TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022591/0225630.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 71

A Whole Greater Than Its Parts?


American individualism draws fire from a new intellectual
movement that re-emphasizes social obligation

By WALTER SHAPIRO


    The word stumbles awkwardly off the tongue, all 16 didactic
letters, sounding like a fuzzy echo from a long-ago college
lecture. Communitarianism. Was it a late-medieval religious
heresy, a 19th century utopian philosophy or an aesthetic
theory that predated socialist realism? The correct answer is
none of the above. But if a new group of centrist academics --
sociologists, political scientists and law professors -- has its
way, the term will soon take a place among the important isms
that shape the U.S. political dialogue.

    Communitarianism, loosely defined, is a fledgling and
provocative effort to temper the excesses of American
individualism with a strong assertion of the rights of the
larger society. The social tension between the citizen and the
community in democratic theory is at least as old as the 18th
century differences between the rights-based philosophy of
Locke and the majoritarian beliefs of Rousseau. But few voices
in modern American intellectual life have challenged the
primacy of the unfettered individual. To fill this void is the
goal of the communitarians.

    The group, under the leadership of prominent sociologist
Amitai Etzioni, took public shape just a few weeks ago with the
launching of a quarterly journal, Responsive Community. "To the
A.C.L.U., libertarians and other radical individualists,"
Etzioni and his co-editors declared in their statement of
purpose, "we say that the rights of individuals must be
balanced with responsibilities to the community."

    Rights and Responsibilities, the magazine's subtitle,
represents shorthand for a public debate that extends far
beyond Etzioni and his coterie. William F. Buckley Jr. in his
latest book, Gratitude, puts an old-line conservative
imprimatur on national service. The February issue of Harper's
features a symposium on whether the Constitution needs a "Bill
of Duties" to offset the Bill of Rights. The Harper's panel,
which included Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a
co-editor of Responsive Community, came to no firm conclusion.
But Glendon conveyed a sense of how communitarians view
personal responsibility with this hypothetical constitutional
language: "The nurture and education of children are duties
primarily incumbent on the parents."

    The communitarians did not plan to make their assault on the
public consciousness just as the nation began fighting in the
Persian Gulf. But a rethinking of the relationship between a
citizen and his country is particularly apt at a time when
America is waging its first major war in this century with a
volunteer army. Encouraged by the suddenly reawakened sense of
national community, Etzioni observes that often "war brings out
latent things in a society."

    Ideas develop at their own pace, but American intellectual
movements these days tend to be born over lunch. Supply-side
economics flowered in 1974 when economist Arthur Laffer drew
tax and revenue curves on a cocktail napkin. For
communitarianism, the seminal breaking of the bread came last
summer at the faculty club at George Washington University,
where Etzioni teaches; his luncheon companion was political
scientist William Galston, the issues director of Walter
Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign. Sensing a shared
perspective, Etzioni plied Galston with hypothetical conflicts.
Are sobriety checkpoints for drivers of motor vehicles an
infringement of civil liberties? What should the police be
legitimately allowed to do to disrupt open-air drug markets?

    These questions represented to Etzioni case studies in which
the aggressive defense of individual legal rights is at odds
with the safety of the larger community. But Galston, who
signed on as a co-editor of Responsive Community, stresses that
his own approach "is not to water down or trump certain rights
in the name of something else. Instead, we need to think in a
fresh way about what rights we do have."

    Etzioni seems animated by his own agenda: intense hostility
to legal efforts by civil libertarians to restrict police
behavior and uphold individual rights. He says, "I'm hard put
to find any organization that is so actively opposed to
communitarian issues as the A.C.L.U." The American Civil
Liberties Union already has critics to spare; George Bush made
it a major theme of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis.
Moreover, A.C.L.U. executive director Ira Glasser argues, "The
problem with the Etzioni group is that they assume incorrectly
that individual rights are not a public good."

    Such skirmishes detract attention from the much broader role
communitarianism could play amid the desolate landscape of
American domestic policy. Who else speaks to the need to
reanimate public service and restore civic virtue? Glendon
captures this spirit when she says, "We are discontented with
the orthodoxies of the right and the left. My hope is that
there is a constituency in America for truth telling, moderation
and complexity." Several articles in the inaugural issue of
Responsive Community provide tantalizing hints of new ways of
looking at old problems. Galston, for one, suggests a bold
reformulation of divorce laws to emphasize the needs of
children over the financial and emotional demands of their
parents.

    Communitarianism is an idea still in flux, more than a
slogan but less than a coherent philosophy. Even the name may
give way to something more catchy; Galston tentatively offered
up "neo-progressives." But whatever the label and whatever its
political future, it is an encouraging sign that thinkers are
groping to find alternatives to the selfishness inherent in
interest-group liberalism and conservative laissez-faire
economics.