community

Community and Sociology David E. Pearson p romoting ideology in the guise of social science has been a part of the sociological scene ever since Auguste Comte propounded his scheme for a utopian community based on sociological principles more than a century ago. The communitarian movement, whose protagonists include a number of eminent sociologists, is one recent and highly visible manifestation of this disciplinary predilection. Its ambitious goal is to com- bine individual liberties and widespread choice, modernity's brightest issue, with the equally alluring cohesiveness and coherence that represent the best of tradition. Writings such as Amitai Etzioni's Spirit of Commu- nity, the communitarian movement's manifesto, claim that this challenge has been successfully met. We can, he informs us, have the best of both modernity and tra- dition while eliminating many of the negative aspects of each: an unbridled, radical individualism, on the one hand, and authoritarianism and smothering conformity, on the other. If he is correct, he has resolved the prob- lem of choosing between freedom and restraint that has puzzled social philosophers from Plato to Popper and that has bedeviled sociologists for well over a century. If he is right, we are as a society poised to move beyond our present disorganization and excessive individual- ism to a world that is at once just as vibrant for the individual and yet eminently more sane socially. If he is fight, at long last we can have it all. The problem with this utopian vision is its sheer impracticality. It will not work because it misappre- hends, at a most fundamental level, human character and the character of human social groupings. The re- mainder of this essay will describe the nature and source of these misapprehensions. Using The Spirit of Community as a springboard, I will examine two closely related themes that characterize many communitarian writings. The first is that the purpose of community is to exhibit a particular version of the general welfare, an egalitarian one, whose sustenance in turn presumes a special sort of political and eco- nomic organization. The second theme is that it is the charge of social science, and sociology in particular, to help bring that sort of community about. The Spirits of Individuals A concern with human happiness lies at the very core of the communitarian vision, in which utopianism runs head-on into utilitarianism. Communities clearly produce a degree of happiness, for some people, at any rate. If they do this for some, communitarians ar- gue, they should do it for everyone. Echoing Jeremy Bentham's dictum about "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," a greater quantity of happiness for a greater number of people makes for a greater com- munity. From this, it is easy to conclude that an ap- propriate criterion for evaluating the moral standing of a community should be whether it evidences "mor- ally unjustifiable" signs of privilege for some of its members, signs that are by no means strictly limited to things economic. Even if by some alchemy every- COMMUNITY AND SOCIOLOGY / 45 one's economic needs were suddenly satisfied, the community's moral standing would remain suspect, Etzioni tells us, if it was less than fully responsive to their spiritual requirements and "authentic needs." Communities should be "authentic," with authentic- ity rendered virtually synonymous with a thorough- going egalitarianism. One problem with this otherwise rosy vision is that it conflates the concepts of happiness and community, which are not, in point of fact, identical. The desire to promote widespread happiness is a laudable philo- sophical sentiment, but sociologically speaking, hap- piness is not the reason human communities arose, nor does it represent their ultimate purpose. Rather, they came about for more pragmatic reasons: On the one hand, they represented a buffer against what we might consider certain types of unhappiness (starva- tion, for example, and pillage and murder); on the other hand, they represented a resource that could be em- ployed by members in their efforts to improve their individual situations. But saying this is hardly to sug- gest that communities must therefore be guarantors of survival and status advancement for every individual. If history is any guide, it is clear that in their efforts to ensure the general welfare, communities, even demo- cratic ones, will countenance suffering on the part of some, perhaps even many, of their members. The "gen- eral welfare," in the inclusive, self-actualizing sense that many communitarians tend to use the term, is a pleasant but by no means necessary by-product of collective life. Perhaps more than anything else, coming to terms with the idea of relentlessly self-interested individu- als, whose prospects for individual survival and sta- tus advancement are more propitious in a collective context, represents the basis of a sociological under- standing of community. But understanding that com- munity is, in the final analysis, a community of the self-interested is clearly foreign to the gentler com- munitarian view of human nature. For comrnunitarians, people are motivated not by self-interest but by com- passion and altruism. People help one another not be- cause of any expectation for reciprocal benefit but, rather, because it simply is the right thing to do. The world might be a better place if this were true, but it assuredly is not. The ethnographic record is clear: People in all societies, during all periods of history, have evidenced a profound hunger for status and have en- gaged in myriad forms of competition to achieve it. In- deed, class, status, and power have been the sine qua non of all societies, especially the modern ones. From Max Weber, in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, through Kai Erikson, in his WaywardPuri- tans, sociologists have pointed out these features as present even in a this-worldly society of saints. More- over, they were present with a vengeance in this century's many failed experiments with an often bru- tally enforced egalitarianism. Charles Horton Cooley had it precisely fight in 1909 when he noted that in premodern societies, talents and peculiarities of tem- perament were intimately understood, people were re- spected or despised accordingly, and the resulting differences translated directly into differences of posi- tion and power. Cooley observed that status competi- tion and the resulting hierarchies of privilege occurred even among very young children and were virtually impossible to eradicate "even by the most inquisitorial methods," and he concluded therefore that they must issue directly from a basic feature of human nature. Thus the universal presence of inequality in all societies, from the most primitive hunter-gatherer types to those most thoroughly modernized. Reality is hardly sanguine for those interested in promoting a social order based on a widespread egalitarianism. The Spirits of Groups If self-advancement is ubiquitous among individu- als, why should it not also be a prominent feature of the groups they comprise? What are groups, after all, except vehicles for the more effective pursuit of indi- vidual goals? But this differs considerably from the communitarian's view of groups, and to see where the differences lie, we first need to consider their deirmi - tion of community, which, Etzioni tells us, entails "a web of affect-laden relations among a group of indi- viduals" and involves a "measure of commitment to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings." But this seems as apposite of small groups as it does of many larger groups and social categories. So which of these in fact represents "community": the large groups, the small ones, or both? Communitarians opt for the inclusive view, in which one size fits all. We all belong to a range of groups of varying sizes, each one of which represents a potential community membership. At the same time, community is more than any of these single involvements. Com- munity, writ large, should not be conceived as a unitary construct but, rather, as a variegated "community of communities." This is a phrase that conjures up more sentiment than sociological precision. It calls to mind a menu of groups and associations, from which an indi- vidual selects some subset to be the objects of his com- mitment and devotion. At the same time, this community of communities seems more like a Russian matryushka 46 / SOCIETY �9 JULY/AUGUST 1995 doll, wherein each of a person's various community memberships, memberships in groups that range from the small to the quite large, are each nested comfort- ably within the others. But whichever image we prefer, the constant is that the concept of community is actu- ally plural. One can be a member of the gay commu- nity, say, or a professional community, or both. One can be a member of the feminist community, the Jew- ish community, the environmentalist community, a resi- dential community, and so on. The concept rapidly devolves into a sort of infinite regression, with com- munities of various types, and our commitments thereto, spanning the range from elemental social units such as families and groups of friends all the way up to the overarching society itself. Community, writ large, should not be conceived as a unitary construct but, rather, as a variegated "community of communities." But are all these truly communities in any reason- able sense-- indeed, even in the communitarians' sense--of the term? Do they all provide their mem- bers with a structure of meaning, with the sense of identity and moral cohesion that we call "solidarity"? It is frankly hard to imagine that they do. While some of these memberships might in fact approximate what Weber once described as communal social relation- ships, others appear to be quite different types, with a far greater potential for divisiveness and conflict. And it is here that communitarians must be forced to enter the realm of hard Weberian fact. To the question of whether our social relationships are actually (or even potentially) in the service of wide- spread solidarity, or whether they instead serve a dif- ferent master, Weber's answer was emphatic. Consider first communal social relationships, the ideal-type that he described as "based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they be- long together." It is a definition not greatly dissimilar to communitarians' notion of community, to be sure. But as Weber was quick to point out, communal rela- tionships seldom, if ever, exist in pure ideal-typical form. In the real world, and even for the communal relationship's archetype, the family, considerable variation exists with regard to the sentiments and in- terests that members share. In the family and other intimate relationships, exploitation and coercion are commonplace. There are differences in opportunity and in outcome. Indeed, as many of us can attest, fami- lies and other intimate relationships represent not only the locus of greatest human affection but also that of the most virulent discord. If conflict and inequality are commonplace even for those relationships closest to the communal type, if there are practical limits to love even among actual brothers, it should come as no surprise that brotherly love in the more general sense will be less than uni- versal among people for whom the ties that bind are less compelling. Most relationships are based not on kinship, of course, but on common qualities, such as race or ethnic background; on common situation, such as age or membership in a particular profession; or on common behaviors, such as sexual preference or po- litical affiliation. Communitarians such as Etzioni readily subsume these beneath their rubric of "com- munity." But as Weber pointed out, most of these groupings are based far less on sentiment and far more on rational calculations of self-interest than are rela- tionships of the communal kind. They are what he re- ferred to as "associative relationships," in which membership provides little assurance of unity or sense of belongingness. Associative relationships, conse- quently, carry an even higher potential for conflict and inequality and are hardly what most of us think of when the term "community" is invoked. I expect many communitarians would respond that people are members of a variety of groups and that not every membership necessarily represents a com- munity commitment. A black woman might feel a sense of belonging with the black community, for in- stance, but not with the feminist community; a resi- dent of a certain geographic area need not feel any attachment to others from his area, preferring instead the community of his profession, and so on. Thus, if some groups prove incapable of providing their mem- bers with an adequate sense of belongingness or are otherwise unpalatable, this is of little practical conse- quence. If for whatever reason the community voices that people hear sound oppressive, if their "moral in- frastructure" begins to deteriorate, people can just change their place of residence, join different social clubs, change churches or professions. This is a view of community that is inherently volitional, constituted of a collection of similar people who have voluntarily chosen to be together. But how potent can a community's values be if, as Etzioni instructs us, we are obliged to subject them to a continual process of moral evaluation? How persua- COMMUNITY AND SOCIOLOGY / 47 sive can their moral voices be when, if they prove de- ficient, we can swap them for another set of voices essentially at will? How much compliance can com- munities exact when those who fail to adhere to their standards have the option of joining or forming other communities--when they have the option of simply opting out? The answer, as Ferdinand T6nnies knew when he distinguished between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, surely seems to be not much. To earn the appellation "community," it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a mea- sure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily--indeed, by definition-- coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don't. But by celebrating group choice, communitarians (like the "New Individualist" baby boomers, described by Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, who form the movement's core constituency), "quite unself-con- sciously envision the antithesis of community and fam- ily, in neither of which does one choose the other members nor enjoy equal status." In the volitional world of the authentic community, the groups one chooses to belong to are ultimately of less consequence than the essential fact of being able to choose them in the first place. Call it a radical groupism, if you will, a foregrounding of group choice as the essence of mo- rality and community that invariably denotes all com- munity choices as equally valid. In this sense, anyway, communitarianism appears to be indistinguishable from the radical individualism it decries. A related and more practical shortcoming to the idea of unrestricted choice involves its implicit assumption that communities will provide people with largely un- restricted entry and egress. What is assumed, again turn- ing to Weber's terms, is that communities will be open rather than closed. Of course some groups are in fact open, but the reason for this is hardly to promote gener- alized societal amity. Rather, it is because groups trmd that under some circumstances openness improves their situation, advances their members' interests, relative to other groups. Analogously, groups will be closed to the extent that this advances their members' interests. While the reasons for closure are various, the real-world fact of extensive group closure is incontrovertible. Indeed, the very definition of organization incorporates the idea of boundary maintenance, of restricting the number and type of people who can enter and, not uncommonly, their ability to exit as well. Sociology, Weberian or oth- erwise, offers little basis for the belief in a harmonious, volitional community of communities. To be fair, it is not that communitarians are entirely blind to these realities. Etzioni recognizes, as did Emile Durkheim a century ago, that volitional group mem- berships produce a sense of belongingness that is less than compelling; indeed, as he phrases it, they are "rather anemic." In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim observed that as societies modernized, their earlier world-defining beliefs, what he called the "Col- lective Conscience," were gradually being eroded. They were being replaced by a new, more abstract and general set of beliefs, among them that people should make useful economic contributions, a quasi-religious belief in moral individualism, and an ideal of social justice. Recognizing that these beliefs alone would not provide societies with sufficient moral cohesion, Durkheim suggested that group memberships, in par- How potent can a community's values be if we are obliged to subject them to a continual process of moral evaluation? ticular professional associations, might provide the necessary remainder. But implicit in this, of course, is the idea that volitional group memberships are by themselves also insufficient. Durkheim's U.S. contem- porary, Cooley, suggested much the same thing. He noted that people in modern societies readily formed a large number of groups--clubs, fraternal societies, educational and occupational associations, and the like--groups with some potential for real intimacy. But he went on to point out that such groupings, based on congeniality, were far less substantial than com- munities of ascription, in particular family and neigh- borhood, which, he said, expressed "a more universal human nature." In the face of sociological theory and evidence, what then is the basis for the communi- tarians' community of communities? Instead we anticipate, and find empirically, some- thing more closely approximating a community of competing communities. On the contemporary scene we find ethnic, gender, professional, lifestyle, and a wide assortment of other groupings, many of which are at odds with one another and in fierce competition for economic resources and political power. Rather than contributing to the overarching community that is the United States, some of these groups do not hesi- tate to subvert it to their benefit, while others appear to be doing nothing so much as working, tirelessly, to 48 / SOCIETY �9 JULY/AUGUST 1995 destroy any larger set of enjoining moral principles, if not U.S. society itself. So in the real world there seems to be a problem with keeping the communitarians' cacophony of moral voices in harmony, a problem with keeping the members of this community of commu- nities from slitting each other's throats. The Egalitarian Spirit Again, it is not that communitarians, some of whom have produced important works in the area of organi- zational sociology, are altogether blind to these perils. Much in the same way that we need to be on the look- out for self-centered individuals, Etzioni tells us, we need to watch out for self-centered communities. But as soon as they consider what should be done with the outlaws once they have been rounded up, communitarians step onto the slippery s