Community

3rd edition

Gerard Delanty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351656054
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

The increasing atomization of modern society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging in an increasingly insecure world. Far from disappearing, community has been revived by transnationalism and by new kinds of individualism. Gerard Delanty begins this stimulating critical introduction to the concept with an analysis of the origins of the idea of community in Western utopian thought, and as a theme in classical sociology and anthropology. He goes on to chart the resurgence of the idea within communitarian thought and postmodern philosophies, the complications and critiques of multiculturalism, and new manifestations of community within a society where changing modes of communication produce both fragmentation and possibilities of new social bonds. Contemporary community, he argues, is essentially a communication community based on belonging and sharing, and can be a powerful voice of political opposition. The communities of today are less spatially bounded than those of the past, but they cannot dispense with the need for a sense of belonging. The communicative ties and cultural structures of contemporary societies have opened up numerous possibilities for belonging based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, lifestyle and gender.

1

Community as an Idea

Loss and Recovery

To understand the appeal of the idea of community we need to go far back into the early origins of modern thought. According to Robert Nisbet in The Sociological Tradition, ‘Much of the reorientation of moral and social philosophy is the consequence of the impact of the rediscovery of community in historical and sociological thought’ (Nisbet, 1967, p. 53).

While today community is often and, as I shall argue, incorrectly seen in opposition to society and based on non-contractual ties, in earlier times this was not the case. Indeed, community was often highly political and even contractual. For Aristotle there was no essential difference between the social and the communal because the idea of society was associated with friendship. The polis of classical Greece contained within it political, social and economic relations. Aristotle in fact saw the city – the polis – as a community (koinonia), which for him had a very urban character, a contrast to the tribal and rural social relations of Arcadia. The communal forms of the Greek city were seen to produce contractual ties in which the social character of people reaches its highest level. For this reason, the romantic and nostalgic distinction made in the nineteenth century of a golden age of community preceding the advent of society is highly questionable as a description of community before modernity.¹

From the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment, community expressed the essence of society, not its antithesis. For Rousseau in the eighteenth century, modern civil society was based on the Greek polis as an association of citizens. The Enlightenment idea of community encapsulated the emerging world of society as a political community in which human autonomy and solidarity could flourish. Reducible neither to the state nor to the private world of the household, community expressed bonds of commonality and sociality. In so far as community expressed a domain of specifically social relations, it indicated a tension with the autocratic state. In contrast to the state, community referred to the more immediate world of meaning, belonging and everyday life. While the state was an objective and distant entity far removed from people’s lives, community was something directly experienced and sustained through solidarity.

In early modern thought community and society were virtually interchangeable: community designated the social domain of the ‘lifeworld’, the lived world of everyday life. Although these spheres were to become more and more bifurcated, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both could express much the same concern. This interchangeability of community and society may be seen in the idea of civil society and in the notion of modern associations. Until the late nineteenth century there was no clear definition of the social as a reality sui generis, as Durkheim was to claim. Instead society was seen as the civic bond, which could refer also to economic relations as opposed to political relations. Civil society could also be expressed in terms of the common bond, or community. Community thus did not mean merely tradition, but simply social relations, such as those that were emerging around a market-based society and bourgeois culture, such as associations. Indeed, the notion of the civic association and community were often interchangeable.

Raymond Williams has outlined how the earlier idea of society was felt to be more immediate than it later became, and to this extent it meant much the same as the idea of community (Williams, 1976, p. 75). His suggestion is that the idea of community inherited from the early idea of society the body of direct relationships as opposed to the organized realm of the state. While the idea of society progressively lost this sense of the immediacy of direct relationships, the notion of ‘community’ retained it and continued to be the word used to designate such experiments in alternatives to the status quo. Robert Nisbet reflected this kind of thinking when he claimed that sociology has always conceived the social as the communal:

Sociology, above any other discipline in the [twentieth] century, gave primacy to the concept of the social. The point to be emphasized here, however, is that the referent of the ‘social’ was almost invariably the communal. Communitas, not societas with its more impersonal connotations, is the real etymological source of the sociologist’s use of the word ‘social’ in his [sic] studies of personality, kinship, economy, and polity.

(Nisbet, 1967, p. 56)

The social bond is essentially communal. Without community, there can be no society. It is the basis of solidarity, trust, the gift, and belonging. We can make a more general observation on the basis of this interchangeability of the terms ‘society’ and ‘community’ in an earlier period in the formation of modernity. The defining element in the discourse of community from the seventeenth century onwards was a critique of the state, which in the age of the Enlightenment was absolutist. In this respect community expressed a dream impossible to realize: a vision of a pure or pristine social bond that did not need a state. It was, in a sense, a purely utopian concept of community as an emancipatory project. The ideal of community in Western thought has been much animated by the vision of a society without a state, or rather without the need for a state. Much of modern thought has seen the state either as the enemy of the social, a kind of necessary evil as in liberalism, or as something to be abolished. Anarchism, freemasonry, liberalism and civic republicanism have all been defined in opposition to the state and have given rise to different narratives of community. Socialism has regarded the state as a stepping stone to communism, for which the state is the expression of human alienation. Exceptions to this are modern conservatism, Zionism and nationalism, which have looked to the state as a model for defining the social. In these ideologies the state has generally been seen as an organic entity expressing the totality of political community. We return to the question of political ideology and community below, but for now the point that needs to be established is that by the nineteenth century community came to embody the quest for a perfect society. For the early moderns – as in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes – the state was a Leviathan, a monstrous creature which was necessary for the survival of society, but which had to be subdued and, in many of the discourses of modernity, abolished. Community thus points to an organic conception of the social as encompassing political, civic and social relations. What is important here is the immediate and experiential aspect of community as embodying direct relationships in contrast to the alien world of the state. The tendency always existed for community to be a challenge to the state, and in many cases even an alternative. Today in the global age, community as a total critique of the state has been revitalized by varieties of religious fundamentalism and extreme forms of nationalism, but also by hackers.

But of course no society can exist without a state. The quest for community must be seen as a perpetual critique of the state that is utopian in its inspiration. There are two aspects to this. Community is seen as something that has been lost with modernity and as something that must be recovered. As a process dominated by state formation, modernity has allegedly destroyed community. Modernity has taken politics out of the social and confined the political to the state. It is in opposition to this that community as a vision of society purified of the state has received its animus. As a discourse of loss and recovery, community can be utopian and nostalgic at the same time. The modernist assumption has been that community once existed and has been destroyed by the modern world, which has been erected on different foundations. In Chapter 2, the nostalgic dimension is discussed in more detail. In this chapter, we concentrate on the utopian aspect of community as a discourse of both loss and recovery. It will suffice for present purposes to point out that the nostalgic narrative of loss has given the utopian dream its basic direction. It has also been the source of some of the greatest political dangers, giving rise to the myth of the total community that has fuelled fundamentalist, nationalist and fascist ideologies in the twentieth century. With its promise of a better future, community has been subversive of modernity, seeking a recovery of the social and the political. In postcolonial thought, there is a related but different notion of community as that which must be returned to the colonized.

In this chapter we look at some of the major historical discourses of community in Western thought and political practice. First, we begin with the rise of the ideal of community in the encounter of Greek and Christian thought. Second, we move on to the discourse of loss that began with the decline of the institutions of the Middle Ages. Third, modernity and utopian political ideology is discussed as a foundation of community, which is not only a discourse of loss but also one of recovery and realization. Fourth, the idea of total community is discussed as embodied, on the one hand, in fascist political ideology and, on the other hand, in radical communal movements. If these very different conceptions of community have anything in common, it is a view of community as communitas, to use the Latin term, as an expression of belonging that is irreducible to any social or political arrangement. Community exerts itself as a powerful idea of belonging in every age, and as such its reality consists of its persuasive power as the most social aspect of society.

Community Between Polis and Cosmos

Lying at the heart of the idea of community is an ambivalence. On the one hand, it expresses locality and particularity – the domain of immediate social relations, the familiar, proximity – and, on the other hand, it refers to the universal community in which all human beings participate. This double sense of community as encompassing the universal and the particular, is all the more acute today with cosmopolitanism at the forefront of political debate, but it has always been central to the idea of community. It was the basic idea that animated the early monastic orders with their notion of a fraternal community that participated in the sacred community. Community can be exclusive or inclusive. For Parsons the highest expression of social integration was the ‘societal community’ (Parsons, 1961, p. 10). In other and more post-traditional forms – for instance, the European Community (the earlier name of the European Union) or virtual communities (see Chapter 9) – community is an expression of an unbounded sense of humanity. In contrast, for Ferdinand Tönnies (1963) community was the basis of social integration and expressed traditional face-to-face relations of a non-contractual nature. Rather than see these conceptions of community as exclusive, it is more fruitful to see them as complementary and with a long history in Western political traditions.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the modern idea of community has been deeply influenced by classical thought, which bequeathed two conflicting conceptions of community: the human order of the polis and the universal order of the cosmos. These traditions – one particularistic and the other universalistic – correspond approximately to the Greek and Christian traditions. There can be no doubt that the modern idea of community has its origins in the Greek political community, the polis. The kind of community that was exemplified in the polis provided the basic ideal for all subsequent conceptions of community. It was first of all local and particularistic, embodying the human dimension of the city as opposed to a larger entity. As such, the communitarian order of the polis was one of immediacy. Politics was based on the voice; in its pure form it was indistinguishable from friendship and from participation in public life, which was both an ideal and a practice for the Greeks, who did not know the separation of the social from the political that was to come with modernity.

According to Hannah Arendt, one of the major interpreters of Greek political thought, the polis ideal asserted the primacy of politics over the social (Arendt, 1958). But this thesis of the primacy of the political is to be understood as the absence of any distinction between the social and the political. Modernity was marked by the reversal of the primacy of the political by the social and led to the subsequent decline of the integrity of the political; the latter she associates with the domain of needs and labour. Politics for the ancients was not confined to the state, but was conducted in everyday life in self-government by citizens. The Greeks did not experience the alienation of politics in the state, which Marx claimed was the achievement of capitalism. For this reason, many thinkers, including Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Arendt, admired the Greek polis, which served as a kind of normative critique of modernity and had a universalistic significance. In these critiques, as will be commented on below, we also find the beginnings of the idea of community as a discourse of loss. In the work of Arendt the decline of the political – which preserved the unity of community – is reflected in her theme of the loss of the world. The dominant view of community in modern sociological thought shifts the emphasis from the universalistic conception of political community to the particularistic conception of the local community.

It also needs to be pointed out that while the Greek polis may have made politics more immediate, the price that had to be paid for its particularity was a high degree of exclusion. It appears that the price for the inclusion of some is the exclusion of others. Thus the Greek communitarian ideal of the polis may be seen in a negative light as constructed around strong codes of us/them, setting limits to its universality. However, the main point is that for the Greeks community was to be found in the immediacy of public life. The polis was a contrast to the cosmic order of the gods. Although the Greeks tried to construct the polis to reflect the cosmos, the polis ideal was always in tension with the divine order, the universal order of the cosmopolis. The Stoics in the age of Alexander the Great broke with this division of the particular and the universal with the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal of a world community, which was not confined to the world of the polis.

The division of the universal and the particularistic conceptions of community was finally overcome with the Romans, who linked societas with universalis. The Roman Empire itself was to be a universal human community based on citizenship. However, the idea of a universal community that would transcend the territory of the political order did not develop fully until the arrival of Christian thought, especially with Augustine. Where the Greeks gave priority to the polis as the domain of community, Christian thought stressed the universal community as a communion with the sacred. Augustine, in his City of God, which established the foundations of medieval political theory, outlined how the ‘city of man’ was incomplete and thus a contrast to the universal community of the ‘celestial city’ of God, which was conceived as a perfect human community but could never be realized in human history. The idea of the ecumenicity of the universal Church suggests this wider concept of community as an order that transcends the social and the political. A definition of ‘community’ in a French dictionary in 1538 stated that it signals ‘a totality of persons, and abstractly, the condition of what is common to several persons. Applied to persons, it indicates a religious collectivity.’²

What emerges from this is a notion of community as participation in a universal order. This concept of community has been very influential in modern times in that it has postulated a far-reaching critique of the human order of society. Community thus enters into tension with society, which it rejects in the name of a higher order. This kind of universal community has been reflected in many of the world religions, not just in Christianity. In Islam there is also to be found such an emphasis on community – the umma – as extending beyond the immediate context and embodying a principle of unity.³ In Confucianism community extends to encompass the cosmic order (Schwartz, 1991). Community is also a powerful discourse in Indian society and its principal religions (Jodhka, 2002). The Buddhist monastic tradition is based on the notion of sangha, which is roughly the equivalent of community.

Thus far we have established that in the critical juncture of Greek and Christian thought two senses of community emerge which are in tension with each other: on the one hand, community as local and therefore particular and, on the other hand, community as ultimately universal. This conflict has never been resolved and has endured to the present day, when we find two kinds of community in conflict: the cosmopolitan quest for belonging on a global level and the indigenous search for roots.

Modernity and the Loss of Community

It has already been noted that the modern discourse of community has been dominated by a theme of loss. As is suggested in the work of many s...