ABSTRACT
Anthony Giddens writes: ‘On each side of the political spectrum today we see a fear of social disintegration and a call for a revival of community’ (Giddens, 1994, p. 124). What Giddens has noted is that community has become a political theme in both right and left political discourse today. In this chapter we look at the debate on community in recent political thinking. Unlike the sociological theory of community discussed in the previous two chapters, the concept of community in political philosophy has been largely of a normative nature and, in some conceptions, has considerable and growing influence on policy making in the English-speaking world. The main sociological theories concern the wider context of the transformation of modern societies, while in political philosophy the question has largely been about the civic foundations of the polity. For this reason much of the debate has been about citizenship, which concerns membership of political community. But the sociological arguments about community discussed in Chapter 3 and the idea of community in political philosophy are not as entirely separate as they appear. What unites them is a view of community as being primarily about belonging. While much of the classical debate in sociology tends to stress tradition and locality, community in political philosophy has a broader concern with membership of society. Yet arguably, both are about different expressions of community. In the case of Robert Bellah’s major work,
Habits of the Heart, this connection between sociology and political philosophy is very evident (Bellah et al., 1996). Here questions of the nature of the self, values and community are empirically investigated in a study that may be seen as a sociological version of communitarian political philosophy. In this work community is a mode of belonging and consists in desires and beliefs rather than in a territorial or institutional structure. Philip Selznick, in one of the major communitarian texts, describes community simply as a variable aspect of group experience (Selznick, 1992, p. 358). There are certainly advantages in this definition, especially in that it leaves open the possibility of community taking different forms. The communitarian position, however, differs from the conceptions of community discussed in the previous chapter in one major respect. Community is more than communitas or communion, embracing a range of activities. What is particularly important, in Selznick’s view, is not only participation, but also loyalty, solidarity and commitment. In the terms of, for instance, Victor Turner’s theory of community (see Chapter 2), communitarians are interested less in spontaneous, anti-structural community than in a normative theory of political community.
