heart attacks, ulcers, and high blood pressure, as well as recover from illness more slowly) and psychologically (e.g., are more prone to be depressed, have low self-esteem, or be disoriented). The absence of sufficient communal bonds is also a major reason why people feel detached, alienated, and powerless and either withdraw or act out in antisocial ways including joining gangs and militias (to find community) or abusing drugs and alcohol or each other.


Communitarianism Good – National Disasters

1. COMMUNITARIANISM IS NECESSARY IN ORDER TO MEDIATE NATIONAL DISASTERS: Jonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 169.

Probably more important, the analysis of chapter 9 suggests that if emergencies are not to be disappointing or even disastrous, a strong communitarian movement has to be ready in the wings. Such a movement would be the main inspiration of a political party (or parties) which occupied a focal position in parliament and which was capable of forming a government or playing a leading part in a coalition at the critical time. Historically, we observed two principal candidates for this role in Western Europe: Nordic social democracy from the 1930s onwards, and personalist Christian democracy at its initial, short-lived best; both assisted by a long-standing national ethos of democracy and political civility in certain countries.

2. HARMFUL ECONOMIC EFFECTS IN THE UNITED STATES CAN ONLY BE REMEDIED BY PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT WITH THE SYSTEMJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 178.

Organized labour has remained distinctly junior to business; it has not been integrated into enterprise, let alone national-level decision making. Industrial relations have followed a strongly market-competitive path. ‘Corporatism’ has been peripheral. Voluntary incomes policies have hardly featured. Overall, the American political economy assigns a higher-than-usual importance to competition, followed by a fairly close (though in less acknowledged ways) by government involvement and legal regulation. As to whether this underdeveloped public co-operation reflects deficiencies in structures, beliefs and emergencies, I suggest that the answer is ‘yes’.

3. PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC COOPERATION ARE KEY TO SOLVING ECONOMIC GROWTH, POVERTY, AND PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENTJonathan Boswell, Professor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, 1991. COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY: THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CO-OPERATION, pg. 187.

It is difficult to think of a major objective in the advanced mixed economies which will not call, over the coming few decades, for a lot of public co-operation. This applies to sustainable economic growth; the adoption of technological change and still more its humane application; environmental protector; pursuits of anti-squalor and anti-poverty. None of these priorities can rely solely on price systems, central controls, taxes and laws. All of them require public networks for persuasion, negotiation and consent. As for many quality-of-life issues, let alone participatory democracy, there public co-operation largely defines the objective.


Communitarianism Good – Empirically Successful

1. MARKETS BASED ON COMMUNITARIAN PRINCIPLES CAN EMPERICALLY FUNCTION JUST AS WELL AS INDIVIDUALISTIC ECONOMIES – SWITZERLAND AND JAPAN.Norton Garfinkle, Chairman of The George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, February 1997. JOURNAL OF SOCIO-ECONOMICS, p.1.

There is a general belief held by many economists that a successful economy must necessarily encourage extreme individualistic behavior. Fortunately, there are examples of successful market-oriented economies that encourage not only striving for individual material success but also encourage striving for the development and implementation of communitarian value systems. As John Kay has pointed out, economies operating on non-individualistic market-based economic principles, such as Japan and Switzerland, are no less successful in strictly economic terms than economies that operate on more individualistic principles.

2. POOR COMMUNITARIAN BONDS AND LACK OF PARTICIPATION IN CIVIL SOCIETY ENSURED THE FALL OF THE USSRAdrian Little, Political Science Professor at the University of Melbourne, 2002. THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY: THEORY AND PRACTICE, pg.111.

Thus success or failure is less a matter of politics or economic and more to do with culture. An example of this comes in Fukuyama’s dismissal of former communist regimes that, because they decimated civil society and forms of civic society, will struggle. Thus, their problems derive from their statism. In this sense the economic problems of Russia do not emanate from the embrace of free-market capitalism but the type of state organization that has historically existed.

3. ECONOMIC GROWTH AND COMMUNAL QUALITIES REINFORCE EACH OTHER – JAPAN PROVESKevin J. Worthen, Dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, 1st Quarter, 2002. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, p.477.

Thus, Professor Wyrzykowski informs us that, despite the rejection of communism, socialism retains "an attractive set of promises, at least for major sections of society." Professor Inoue likewise observes that the economic growth resulting from Japan's "communal character" has in turn "caused Japan to reproduce or even reinforce [this] character." Clearly, both nations have found something attractive in their communitarian heritage.


Communitarianism Good – Self-Regulating

1. THE AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR LEGAL RIGHTS IS ABLE TO INHERENTLY COMBAT EXCESSIVE ENTRENCHMENT ON INDIVUALISMAmitai Etzioni, Former President of the American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, February 1996. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, p.6.

For instance, national service, to the extent that it fosters social bonds and shared normative conceptions, serves as an antidote to excessive individualism, and the Bill of Rights serves as an antidote to excessive collectivism. This perspective leaves behind the libertarian-communitarian debate that dominated the 1980s: whether a group of individuals should have a shared concept of the common good. Instead, this view focuses on the scope, power, and content of such concepts, taking for granted that they are, and ought to be, defining elements of communities.

2. JAPAN AND POLAND PROVE THAT THOSE INVOLVED IN STRONG COMMUNITIES ARE ABLE TO OVERCOME POTENTIALLY NEGATIVE ASPECTSKevin J. Worthen, Dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, 1st Quarter 2002. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, p.479.

Similar observations by other western philosophers, modern theorists, and the author of Genesis provide powerful support for the position that communities are essential to human happiness. Consequently, group membership not only facilitates liberty, it is ultimately essential to it. The continuing communal nature of both Poland and Japan would seem to lend some support to this conclusion. Despite the recent recognition in these societies that overemphasis of community values can be destructive, members of both societies appear to be extremely hesitant to eliminate communitarianism.

3. AMERICAN VALUE SYSTEMS ARE ABLE TO BALANCE OVERREACHING COMMUNITARIANISMAmitai Etzioni, Former President of the American Sociological Association, Retired Professor at Columbia University, February 1996. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, p.7.

The American tradition is a mixture of the two formulations and of a quest for “corrections” when one formulation becomes too strong. The fact that both individualism and communal bonds are part of the American experience is well reflected in our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution contain statements such as “[W]e mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred trust”; “We have appealed to their [the British] native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations”; and “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,… promote the general welfare…”


Communitarianism Good – Individualism Bad

1. MARKET INDIVIDUALISM ACTS AS A CANCER ON THE COMMUNITY--THE SUBORDINATION OF CIVIC DUTY TO SELFISHNESS IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF MARKET OPPRESSIONHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 3-4.

What lies at the heart of the communitarian objection to market individualism is the latter's cancerous effects on community life. Human beings who are in control of more economic resources than others are able to set the agenda for everyone from a privileged bargaining position. They can make substantial private `donations' to those in government; they can distort public opinion by buying control of the media; and they can subdue all those who are dependent on the employment, investment or purchases they offer, by threatening to withdraw them. Others have to conform to their demands, or risk losing the income they need to look after themselves and their families. So out of fear and insecurity, people work under greater stress and for longer hours, which in turn leads to the neglect of children by overtired parents, to family breakdowns, and to a dwindling sense of responsibility for the well-being of others (Etzioni, 1995b; Young and Halsey, 1995). Selfishness becomes a moral creed. Individuals are encouraged at every turn to put their own interests first, and to demand the freedom to make their own choices regardless of the implications for the civic order. Like an infected cell, the ethos of putting the needs of oneself above the needs of others spreads to every aspect of social life, and-the ability of communities to rely on their members' readiness to give support to each other is gradually destroyed from within (Marquand, 1988; Selbourne, 1994).

2. “LEVEL PLAYING FIELDS” ARE ILLUSORY--THE AFFIRMATIVE CANNOT CREATE SIMILAR ACCESS TO PRIVACY RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE BECAUSE OF THEIR DIFFERING STATUSHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 5.

The claim that, by establishing am economic `level playing field', everyone would have equal freedom, playing by the same rules, to pursue their own interests distorts social reality on two counts. First, the rules are not neutral. They are geared to benefit those good at the economic game of market transactions. Those who might otherwise score highly in non-economic terms are simply told that their game does not count any longer. It is analogous to a federation of basketball players imposing the rules of their game on the players of all other sports, on the grounds that it would be unfair, for example, for football players to have larger teams and be able to use their feet, and so on. When players of other sports demand that, in return, basketball players should play to their rules, they are told that, for the sake of fairness and efficiency, there should be just one set of rules for everyone. Second, being forced to play a game for which one has not developed the necessary skills means, in the real world, being relegated to the lower social divisions. This is not so much a matter of comparative competitiveness as a question of how power is structured to the permanent disadvantage of those whose abilities are not readily translatable into material wealth. No amount of pseudo-scientific economic modeling can legitimise such structures (Ormerod, 1994).

3. EXCESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM ALLOWS ONLY THE POWERFUL TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM DANGER--COMMUNITARIAN INCLUSION SOLVES THISHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 114.

Education develops the abilities of citizens, and productive work gives them the resources, to live as effective members of inclusive communities. However, the pursuit of common values can be undermined by a wide range of factors. To enable citizens to defend themselves against these threats and dangers, citizenship must incorporate a system of protection for all. Such a system needs to be based on a common identification of the factors from which we are to be protected. In an individualist model, there are only personal interests. People may bargain about the possible gains and concessions inherent in the varying threats and opportunities relating to their interests, but they cannot work towards a common recognition of what the dangers are for all of them. What results is a series of protective arrangements that would favour those in a stronger position to drive a harder bargain. This may range from the deployment of policing resources to protect the wealthiest, to health initiatives which address the anxiety of the well-off, rather than the sufferings of those too poor to pay towards any system of health care.


Communitarianism Good – Alternative – Rethinking

1. MINOR CONCESSIONS TO THE COMMUNITY WILL NOT SUFFICE--FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES IN OUR APPROACH TO PRIVACY POLICY ARE REQUIREDAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 4-5.

Moreover, I shall try to demonstrate in the following pages that what is called for are not some limited, ad-hoc concessions to the common good, extended if and when a specific and strong case can be presented that privacy must be curbed. What is required is a fundamental change in civic culture, policymaking, and legal doctrines. We need to treat privacy as an individual right that is to be balanced with concerns for the common good-or as one good among others, without a priori privileging any of them. Discussions about privacy (and other rights) often center on a particular new technology or social measure that violates privacy and hence, it is argued, should be rejected. For example, when civil liberties groups learned recently that parents at work now may watch their children play in child care centers on their desktop computers, these groups objected on the ground that the cameras violate the privacy of the staff. However, as I see it, this claim is merely the beginning of a necessary dialogue on the subject. The next step is to ask whether the gains to the children, the parents, and the community justify whatever loss in privacy is entailed. (Note that the staff are informed about the presence of the cameras.) Even the First Amendment, often consid-ered the most absolute right of them all, does not trump all other considerations; shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is not a protected form of speech-unless, of course, there is indeed a fire, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reminds us. Privacy should be treated with similarly high, but not unbounded, respect. We must re call that both ethics and public policies often entail not a choice between good and evil or right and wrong, but rather the much more daunting challenge of charting a course when faced with two conflicting rights or goods. This book seeks to contribute to that effort by sorting out the conflicting claims of the right to privacy and the needs of public safety and public health.

2. CHANGING ATTITUDES ABOUT COMMUNITIES ARE CRITICAL TO STOPPING OPPRESSIONHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 7.

What communitarians advocate is the transformation of prevailing attitudes and conditions in society in order to build inclusive communities which respect all three principles. This means that questions about what collective action is to be taken for the common good are not to be left either to political elites who are rarely answerable to their fellow citizens (perhaps once every four or five years), or to individuals in the marketplace, but are considered through informed community discussions. Questions about values are not allowed to be hijacked by authoritarians who want to impose their views on others, or to be ignored in the name of liberal neutrality, but are dealt with by citizens themselves deliberating over what values and responsibilities they share. It also means that power relations are not to be protected or altered for the exclusive benefit of any particular religious, racial, gender, or socioeconomic group, but they are to be continuously revised to approximate the conditions wherein all citizens can play a constructive part in applying collective power in pursuit of common values. People live in overlapping communities, with varying degrees of emotive ties and subject to different power relations. These communities may range from an extended family, a school, a neighbourhood, a research society, a professional group, a co-operative or a business enterprise, to a region, a country, an international association or a global network. The memberships of some of these groupings are voluntary, but others are largely determined by external circumstances. In both cases, it is operative power relations that shape the interactions of community members. Those who find themselves in oppressive power relations will suffer either moral degradations as oppressors, or ill-treatment as the oppressed. This may occur in an authoritarian state where those in control dictate to the rest how they should live; in an anarchic labour market, where individuals with little bargaining power have to bow to the demands of employers; in hierarchical organizations, where directives from above are not to be questioned; or in a family, where a woman can be beaten for disagreeing with her husband. Oppression can take diverse forms, and the pain and alienation it causes may vary in different cases. But oppression is, unavoidable if the potential for community life is not safeguarded by communitarian principles.


Communitarianism Good – Alternative – Criticism

1. ENGAGING THE KRITIK SPREADS COMMUNITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESSHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 59.

So while young people's different interests and technical abilities may lead them to specialize in different subjects, the underlying objective of teaching, whatever the combination of subjects, should contain a core component of stimulating and supporting the growth of the young people's imaginations. By applying their imaginations constructively to the common values of communities, the solidarity of those communities and the development of their members would be strengthened. In contrast to the strengthening of closed communities, which inhibits individuality for the sake of submissive conformity, and alienates other communities, this form of strengthening would allow individual citizens to use their own initiative in a framework that best guarantees the realization of the good for all. More specifically, the cultivation of imaginative appreciation of the four general values provides a measure of the effectiveness of communities in carrying out their educative role. To be effective, education in all its forms must enable successive generations of citizens to pursue those values in every aspect of life.

2. VOTING NEGATIVE VALIDATES DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITARIANISMHenry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 63.

The shift to greater value-orientation in education can be helped by applying the approach of co-operative enquiry more extensively to teaching. Unlike authoritarian values, which are imposed, communitarian values can only become the shared values of each new generation of citizens if they participate in examining and developing those values in the context of their own experiences. It is the development of such an approach which should form the focus of what is often described as `citizenship education'. Citizenship cannot, and should not, be packaged as a stand-alone subject alongside history, mathematics, chemistry and so on, and taught in addition to the other subjects. Learning to become an effective member of an inclusive community involves the development of attitudes and abilities which must come through the whole educative experience. This experience should not be confined to classroom teaching either, but needs to be extended to all interactions between educators and the young (Lemming, 1994; Fogelman, 1996). The moral vacuum left by academic relativism has meant that any talk of developing the `right kind' of citizens through education is treated with suspicion. Rather than risk putting forward a model that could be criticized for supporting a particular authoritarian vision of control, a more superficial form of introduction to citizenship could be considered as a safe substitute. Young people may be encouraged to do a little voluntary work, find out about the availability of public services of interest to them, donate money to charities, and hold mock political debates which mirror outmoded political systems (Haste, 1993).

3. THE BALLOT CAN TEACH DEBATERS CIVIC VIRTUE Henry Tam, Chair of UK Communitarian Forum, COMMUNITARIANISM, 1998, p. 64.

Matthew Lipman's work on developing the `Community of Enquiry' approach in the teaching of children provides an example of how young people can be taught to expand their understanding of an issue through shared enquiries with others. By following a structured discussion format, children come to understand better why certain ideas and principles should be believed, and also why in some cases it is necessary to recognize that there is no definite answer. Lipman's work, not surprisingly, draws heavily on the ideas of Dewey and Peirce. Instead of positing a set of truths on any subject for children to receive passively, the children themselves are encouraged to participate openly in determining what would or would not be an acceptable claim (Sutcliffe, 1995; Healy, 1996). It is important to note that such processes do not leave their participants thinking that they can legitimately cast doubt on anything they individually may wish to reject. On the contrary, the processes introduce them to the epistemological reality that knowledge is embedded in discursive communities, and knowledge claims should therefore be evaluated and, where appropriate, modified in the context of co-operative enquiries with other community members. As a result, they are able to differentiate more clearly between what they can rely on as a guide to practice and what they cannot. Children and young people need to appreciate that guidance on moral behaviour is based on the cumulative experiences of past generations, and that it is the duty of the present generation to develop it


further where there is sufficient evidence and reason to do so. This allows them to take ownership and responsibility for acting in accordance with moral guidance, and not seek to avoid responsibility whenever coercive sanctions are absent (Pybus and McLaughlin, 1995).


Communitarianism Good – Solves Aff Harms

1. POLICIES TREATING UNWANTED SIDE-EFFECTS OF PRIVACY INVASION ARE BETTERAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 13-14.

Lastly, measures that treat undesirable side effects of needed privacy-diminishing measures are to be preferred over those that ignore these . Thus, if more widespread HIV testing and contact tracing are deemed necessary to protect public health, efforts must be made to enhance the confidentiality of the records of those tested. These records need to be particularly well protected to ensure that individuals testing positive will not lose their insurance, employment, or housing or otherwise suffer discrimination. For the same reasons, a communitarian society may have to increase penalties for such violations of privacy.

2. THE COMMUNITARIAN CONCEPTION OF PRIVACY TREATS PRIVACY AS SOCIETAL LICENSE RATHER THAN AS AN INALIENABLE RIGHTAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 196.

There is no widely accepted communitarian conception, let alone definition, of privacy. I suggest that a sound communitarian treatment of privacy views it as the realm in which an actor (either a person or a group, such as a couple) can legitimately act without disclosure and accountability to others. Privacy thus is a societal license that exempts a category of acts (including thoughts and emotions) from communal, public, and governmental scrutiny. For instance, contemporary American society largely exempts from scrutiny most acts that occur inside the home, especially the bedroom, and to a lesser extent those that occur within the automobile. Exceptions include child abuse, domestic violence, and illegal drug use. Even in these situations, respect for privacy typically requires that the state act only after the consequences of acts that took place in the home or auto have become visible outside the space exempted from scrutiny-for example, when a violent fight inside a house is heard from the outside, or when a child comes to school or a physician's office showing clear signs of abuse.

3. COMMUNITARIANISM IS NECESSARY TO CHECK EXCESSES OF INDIVIDUALISMAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 5.

If we take as our starting point the general principle that a good society crafts a careful balance between individual rights and the common good, the next step is to apply this principle to actual societies. We can then ask whether a particular society, in a given period, leans too far in one direction or the other. In a society that strongly enforces social duties but neglects individual rights (as does Japan, for instance, when it comes to the rights of women, minorities, and the disabled), strenuously fostering the other side in order to achieve balance would entail the expansion of autonomy. Indeed, even in the West, when John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill wrote their influential works, and for roughly the first 190 years of the American republic, the struggle to expand the realm of individual liberty was extremely justified, and there was little reason to be concerned that social responsibilities would be neglected. However, as communitarians have repeatedly noted, the relationship between rights and responsibilities drastically shifted in American society between 1960 and 1990 as a new emphasis on personal autonomy and individualism gradually overwhelmed other societal considerations. As a result, recognition of the need to rein in the excesses of individualism has grown in the 1990s. I show in this book that this much needed social correction-this balancing of rights with a fresh emphasis on responsibilities-has yet to be brought to bear on privacy issues.


Communitarianism Bad – Individualism Good

1. THE COMMUNITARIAN ARGUMENT FOR THE SHIFT OF RIGHTS TO A COMMUNITY BASED STANDARD IS ILLOGICAL AND WILL ALWAYS FAIL BECAUSE THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WANT BOTH COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTSKelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

The Communitarian pitch to balance rights and responsibilities thus masks an attempt to shift the basic nature of rights and responsibilities from individuals to the community, i.e. to the state. They can always refer to the clause in the Preamble that says to "promote the general Welfare" -- regardless of whether particular individuals want their welfare promoted by the state, as it sees fit, or not. Unfortunately, the people who often do seem to be screaming about their rights all the time, seem mostly to want to have it both ways: to have the liberties of individualism and to impose liabilities on the community for the errors in judgment and action that they make. What needs to be made clear to people is that they cannot have it both ways. The Communitarians, in turn, don't seem to understand that there is a choice: they would just as soon strip individuals of their liberties every time there is a conflict with communal power and liability.

2. THE BEST WAY IS COMBINING BOTH INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY RIGHTS TO CREATE A SYSTEM THAT IS MOST FAIR FOR ALLBernard V. Brady, professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, Feb 13, 2002. The Christian Century, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

In the end I want to have it both ways, and communitarianism only helps me to think about society one way. I want a stronger sense of community and general responsibility, yet I think that communities can exhibit the same vices as persons. Communities can be and often are driven by excessive "self-interest, self-indulgence, permissiveness and a sense of entitlement" in ways that are threatening to the well-being of other communities. Intracommunitarianism must become a necessary element of communitarianism if the movement is to offer an adequate account of the moral order.

3. THERE IS NO REASON THE COMMUNITARIAN CONCERNS CANNOT BE MET IN A LIBERAL SYSTEMWill Kymlicka, Professor of philosophy at Queen's University, 2002. CONTEMPORARY POLITIAL PHILOSOPHY: AN INTRODUCTION, p. 227-228.

It is unclear which if any communitarians hold the view consistently. It is not a plausible position, since we can and do make sense of questions not just about the meaning of the roles we find ourselves in, but also about their value. Perhaps communitarians do not mean to deny that; perhaps their idea of our embeddedness is not incompatible with our rejecting the attachments we find ourselves in. But then the advertised contrast with the liberal view is deception, for the sense in which communitarians view us as independent of them, and the sense in which communitarians view practical reasoning as a process of ‘self-discovery’ incorporates the sense in which liberals view it as a process of judgment and choice. The differences would be merely semantic. And once we agree that individuals are capable of questioning and rejecting the value of the community’s way of life, then the attempt to discourage such questioning through a ‘politics of the common good’ seems an unjustified restriction on people’s self-determination.

4. COMMUNITARIAN CONCERNS CAN BE BEST MET UNDER A LIBERAL SYSTEMWill Kymlicka, Professor of philosophy at Queen's University, 2002. CONTEMPORARY POLITIAL PHILOSOPHY: AN INTRODUCTION, p. 227-228.

So I think the communitarian critique of the liberal belief in rational revisability can be answered. The communitarian conception of the embedded self is not a plausible conception of the self-understandings of most citizens in Western democracies. It may be surprising, therefore, that many liberals have attempted to at least partially accommodate the communitarian position, and to show that people who accept the


communitarian conception of the self can still accept a (reformulated) version of liberalism. I will discuss this liberal reformulation – known as ‘political liberalism’ – below.


Communitarianism Bad – Individualism Good – Nuclear War

1. CULTIVATION OF INDIVIDUALISM IS CRITICAL TO STOPPING THE NUCLEAR THREATGeorge Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 42.

By continuously expanding the scope of governmental activity, these tendencies work against one of the principal constituent elements of individualism, the idea that each person should be subject to the smallest possible amount of government regulation that goes beyond insuring the obligation that binds individuals as well as the government: the acknowledgment of and respect for rights. Indeed, the protection of rights and the restriction of governmental activity are jointly at the service of a free life. One's life is not supposed to be arranged or designed by government nor have meaning or coherence given to it by government; nor is one supposed to be helped too much, or saved from oneself, or looked at closely or continuously. One is supposed to be free, autonomous, self-reliant. Individual rights are not always abridged when government acts to substitute itself for the individual and tries to lead our lives for us. Government may abide by the constitutional limitations on itself, and nevertheless fill up too many vacant places in a person's life, thus leaving too little raw material out of which a person develops on his or her own. This ideal of free being is under relentless attack; but the attack could no score its successes unless we cooperated In cooperating we forget the ideal, or I et preliminary aspects of it like the pursuit of interests and self-regarding claims, exhaustively define the whole ideal. The very notion of rights becomes bloated because of obsession with interests and claims and turns false to itself. Resistance must be offered from within the ideal, not from collectivism or communitarianism, which are both on the side of making a people systematically docile and ready for mobilization. Even if nuclear weapons did not exist, and there were no possibility of extinction, the fight against state-activism would have to be carried on. But the link between state-activism and extinction suggests itself, and a cultivated individualism must be enlisted against such activism and in behalf of avoiding massive ruin and the possibility of extinction.

2. INDIVIDUALISM IS CRITICAL TO REVERSING THE STATE’S ATTEMPT TO NUMB US TO THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR EXTINCTIONGeorge Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 36.

Common to all these ideas is what Foucault refers to as the problem of the modern plebs, the solution to which is the creation of order by the training and enlistment of energies that threaten gross disorder. Indeed, the overwhelming passion in these ideas is a passion for order, for stillness, for regularity, for predictability, for a coherence that can exist only as the result of a drastic purification of human inclinations and actions, and a continued exercise of fundamentally undemocratic authority in every area of society. One might think that there was a latent death wish in this passion, something akin to the death wish present in utopian thought. But apart from this direct if dreamlike connection between the sources of state-activism and the will to deathlike stillness, I would suggest that the various encroachments of state-activism help to do the awful work of subtly, indirectly, but inexorably emboldening officials to think with an ever deepening seriousness the nuclear thoughts they express publicly, and of conditioning people to depend, comply, go along, trust, even to the extent of accepting policies that threaten massive ruin and the possibility of human and natural extinction It is hopeless suddenly to reverse these tendencies of state-activism in the United States, or other nuclear de democracies There may be something quixotic in even thinking to challenge them. But if there is any resource at all- in regard to the United States-it lies in the renewal of that component of individualism that prizes noninterference in the life of the individual for the sake of his or her exploratory self-making, for the sake of what I call democratic individuality. Even short of the full expression of that ideal, the challenge could be in the name of what Mill calls (in the first chapter of On Liberty) individual sovereignty. We would call it a modest free being. If individuals do nothing truly and gloriously individualist; if indeed some of them behave foolishly or disreputably, government must nevertheless not treat them as if they were only machines made to function smoothly. It must treat them without such contempt, if it is not to dwarf them. Mill's theory of individual sovereignty is all the more relevant in the nuclear age: the dwarfing inherent in state-activism serves nuclear statism.


Communitarianism Bad – Ineffective

1. COMMUNITARIANISM OFFERS NO REAL SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International, July 26, 1996. SLATE MAGAZINE ONLINE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2380

Communitarianism was supposed to be a third way, neither liberal nor conservative, that charted a new course for philosophy and politics. But as this primer suggests, it has become a collection of meaningless terms, used as new bottles into which the old wine of liberalism and conservatism is poured. Community means one thing if you are a conservative and another if you are a liberal--the same with civil society, and even bowling. Call it politics as usual.

2. THE MODERN COMMUNITARIAN MOVEMENT IS POLITICALLY INSUBSTANTIALRobert S. Boynton, teaches magazine journalism at New York University, July 14, 2003 THE NATION ONLINE, accessed 5/20/06, http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030714&s=boynton

Much of the difficulty had to do with his "third way" communitarian message. The political blood-sport of the Clinton era made Etzioni's plea for nonpartisanship sound naïve, if not disingenuous. If Clinton could gut welfare while simultaneously praising communitarianism ("You are my inspiration," Clinton told Etzioni one New Year's Eve), maybe the movement was more style than substance. Were communitarian ideas merely protective coloration for politicians of the left and right? Was a movement admired by Bill Bennett, Dick Morris and George W. Bush itself worth admiring?

3. COMMUNITARIANISM IS AN ATTEMPT TO COMBINE SEVERAL INCOMPATABLE SYSTEMS CREATING AN INEFFECTIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENTPatrick Briley, Independent Researcher for the US Government, September 20, 2004. NEWSWITHVIEWS.COM, accessed 5/22/06, http://www.newswithviews.com/Briley/Patrick2.htm

The “Third Way” of which Keyes spoke is also known as communistarianism, a belief system that attempts to combine incompatible value systems like communism, capitalism, socialism and Christianity into a false world value system. “Third Way” Communitarianism places the importance of a global society ahead of the inalienable rights of the individual and citizen of any one country. Communitarianism is the philosophy behind an emerging socialistic world government system.

4. THE COMMUNITARIAN CLAIM THAT WE CAN SIMPLY TREAT EACH OTHER AS UNIQUE IS TOO WEAK A CONCEPTION TO ALLOW SOCIETY TO FUNCTION CORRECTLYBernard V. Brady, professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, Feb 13, 2002. THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

The lingering problem seems to be not only that some of our communities are weak, but that we also have fault lines between communities. Mound the globe communities are clashing. People of different races, nationalities and ethnic and religious identities have a very difficult time living together. When Etzioni notes that a major defect of communities is that by nature they exclude, he is only half-correct. Not only do they exclude, but they tend to define themselves against other communities. The perception that "we are not like them" or "they are not like us" seems to be the glue holding together some communities. Etzioni argues that "if we treat one and all as unique persons, we avoid community-based exclusivity." I think it is more complicated than that, and I think "unique" is too weak a word.


Communitarianism Bad – Already Failing

1. THE COMMUNITARIAN MOVEMENT IS FAILING IN THE STATUS QUOKelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

While movements like Communitarianism are trying to replace responsibility to self with responsibility to the state, on the grounds that this is responsibility to others, the very idea of personal responsibility has been damaged by the idea that the causes of people's actions are exculpatory (i.e. absolve us of responsibility) before the law. It has become rather common lately both to excuse the perpetrators of crime because they couldn't help themselves (because of "anger," etc.) and to blame some remote conditions (poverty, capitalism, child abuse, television, drug abuse, pornography, video games, etc.) for the perpetrator's actions.

2. THE COMMUNITARIAN DESIRE FOR PAST TIMES IS A DESIRE FOR A COMMUNITY THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO TODAY’S SOCIETYRichard Reeves, former chief political correspondent for The New York Times, April 2, 2001. NEW STATESMAN, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP 5/20/06

Putnam is grieving for a certain kind of community that may not be relevant to the modern world. He is suffering from a kind of Neighbourhood Watch nostalgia. He ends up worshipping a world in which men did boring jobs while women baked cookies at home. He worries that people don't even know who their neighbours are. But all that neighbours have in common is a postcode. People certainly know who their co-workers are, and they have much more in common with them. Look at the success of TV shows such as Ally McBeal, which is all about a community in the workplace. Putnam acutely observes the decline of old forms of community, but is blind to the new ones being constructed under his nose.

3. THERE IS NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE COMMUNITARIAN CLAIMS THAT AMERICA IS LESS CIVIC MINDED Richard Reeves, former chief political correspondent for The New York Times, April 2, 2001 NEW STATESMAN, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

Putnam is right to say that society is better if built on strong social connections and communities. But he is wrong to suggest that those communities need to be founded on a shared location, a place of worship or a PTA. There is little evidence that people are less community-minded, less associative, less concerned for the welfare of others, or less sociable, than before. We are simply using different tools in different places to express our civic leanings. And work is chief among them. We might bowl alone, but we work together.

4. THE CLAIM THAT OUR PROBLEMS STEM FROM TOO MUCH INDIVIDUALISM IS INCORRECT BECAUSE WE SEE THE SAME PROBLEMS EVEN IN CLOSE KNIT COMMUNITIESBernard V. Brady, professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, Feb 13, 2002. THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

COMMUNITARIANISM is a stimulating movement, but in the end it is unsatisfying. I agree that stronger communities, a stronger moral voice in communities and a more fully developed sense of responsibility among persons and businesses would forge a better society. I also agree that we are fundamentally social beings. But I am not convinced that the most adequate description of our social ills is that we are too individualistic. I also doubt that better community is the unequivocal remedy for our social woes. It is not enough to say that diverse American communities share some common values, for these communities too often have separate and unequal means to access and to live those values. It seems that no part of the country is without its racial tensions and other fractures in community.


Communitarianism Bad – Collapse

1. SMALL COMMUNITIES WILL INVEITABLY LEAD TO A FEDERATED SYSTEM OF COMMUNITIES THAT WILL BECOME A STATERobert F. Nagel, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Fall 2004. PUBLIUS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

Small, homogeneous, distinctive communities can, no doubt, produce fierce, deep feelings of connection. The difficulty is that the smaller and more personal the group, the less abstract the loyalty. If local communities are to compete with the national political community, they must be bound together into a territory large enough to have an abstract identity. They must contain a sufficient variety of groups and perform a sufficient range of functions that personal ties can be elevated to political identification. That is to say, among the plurality of types of attachments that constrain devotion to the national government, it is useful to have an attachment to some entity that can claim at least some kind of sovereign governmental status.

2. THE LOSS OF A FEDERATED SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE WOULD LEAD TO THE FAILURE OF ALL COMMUNITIES Robert F. Nagel, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Fall 2004. PUBLIUS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP accessed 5/20/06

In short, liberal and conservative instincts have each had the same consequence for communitarian thought. The liberal instinct in favor of uniform progressive policies has led to a general lack of interest in states that sometimes is tinged with hostility. The conservative instinct for psychological realism and against impersonality, unruliness, and weakness has led to a similar (if somewhat less antagonistic) inattention. Both optimism and pessimism, then, conspire to impoverish the debate over associational life, for it may be that a federated system is important in sustaining that life.

3. COMMUNITARIANS IGNORE THE FACT THAT COMMUNITIES ARE HELD TOGETHER BY A FEDERATED SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE Robert F. Nagel, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Fall 2004. PUBLIUS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP accessed 5/20/06

The limitations and disadvantages of political and social life in isolated communities are so obvious that the communitarian fixation on extremely local associations and institutions seems almost perverse. One explanation is that modern communitarians have been writing at a time when connections to wider communities could simply be taken for granted. Nisbet may have thought longingly about aspects of medieval life, but the local associations that he actually observed, even those in the idyllic period before World War I, were not radically isolated. They existed within states and within a nation. Nisbet, of course, had to know this in the abstract, but he was not intellectually inclined to appreciate its significance. He saw that social life in neighborhoods was threatened by the weight of Leviathan, but he largely ignored the possibility that local associations were sustained by federation.

4. THE COMMUNITARIAN MOVEMENT WILL DESTROY STATE GOVERNMENTS LEADING TO INEFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT AND A LOSS OF DEMOCRACYRobert F. Nagel, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Fall 2004. PUBLIUS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP accessed 5/20/06

None of her proposed solutions to the problem of civic apathy involves the restoration of a more vital federal system of government. Some of her ideas, including the call for political activists to rely more heavily on membership recruitment strategies and for the media to give more camera time to civic leaders and less to experts, have that hortatory ring familiar to readers of Putnam. Others, like the proposal that national election day be made a dramatic event that encourages meaningful political participation. are trivial in comparison to the scale of the trends that she describes. Amitai Etzioni does take some account of state governments but is unenthusiastic about the usefulness of moral regulation by states and downright


pessimistic about relying on them for social and economic regulation. He puts his hope for change in speculations about the utility of reinvigorating national holidays and reviving shaming rituals.


Communitarianism Bad – Morality

1. COMMUNITARIANISM DESTROYS THE ABILITY FOR ONE TO HAVE MORALS Andrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA, July 2001. ETHICS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP 20 May 2006

Finally, Etzioni's call for social control and less "permissiveness" simply has little to do with the cases discussed--which involve official state policy--and can draw little support from them. As Etzioni's own distinctions make clear, a discussion of informational privacy does not bear directly, one way or the other, on questions of moral autonomy. This book convincingly demonstrates that health and safety concerns can outweigh freedom from scrutiny. That individuals' moral judgments should systematically take second place to "shared" social values is another claim.

2. SOCIAL ENFORCEMENT WILL LEAD TO STRONG SOCIAL CONTROLS Andrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA, July 2001. ETHICS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP, accessed 5/20/06

Second, Etzioni moves too quickly from his policy arguments to the larger claim that "informal enforcement mechanisms" in the social realm "require social scrutiny but reduce the need for government control". A focus on social enforcement implies that both kinds of privacy can be infringed upon by either the state or society; we should now address not just two privacy categories (or three) but four (or six). More substantively: Etzioni assumes that social enforcement is less onerous, more respectful of individual dignity, than state power. This begs the usual Millian doubts.

3. THE COMMUNITARIAN IDEA THAT VALUE SHOULD BE DEFINED BY LAW OR THAT THE LAW SHOULD BE USED TO PROJECT MORALITY MISSES THE TRUE POINT OF LAWKelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

This also comes out in the Communitarian attitude towards the War on Drugs. Etzioni says that drugs cannot be legalized because the laws "communicate and symbolize those values that the community holds dear." Repealing the drug laws would send the message that "the community approves of people being in a drug-induced stupor." This is a common response from both Conservatives and Liberals; but it is not right. The proper role of the laws is to forbid and punish judicial wrongs (of negligence, violence, and fraud) and protect judicial rights (of person, property, and contract). The law should not be used to send any "messages," especially messages that reflect moralistic views of prudential virtues as imposed by the tyranny of the majority. The absence of drug laws does not mean that drug usage is endorsed or promoted.

4. COMMUNITARIANISM IS DEHUMANIZING BECAUSE IT TAKES AWAY ALL OF ONE’S AGENCY Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

They are profoundly dehumanizing. Holding someone responsible for their actions is to credit them with the dignity of free will, whether the effect of this is either praise or blame. The opposite is to reduce them to a mechanism -- a machine that must be fixed or a computer program that must be rewritten. They become a link in a chain, where all the links are open to our tinkering so that the chain comes out the way we would like it. (Just who the "we" is supposed to be liking it is a good question.) This is deeply depersonalizing. Criminals become rats in cages watched over by behavior modification specialists. Even the death penalty is more humane than that: at least the death penalty is the ultimate "the buck stops here" attribution of responsibility. Most arguments against the death penalty presuppose that the only real argument for the death penalty is "deterrence"; but that stacks the deck. "Deterrence" is about tinkering with causes and motivations. Death is about retribution. Whether there should be a death penalty or not, that is the point on which the arguments speak past each other: all judicial penalty must be about retribution first of all, because that is the essence of holding someone freely responsible for the crime. All other issues -- restitution, rehabilitation, remorse -- are secondary and dependent.


Communitarianism Bad – Totalitarianism

1. COMMUNITARIAN GOVERNMENTS WILL LEAD TO CORRUPTION AND EVENTUALLY TOTALITARIANISMKelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

Behind the Communitarian shift of power to the state is a certain distorted preference about what a "community" is: Communitarians distrust and dislike voluntary communities. Robert Bellah especially believes that the only true community is one created and controlled by democratic political power, which also happens to mean that of the largest political unit possible. To him, small units, whether voluntary associations or smaller units of government, do not represent enough of "the People" to properly represent the General Will (as Rousseau would have said) of the Community. This is an amazingly credulous, dangerous, and naive view of the benevolence of democracy and of large government. What it reveals is that Communitarians are not basically advocates of real community, but they are statists and collectivists who confuse their own benevolent intentions, if they were in power, with what such a government would be like operating under the incentives for corruption that are created in the sort of unrestrained and absolutist, indeed totalitarian, government that they desire.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM ESTABLISHES THE SITUATIONS NECESSARY FOR A TOTALITARIAN REGIME THAT CONTROLS AND MANIPULATES KNOWLEDGEKelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College, 2005. FRIESIAN SCHOOL WEB PAGE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.friesian.com/rights.htm

They launch the law onto a sea of hypothetical uncertainties. The causes of things are usually concealed from casual inspection. Finding them out is what science is for, and it is not surprising that it took 4500 years of human history for science to find its feet and really begin to discover the inner workings of nature. It is still a process, as Karl Popper puts it, of "conjectures" and "refutations." That is what a scientific theory is: a conjecture. Some theories, at this point, seem to be things that we can trust in with some confidence; but it is much clearer now than it was fifty years ago that science is not just a simple march from ignorance to certainty. Indeed, the insights of Popper and Thomas Kuhn are that every scientific "conjecture" inevitably contains preconceptions and prejudices that are not easily weeded from the theory. That is unavoidable. But where Bacon had wanted to say that all prejudices are bad as such and must be avoided, we can say now that, not only cannot they be avoided, but that even the lamest prejudice sometimes actually turns out to be true. In light of this, however confident or distrustful we may be of science, it is in any case a weak reed upon which to begin manipulating, punishing, exhorting, and coercing people because of theories about the causes of criminal behavior. The way that science gets used in such projects is almost always shallow and credulous in the extreme: if scientific theories or results support some political agenda, then they are simply True; but if they begin to contradict it, then suddenly science contains all these vicious prejudices and preconceptions (!) and perhaps is even wholly unreliable and discreditable because of some underlying agenda. The most amazing move is when scientific truth is seen as inherently a matter of power politics, for that leaves knowledge of causes in general as a pawn of power and political ideology -- which means we can just believe whatever we want to, given our own particular grievances with things, and then call it our "science." The tough bullet to bite is that all such triumphant or recriminating uses of science are irrelevant if the causes of behavior, apart from out and out insanity, are simply irrelevant to the law.

3. COMMUNITARIAN WAYS SIGNAL A OUTLET TO AUTHORITARIAN POWER AND CONTROLNiki Raapana, Co-Founder of the Anti-Communitarian Leauge, April 28, 2005. ANTI-COMMUNITARIAN LEAUGE WEBSITE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://nord.twu.net/acl/

Officials who follow communitarian principles have total police power now. American COPS block off neighborhoods and go "door-to-door" asking neighbors for help and information that will help them catch the "bad" neighbor next door. Today it takes at least four cop cars to arrest people accused or suspected of potential for crime. Not only are our prisons overflowing with communitarian political prisoners, our local


jails fill with victims of bizarre interventions, performed on behalf of the community at large. The Domestic Violence and Crime Acts allowed for uncountable bogus charges against innocent Americans.


Communitarianism Bad – Oppression

1. DISCUSSIONS OF HOW COMMUNITY “USED TO BE” IGNORE THE OPPRESSION OF THE PAST AND REINFORCES RACIAL AND CLASS OPPRESSIONFareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International, July 26, 1996. SLATE MAGAZINE ONLINE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2380

Ehrenhalt's book may be the best of the new literature on community, because rather than waxing poetic about community in the abstract, he describes actual communities. The result is a vivid picture showing that the strong bonds that developed in those fabled neighborhoods of yore were kindled by conditions that we might find discomforting today--fear of authority, lack of choice, and poverty. People stayed in neighborhoods, for example, because they could not afford to move, and because other neighborhoods would not accept them easily. They attended church services and neighborhood social events because small banks, schools, and other community institutions were run by a local elite that enforced a certain kind of conformity. Porches and stoops, those symbols of a vibrant social life, stopped being used as gathering places for a rather practical reason--air conditioning. Ehrenhalt himself advocates a return to the choice-free, obedient life of the 1950s, but while seductive in the abstract, it sounds more and more confining on close examination. Imagine having to go to parties with your local bank manager so that you could get a mortgage.

2. COMMUNITARIANS FAIL TO RECOGNIZE THE TRUE CAUSE OF OUR ATOMIZATION WHICH IS CAPITALISM AND MARKET ECONOMIESDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

Thus the purpose of increasing social capital is to increase the overall amount of capital by making more social capitalists. Indeed, this is Putnam’s explicit objective as evident in the title and content of his chapter “Toward an Agenda for Social Capitalists.” This specific Putnam meaning of social capital illustrates the consequences of using economic categories that derive from the dominant orthodox economic model. It also reveals his lack of awareness that the absence of togetherness may be rooted precisely in the existence of capitalism and competitiveness and their adverse effects in alienating and atomizing our citizenry.

3. COMMUNITARIANISM IS STRUCTURALLY UNABLE TO DEAL WITH OPPRESSIONDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

If he had considered this, however, he would have seen the clear contradiction between his desire for togetherness on the one hand and his call for the competitiveness that capitalism forces on its adherents on the other. Togetherness would be encouraged not by expanding capitalist relations but by its precise opposite: an expansion of anti-capitalist relations. That Putnam does not see any contradiction between his call for more capitalists (social capitalists) and his desire for more togetherness speaks volumes about the power of capitalist ideology in the United States.

4. THE MODERN COMMUNITARIAN MOVEMENT FAILS TO OUTLINE A PURPOSE FOR ITS DESIRE FOR STRONGER COMMUNITIESDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

But the other great problem with Putnam’s thesis is that his analysis of togetherness and participation completely omits the political element of purpose. In other words, what is the purpose of this togetherness and participation? Is the organization, participation, and togetherness of members of the Mafia the same as the organization, participation, and togetherness of those in the labor movement? Of course not. The purpose of togetherness (which immediately defines a group’s objectives, alliances, and adversaries) is very different in the two cases.


Communitarianism Bad – Fascism

1. COMMUNITARIANISM BREEDS MAJORITARIANISM--THE KRITIK FALLS VICTIM TO ITS OWN IMPLICATIONSMichael D'Antonio, Foundation for National Progress, MOTHER JONES, May-June 1994, Accessed, April 4, 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dantonio.html

Some civil libertarians wonder if this neocon/neoliberal fusion isn't a white male backlash in disguise. Is Etzioni just a Jerry Falwell in cap and gown? Could communitarianism be a thinking person's Moral Majority? "They are addressing real issues, and they have some feel-good rhetoric," says Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska professor whose critique of communitarianism will be published by Oxford University Press. "But there's a real threat, a danger behind the rhetoric that needs to be examined." The communitarians have it all wrong when it comes to the rights of individuals, he says. And their other proposals--moral education, preserving traditional families, clamping down on crime--are short on new ideas. "These people are supposed to be intellectuals, academics," says Walker. "But their movement is mostly just moral exhortation. They do not offer a program that will make communities stronger. Instead, they just play on fears." When Etzioni began his campaign, even the American Civil Liberties Union--the defender of rights par excellence--was uncomfortable forming a critique. During one lengthy interview, ACLU President Nadine Strossen spent much of the time acknowledging Etzioni's standing as a respected and admired scholar, before expressing her concern that Etzioni and his supporters might prove to be "majoritarians" who would trample the hard-won rights that protect people from illegal search and seizure and invasion of privacy. Looking at the communitarians' social policies--their anticrime proposals, in particular--Strossen speculated that they might curtail the rights of minorities and the poor, while leaving the rich and middle class largely unaffected.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM LENDS ITSELF TO FASCISMMichael D'Antonio, Foundation for National Progress, MOTHER JONES, May-June 1994, Accessed April 4, 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dantonio.html

Yet one person's fond wish for community leads to another's fear of repression. Americans felt a strong sense of community when they put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps in the 1940s and persecuted suspected Communists in the 1950s. "These are examples of what can happen when people believe they are responding to a crisis that threatens the community," says Charles Schultz, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and co-author with his wife Ruth of "It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America." "I was young during World War II, and I remember that 'Japs' was a very powerful word," recalls Schultz. "I didn't think twice about our country putting some of its own people--Japanese-Americans--into concentration camps, because it was at war with an enemy that put people in concentration camps. That's how powerful this force can be." The communitarians are not advocating dramatic, wholesale attacks on individual liberty. Still, Schultz is skeptical of any movement that both reflects and exploits the desire for tranquil, safe, agreeable communities.

3. COMMUNITARIANISM IS A WHITE-MALE BACKLASH AGAINST RIGHTSMichael D'Antonio, Foundation for National Progress, MOTHER JONES, May-June 1994, Accessed April 4, 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dantonio.html

Richard Larson is a lawyer with MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He sees the communitarian movement as the reaction of a white, male-dominated power structure that feels threatened by thirty years of minority rights movements. "I find this appalling," he says of the communitarian proposal for a moratorium on new rights for citizens. "You can talk about the family and individual responsibility all you want, and that's fine. But what about the basic need for a level playing field? That's what the pursuit of rights is all about. It's totally wrong to think that the job is done." Larson says the communitarians start with some erroneous assumptions, the first being that the nation is gripped by a crime wave that justifies extraordinary measures. In fact, according to FBI statistics, the national rate of violent crimes has leveled off in recent years, although many inner cities have experienced an increase. "The issue is a red herring, but it's going to be used to justify a kind of tyranny of the majority," Larson says.

http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dantonio.html


Etzioni is sensitive to the charge that he wants to return America to the 1950s, a time marked by low crime and social order as well as racism, political witch-hunts, and the frequent repression of women, racial minorities, and anyone different from the white, male norm.


Communitarianism Bad – Don’t Reject

1. COMMUNITARIANISM AGREES THAT PRIVACY INVASION MUST BE AS MINIMALLY INTRUSIVE AS POSSIBLEAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 13.

Third, to the extent that privacy-curbing measures must be introduced, a communitarian society makes them as minimally intrusive as possible. For example, many agree that drug tests should be conducted on those directly responsible for the lives of others, such as school bus drivers. Many employers, however, resort to highly intrusive visual surveillance to ensure that the sample is from the person who delivers it when in fact the less intrusive procedure of measuring the temperature of the sample immediately after delivery would suffice. To distinguish these kinds of measures-often undertaken by the government, and typically entailing changes in legal doctrine-from second-criterion treatments, I refer to them as "third-criterion interventions." The principle of limiting the intrusiveness of privacy-curbing measures is further illustrated by the example of a national database that contains the names of medical practitioners who have been sued, sanctioned, or otherwise penalized for crimes, misconduct, or incompetence. The National Practitioner Data Bank allows hospitals that are considering whether to grant "privileges" (the right to practice in the hospital) to a physician to conduct limited background checks on him or her. However, the data bank discloses only that a physician has been subject to malpractice litigation or has been a party to an out-of-court settlement or adverse action (which might include revocation of license to practice or removal of privileges, for acts such as substance abuse), but it stops short of providing details of the violation. Because it is known that, as a rule, physicians are disaffiliated only for major violations, this information suffices for hospitals who seek to protect the public.

2. COMMUNITARIANISM DOES NOT REJECT POLICIES Amitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, RIGHTS AND THE COMMON GOOD: THE COMMUNITARIAN PERSPECTIVE, 1995, p. 11.

A communitarian perspective recognizes both individual human dignity and the social dimension of human existence. A communitarian perspective recognizes that the preservation of individual liberty depends on the active maintenance of the institutions of civil society where citizens learn respect for others as well as self-respect; where we acquire a lively sense of our personal and civic responsibilities, along with an appreciation of our own rights and the rights of others; where we develop the skills of self-government as well as the habit of governing ourselves, and learn to serve others-not just self. A communitarian perspective recognizes that communities and polities, too, have obligations-including the duty to be responsive to their members and to foster participation and deliberation in social and political life. A communitarian perspective does not dictate particular policies; rather, it mandates attention to what is often ignored in contemporary policy debates: the social side of human nature; the responsibilities that must be borne by citizens, individually and collectively, in a regime of rights; the fragile ecology of families and their supporting communities; the ripple effects and long-term consequences of present decisions.

3. COMMUNITARIANISM DOES NOT REJECT PRIVACY--IT SAYS ONLY TO CONSIDER COMMUNITY IMPLICATIONS WHILE TALKING ABOUT PRIVACYAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 1.

And unless one has been denied access to all forms of communication and media, one has been fairly and repeatedly warned that privacy is not so much nibbled away as stripped away by every manner of new technology. Hardly a week passes without alarming headlines warning Americans that their cell phone conversations are not secure, employers read their e-mail, mutual funds sell details of their financial records to marketers, and their medical records are an open book. Public opinion polls show that Americans are appropriately agitated.; And Congress as well as state legislatures are at least claiming that new legislation to protect privacy is imminent. Also, as the abundance of cliches about cyberspace indicates, new technologies have made invasion of privacy so much easier that we are justified in asking what remains of privacy and how it is to be saved in the new cyberage. This is a book largely about the other side of the privacy equation. It is about our investment in the common good, about our profound sense of social virtue,


and most specifically about our concern for public safety and public health. Although we cherish privacy in a free society, we also value other goods. Hence, we must address the moral, legal, and social issues that arise when serving the common good entails violating privacy.


Communitarianism Bad – Privacy Protection Good

1. ETZIONI’S CRITERIA PROVES PRIVACY RIGHTS NEED STRENGTHENINGAmitai Etzioni, Professor, George Washington University, THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY, 1999, p. 14.

Drawing on the four criteria to determine whether the spread of personal medical information should be curbed and the privacy of medical records strengthened, we would first seek to establish whether a significant common good is served by spreading such information to third parties. Finding little or none, we would then determine whether these privacy-endangering transmissions can be curbed without altering the law-perhaps by changing patient consent forms (which now require patients to almost totally relinquish control over their medical information and history), installing more advanced safeguards in computer information systems (e.g., audit trails that allow for the tracking of all those who access a file, thus enabling administrators to determine whether there has been unauthorized access), or other such actions. If these measures are deemed insufficient, legal remedies might be considered. A society might, for instance, introduce new penalties for the unauthorized transmission of medical information. Finally, those who have suffered from undue violations of their privacy-for instance, by losing a job as a result of such actions-might be entitled to receive compensation. In short, the four criteria can be used as much to determine whether privacy is deficient as to determine whether it is excessive, as well as to determine what actions should be taken to shore up privacy or to limit the sway of the common good.

2. MODERN MEDIA IS KILLING OUR PRIVACYJoshua Gamson, NQA, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, November-December 1998, p. 78.

It's hard to know exactly where and when this all began, but the two impulses are now relentlessly chasing each other's tails. The key to understanding the chase, where anxiety about diminution of privacy begets more craving for televised moments of privacy and vice versa, is that it is not the erosion of privacy alone that really seems to be bothersome, but the erosion of moments that can be trusted. It is not just crass voyeurism that drives growing popular interest in the nooks and crannies of everyday life, but a sense that those nooks and crannies look more and more like stage sets. The growth of surveillance, industrialized voyeurism, and increased self-display add up to a situation in which "realness" seems harder to find; all the heightened recording of private and personal life, the invited kind and the uninvited, sets in motion a hunt for the authentic. Television, along with technological advances in surveillance technique and demographic-information capturing, has made the places where one is unwatched and unsurveyed, where one need make no adjustments for an audience, seem fewer and farther between (be careful what books you buy, your sales receipt might get subpoenaed; be careful what you do in the aisle of a drugstore, because hidden cameras are recording you). The look-at-me culture only makes the search for these moments even more untenable: the more people offer themselves for the watching, the more like performers they become. And so the search for trustable moments, really private ones, intensifies.

3. TECHNOLOGY INCREASES HAVE MADE PRIVACY EXPANSION A MUST Adam D. Moore, California State University, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Oct. 1998, p. 365.

At the center of this communication revolution is the control of information--who has it, how can it be gathered, can databases be owned, should information be "pulled" by users as a request or "pushed" to users who have shown interest? These concerns have obvious import into the areas of privacy and power. We each leave "digital footprints" that can be tracked by data mining companies and used to create purchasing profiles, medical summaries, political agendas, and the like. Moreover, this information is then sold to direct marketing companies--who will then call, write, or in the future, e-mail us--government agencies, private investigators, or to anyone for any reason. There used to be domains of a person's life that were totally inaccessible. A person's home and bedroom, notebook and hard drive, were all sanctuaries against the prying eyes and ears of others. It is alarming that digital technology is sweeping these domains away. Deborah Johnson accurately captures this sentiment. “We have the technological capacity for the kind of massive, continuous surveillance of individuals that was envisioned in such frightening early twentieth-century science fiction works as George Orwell's 1984 and Zamyatin's We. The only difference between what is now possible and what was envisioned then are that much of the surveillance of


individuals that is now done is by private institutions (marketing firms, insurance companies, credit agencies), and much of the surveillance now is via electronic records instead of by direct human observation or through cameras.”


Communitarianism Bad – Etzioni is Wrong

1. ETZIONI IS NOTHING MORE THAN A POLITICAL DEMAGOGUE WHOSE THEORIES ARE INCONSISTENT AND INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPTDr. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University, September 1, 2001. LE QUEBECOIS LIBRE, No 87.

Amitai Etzioni is the founding father and leading voice of contemporary communitarianism. His goal is to catalyze a national moral revitalization and preserve civil society. Consequently, he barely discusses communitarianism within its philosophical traditions. Instead, his sprawling, inconsistent, and intellectually deficient writings are pragmatic and aimed at an audience of activists and policy-makers rather than intellectuals. Etzioni wants to do for society what the environmental movement seeks to do for nature.

2. ETZIONI’S POLITICAL THEORIES REPRESENT POLITICAL CONFUSION AND INEFFECTIVENESS Niki Raapana, Co-Founder of the Anti-Communitarian Leauge, October 4, 2005. ANTI-COMMUNITARIAN LEAUGE WEBSITE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://nord.twu.net/acl/etzioni.html

Etzioni represents the confusion in modern party politics. His ideology controls the merger between the American left and right, although most Americans haven't caught on to the name of it yet. When Etzioni's name appears in the media, it's usually as an "expert." His resume is that of a revered elder statesman, but most Americans have never heard of him at all. Until Americans learn who Etzioni is and what his theory does, mass confusion and disorder will reign, and the potential for chaos and violence will grow. The progressive People For the American Way explain the rules of engangement against what they call the Radical Right's Religious McCarthyism: "It is sad and disheartening, as well as reprehensible, that you would lend your name and position to such ugly and divisive political tactics," says PFAW's letter to Frist."

3. ETZIONI IS NOT INTERESTED IN IMPLEMENTING ANY STEADY SYSTEM OR WITH COMMUNITARIANISM BUT RATHER PUBLIC NOTORIETYROBERT S. BOYNTON, teaches magazine journalism at New York University , July 14, 2003. THE NATION ONLINE, accessed 5/22/06, http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030714&s=boynton

While Etzioni's dealings with Clinton and Blair have been well documented, in his memoir it becomes clear that Etzioni's criteria for offering advice depend less on ideology than access. We witness him regress from a passionate intellectual to a Loman-esque figure, desperately hawking his communitarian wares to anyone who will listen. He tries to sell communitarianism to Helmut Kohl (not interested), Bob Dole ("There was no sign of their Christian spirit, that of reaching out and caring for vulnerable members of the community, which is so much a part of the values they were anxious to uphold." Shocking!), and George W. Bush ("His tone and demeanor were often soft and conciliatory; that is, communitarian"). Etzioni implores Janet Reno to rethink her commitment to the Fourth Amendment (she demurs).

4. ETZIONI’S APPROACH TO POLITICS IS TO USE PROPAGANDA TO ACHIEVE SOCIAL CONTROLWIlliam Anderson, teaches economics at Frostburg State University, February 27, 2003. MISES INSTITUTE WEBSITE, accessed 5/22/06, http://www.mises.org/story/1174

Thus, we have the Etzioni approach: Continue the current system, but increase the propaganda in order to increase the supply of organs. Should that not work, then either step up the social pressure or revert to things as usual. However, we should never even consider using a method we know would ultimately reduce the current death rate. To Etzioni and his followers, the market approach would be morally repugnant, and apparently they are willing to subject thousands of people to slow, painful deaths each year just to prove their points. Humanitarians, indeed.


Communitarianism Bad – Etzioni is Bad

1. THE CONFLATION OF ECONOMIC CHOICES AND MORAL CHIOCES MAKE ETZIONI’S THEORIES FLAWED AND UNDESIRABLEAndrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA, July 2001. ETHICS, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP 5/20/06

This creates several problems. First, Etzioni lumps together as "private choice" a wide variety of acts: "unregulated economic behavior, deregulation, school choice, and reproductive choices" (pp. 209-10). Conflating the right to make distinctly moral choices with economic license stacks the deck against autonomy. To avoid a false choice between communitarianism and extreme libertarianism we may need not two but three concepts: informational privacy, free moral choice, and market liberty.

2. ETZIONI IS ONLY TRYING TO TAKE A FRAMEWORK OF ORGANIZATION TOO FAR TO A LEVEL WHERE IT WOULD THREATEN THE INDIVIDUALSimon Prideaux, Lecturer in Sociology at Leeds University, Winter 2002. CANADIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, accessed Expanded Academic ASAP 5/20/06

In the light of both Etzioni's characteristic methodology and subsequent failure to address any of the possible contradictions within the socio-economic foundations of society, it becomes obvious that this communitarian third way is firmly premised upon earlier functionalist interpretations of organisations. Furthermore, it is also worth noting that this form of communitarian analysis also utilises a basic methodology that pre-dated the onset of organisational theory. In particular, it could be argued Amitai Etzioni has taken the methodological influence of structural-functionalism and Talcott Parsons beyond the realms of its organisational offshoot and forged it into a prescriptive attempt at a cure for the perceived ills of modern society.

3. ETZIONI’S COMMUNITARIANISM WOULD DISCRIMINATE AND HARM THOSE WHO ARE SIMPLY ANTI-SOCIAL AND WOULD CREATE A SYSTEM OF INTIMIDATION AND FEARDr. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University, September 1, 2001. LE QUEBECOIS LIBRE, No 87.

Etzioni says that he is reluctant to write morality into the law since autonomy is basic to communitarianism. For example, instead of censorship, he favors informal social mechanisms to curb inflammatory or obscene speech. Those who say things communitarians don't like or agree with will be kept in line by means of ostracism and intimidation (i.e., the tyranny of the majority). Etzioni has a difficult task in explaining how miscreants are to be made to conform if their behavior is simply anti-social and not illegal. This is especially touchy in light of his espoused core value of tolerance, neutrality, and mutual respect for the beliefs of others.

4.. ETZIONI USES PROAGANDA AND LIES TO ACHIEVE HIS DESIRE TO ESTABLISH A WORLD WHERE AN ELITE CLASS WOULD DICTATE LAW.Niki Raapana, Co-Founder of the Anti-Communitarian Leauge, October 4, 2005. ANTI-COMMUNITARIAN LEAUGE WEBSITE, accessed 5/22/2006, http://nord.twu.net/acl/etzioni.html

We've read so many blogs and articles of Americans trying vainly to explain why some leftists now sound like right-wingers (and visa-vera). Other Americans stick blindly to their "side" and totally blame the other side for what went wrong in D.C. The anti-Bush crowd focuses only on Bush and the far-right focuses on the loudest distractions the left can produce. Etzioni comes out of this fracas and calmly states that he is our new moderator. What few Americans know (and many refuse to accept) is both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are great admirers of Dr. Amitai Etzioni. BOTH U.S. Presidents implemented Etzioni's plans for rebuilding American society from 1992 to today. A prolific writer, Etzioni has published a lot of ideas for helping the U.S. become a "better" society. Openly Fabian, he doesn't even hide the fact that he's a change agent for the dialectical revolution. He's simply more moral than that now. Today, unlike the terrorist


actions of the Etzioni Brigades in 1947, he uses propaganda and lies instead of bullets and bombs to achieve his goals.


Communitarianism Bad – Putnam is Wrong

1. PUTNAM’S ANALYSIS AND ADVOCACY ARE SUPERFICIAL AND FLAWEDDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

This absence of politics and struggle is also evident in Putnam’s analysis of Northern Italy. Putnam welcomes the de-ideologization of the Italian Communist Party (he identifies ideology with dogmatism), which means, according to him, the depoliticization of Italian politics, a sign of maturity, reasonableness, and tolerance. But he fails to realize that the welfare and well-being of Italy’s northern regions, which he commends, are the outcome of an enormous struggle carried out and led by the Communist Party, whose solidarity was based precisely in a sense of struggle requiring a totalizing ideology that gave it meaning. Putnam’s unawareness of this fact makes his analysis extremely superficial. It reduces social change to a mere social engineering carried out by enlightened elites (his term) with the participation of social agents in the background.

2. PUTNAM’S ANALYSIS ALSO FAILS TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT OF HUGE SOCIAL MOBILIZATIONS AND TENSIONS REGARDING CLASS ISSUESDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

A similar problem appears in Putnam’s view of the Progressive Era, a view that is incomplete to an extreme. He concludes his analysis of the Progressive Era by attributing the success of its reforms to the ideas of the “leaders of that era who correctly diagnosed the problem of a social-capital or civic engagement deficit”. He thus concludes that what we desperately need now is “an era of civic inventiveness to create a renewed set of institutions and channels for are invigorated civic life that will fit the way we have come to live.” And “we need to be as ready to experiment as the Progressives were”. Again, this position assumes that the social reforms of that period were the works of social engineers with the right ideas who found themselves in positions of power. Such a view ignores the huge social mobilizations and the tensions and conflicts among social classes in the United States that lay behind the progressive reforms.

3. PUTNAM’S ANALYSIS WILL FAIL BECAUSE IT IGNORES THE INTERSECTIONS OF CLASS AND OTHER FORMS OF OPPRESSION A COMMUNITARIAN POLITICAL MOVEMENT WOULD ONLY REINFORCE THESE INEQUITIESDr. Vicente Navarro, Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins University, 2002. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 423.

It is his lack of understanding of how power (class power, as well as race power and gender power) is distributed in the United States that makes Putnam’s solutions so insufficient and, frankly, irrelevant. In his most recent article, written after the events of September 11, his major recommendation for change in the United States comes remarkably close to President Bush’s calls to emphasize voluntarism. Meanwhile, income inequalities are higher than ever and a million people lose their health insurance every year. Actually, Putnam’s apoliticism (and moralism) even lead to a weakened sense of the community and opportunity he is advocating. The community-running and communityfunding of public schools in the United States, for example, has led to a highly unjust system that creates huge dislocations, problems not present in the highly centralized and universally funded French educational system distrusted by both de Tocqueville and Putnam. It does seem, after all, that the alternative to communitarianism—European government intervention—dismissed by de Tocqueville is far better for solving our problems than the solutions he preferred.

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