The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Joshua Abramowitz

The Tao of community

IT'S A GOOD TIME to be a communitarian. Not only is the philosophy au courant in the press and in academia, but even our president got his job partially by invoking communitarian ideals (more responsibilities, fewer rights) and pushing for communitarian public policies (national service, campaign finance reform, welfare reform). And if that president hasn't lived up to those promises, no matter: One of his advisors (William Galston) is a leading communitarian, so there's still room for hope.

Now that they have the national ear, just what is it that communitarians have to say? Americans, they argue, have become obsessed with rights, and neglectful of responsibilities. They want to be represented by juries, but not to serve on them. They want a government that caters to their every need, but collects little in taxes. They want marital freedom, but neglect the consequences--the children--of these unions. And so on.

By that definition, communitarians are conservatives. But as Amitai Etzioni's new book, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda([dagger]), reveals, that's not quite true. Etzioni, a distinguished sociologist, is communitarianism's guru. He intends his book to be the communitarian manifesto, one that will rally ordinary, mainstream people to his cause.

To Etzioni, the story of contemporary America looks something like this: In the fifties, people did as they were told. The walls of social restraint kept the peace, but also maintained social injustice. Then, in the sixties, Americans learned to question, and began removing walls. Unfortunately, by the eighties, that had gotten out of hand--the walls of social restraint were almost entirely torn down. The result was social chaos, manifested in many forms, from crime to greed. Now, in the nineties, Etzioni argues that we can coolly take a look around, survey the damage, and selectively rebuild a few social walls.

This reconstruction starts with the family. Parents, Etzioni argues, are too focused on themselves and on their work. All too often, they pack their kids off to underpaid, uncaring help. What to do? First, there needs to be change in attitude--parents need to spend more time with their children. To be sure: That's not a call for women to return home. It could be men, too. Also, parents might take advantage of new technology that allows them to work at home. Etzioni's ideal family is neither the Cleavers nor Murphy Brown. Rather it is the Huxtables: working hard, but placing kids and family first.

And, when a marriage hits trouble, Etzioni writes, all too often its simply ends. Often this means that children rarely see their fathers again. So he suggests that society make an active attempt to prevent divorce, in ways both social (premarital counseling) and legal (waiting periods, a mandatory delay before remarrying, better enforcement of child support, and pro-marriage welfare and tax laws).

PERHAPS THESE REFORMS can't do much to change deeply ingrained social trends. Still, they are constructive ideas. Unfortunately, as Etzioni is concerned with teaching children how to "develop the basic personality traits that characterize effective individuals" and with making certain that they "acquire core values." In other words, he wants some kind of moral education. Yet Etzioni does not successfully convince the reader that moral education would be the same in practice as in theory. How many parents would want, say, the educational experts who created the New York State multicultural curriculum to teach "core values" to their children?

This is indicative of a deeper flaw. When faced with a problem, Etzioni is all too pleased to call in government. This tendency is widely evident, from his overly sanguine view of national service to this, more extreme idea: "Each city should have a civilian review board whose duty it would be to review the city's procedures to check whether they enhance or hinder the Communitarian nexus."

Still, this is not traditional liberalism. Etzioni not only defends the family and traditional morality, but he also encourages what Tocqueville called "associations"--the many, diverse groups of citizens that come together, independent of government, to do things both for their community and for themselves. A "crime watch" brings citizens together while making the neighborhood safer. And a charity bash is fun for everyone while raising funds for a needed cause.

That means that Etzioni is mindful of two of the institutions that stand between the individual and the state--the family and the community. But that's it. He goes two for three. In other words, Etzioni's plans for a "moral revival" pay almost no attention to religion. When religion does come up, it is often tied to intolerant excess--religious fait and authoritarian thuggery, Etzioni implies, go hand in hand. Presumably, that's because religions threaten the communitarian agenda: they can be insular and socially inflexible, if not intolerant of some community norms.