A Short Note Community Politics PDF

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A Short Note Community Politics...

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A Short Note Community Politics One of the central tenants of communitarianism is that our moral and political judgments, as well as the policies and institutions we enact, should be informed by our understanding of human nature and the various constitutive communities (or social relations) that give rise to them. We're more like lions and tigers than tigers and lionesses because we spend most of our time in groups rather than alone. We have a moral and political obligation to support and nourish the communities that provide meaning in our lives, without which we would be disoriented, deeply lonely, and unable to make informed moral and political judgements. While communitarianism has been around for centuries in the West, China, and elsewhere, the modern movement was sparked by a critical response to John Rawls' landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice. According to Rawls, the primary function of government is to secure and fairly distribute the liberties and economic resources that individuals require in order to lead freely chosen lives. Political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer disagreed, drawing primarily on the insights of Aristotle and Hegel. The communitarian label was placed on these liberal theory critics by others, usually critics, but they never identified with the communitarian movement nor did they offer a grand communitarian theory as a systematic alternative to liberalism. However, the four theorists mentioned above all make similar claims about the importance of tradition and social context for moral and political reasoning, ontological or metaphysical claims about the social nature of the self, and normative claims about the value of community in opposition to liberalism's devaluation of it. To make it easier to follow, I've broken this essay up into three sections. In each section, I present the most important communitarian claims and then make the case

that philosophical concerns from the 1980s have largely given way to political concerns that originally motivated much of the communitarian critique.

Community Politics

Communitarian critics of liberalism may have been motivated less by philosophical concerns than by pressing political concerns, such as the negative social and psychological effects of modern liberal societies' atomistic tendencies. There are many communitarians who are concerned about the perceived inability of traditional liberal institutions and practises to deal with modern phenomena such as alienation from the political process, unbridled greed and a lack of social cohesion, as well as urban crime and high divorce rates. So it was perhaps inevitable that Amitai Etzioni and William Galston would turn to the more practical political terrain of emphasising social responsibility and promoting policies meant to counteract the erosion of communal life in an increasingly fragmented society in the 1990s. For example, Amitai Etzioni's The Responsive Community, which featured contributions from an eclectic group of philosophers, social scientists and public policy makers, was the flagship communitarian periodical until its demise in 2004 due to financial constraints. Director of Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, Etzioni is also responsible for producing working papers and advising Washington officials.

They blame both the left and the right for our current state of affairs. Politicians on the political left are accused of shifting power away from local communities and democratic institutions to centralised bureaucratic structures better equipped to

administer the fair and equal distribution of benefits, resulting in a growing sense of powerlessness and alienation from the political process. Besides that, the modern welfare state has weakened civil society's family and social ties by removing all but the most essential duties from individuals, by actively discouraging individuals from volunteering their time and efforts to help others (for example, in Sweden, union rules and strict regulations prevent parents from voluntarily participating in the governance of some day care centres where they send their children), and even by imposing new obligations on individuals (e.g., no-fault divorce in the US is often financially rewarding for the non custodial parent, usually the father).

Right-wing libertarian solutions have contributed even more to the erosion of social responsibilities and cherished community life, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. " The invisible hand of unregulated free-market capitalism does not produce positive social outcomes, but rather harms the family, disrupts local communities, and corrupts the political process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no longer represent the community at large). More than that, the Thatcherite/Reagan period's elevated status for avarice justified the expansion of market-based rules of reciprocity and civil obligation beyond the confines of the marketplace. As the world becomes more interconnected, states are being forced to follow the dictates of global markets.

In the United States, communitarian theorists like Mary Ann Glendon criticise a recent upsurge in the rights discourse. A strident right rhetoric has colonised

contemporary political discourse, whereas the assertion of rights was once limited to matters that were of essential human interest, leaving little room for rational discussion and compromise, justifying the neglect of social responsibilities that are essential to a society's functioning, and eventually weakened by devaluing the most important rights.

Public policies would be implemented by political communitarians to help correct this inequality in US society by placing restrictions on new rights being created and encouraging us to change our "habits of the heart" away from solely focusing on ourselves and towards supporting our communities as a whole rather than just a few individuals. It is important to note that this proposal assumes the existence of basic civil and political liberties, which alleviates the fear that communitarians are on a slippery slope toward authoritarian rule. Even so, communitarian thinkers have quietly lifted their call for a moratorium on the creation of new rights, presumably due to a growing consensus that marginalised groups, such as samesex couples seeking the right to legally sanctioned marriage, have a legitimate claim to new rights and would be paying the price for the excesses of others if the moratorium is implemented.

What's more serious from a communitarian perspective, however, is the question of exactly what this has to do with community. Etzioni, for one, uses the need to maintain a balance between social order and freedom to justify his policies rather than citing the importance of community. Even communitarians like John Stuart Mill and Burkean conservatives are concerned about social order, and this isn't just a communitarian concern. Politicians who use the term "community" seem to have

no problem defining what it means. Furthermore, as Elizabeth Frazer argues, it has frequently been used to justify hierarchical structures and to delegitimize areas of conflict and contention in modern societies..

But the term "community" as a normative ideal can be understood. Communitarians begin by claiming that our lives are inextricably linked to the well-being of the communities in which we are born and raised. There are some things that aren't included in this list, such as memberships to golf clubs, that don't have a significant impact on a person's sense of identity and well-being. In contrast to the pre-modern proponents of Gemeinshaft, it is assumed that there are many forms of communal life valued in the modern world. Rather than restricting individual freedom, the distinctive political project of the communitarian movement focuses on identifying and protecting important aspects of community life. For communitarians the following types of communities are typically mentioned:

"Communities of place" refers to social groups whose members share a common geographic origin. It's safe to say that this is the most common interpretation of the word "community." As a result, it can be said that a community has a "locality" in the sense of having a physical location. A small hamlet or a bustling metropolis can be the subject of this phrase. As well as having an affective component, a sense of community of place refers to a person's "home," the place where they were born and raised and the place where they would like to spend the rest of their lives, even if they leave as adults. There is at the very least an interest in identifying with familiar surroundings among communitarian thinkers.

Politicians should take into account the existing character of the local community when considering development plans, for example (Jane Jacobs famously documented the negative effects of razing run-down tenements and replacing them with functionally adequate but characterless low-income housing blocs.). Big cities can and should work to preserve and promote their own unique sense of identity... (Bell and de-Shalit). Building projects that do not adhere to existing architectural styles should be subject to community council veto power; laws regulating plant closures should be put in place to protect local communities from the effects of rapid capital mobility and sudden industrial change; local ownership of corporations should be encouraged, as well as restrictions on large-scale discount outlets like Wal-Mart that threaten to displace entire neighbourhoods; (Shuman) (Ehrenhalt).

2. Groups of strangers who share a morally significant history or a community of remembrance. An imagined community with a shared history spanning several generations is referred to by this term, which was coined by the authors of Habits of the Heart for the first time. These communities not only bind us to our past, but they also point us in the direction of the future, as their members strive to realise the ideals and aspirations engendered by those communities' past experiences, seeing their efforts as part of a collective good. People's lives are given purpose and direction because of them. The nation and language-based ethnocultural groups are among the most common examples.

There are a number of nation-building activities in Western liberal democracies that are meant to strengthen the ties that bind people together, such as national service and national history lessons in school textbooks. The national political community is of particular importance to self-described republicans like Michael Sandel, who advocate for measures that increase civic engagement and publicspiritedness (Sandel 1996). Multi-national states are becoming more common, and modern Western states have to make room for the political rights of minorities in order to maintain their legitimacy. Many recent studies on nationalism, citizenship, and multiculturalism have addressed these issues.

Communities governed by feelings of trust, cooperation, and altruism, such as face-to-face social groups. In order to achieve common goals, a group's members engage in joint activities and feel a sense of psychological closeness. Trust, cooperation, and altruism are the guiding principles of face-to-face communities based on trust, cooperation, and altruism in the sense that constituent members act for the good of the community. Unlike communities of place, they are not necessarily defined by their location or the proximity of those in the community. Unlike communities of memory, they are more "real" and are typically based on face-to-face interaction at a single point in time, so they tend to be smaller in scope. [14] The family is a good starting point. Many small businesses and schools are built on the foundation of trust and social cooperation.

People who identify as communists are more likely to advocate for policies that support the preservation of family and family-like groups. Measures such as promoting marriage and making it more difficult to dissolve a marriage legally fall

under this category. The benefits of marriage to one's mental health and social well-being lend credence to these policies. People's deepest psychological needs can be tapped at an early age by communitarians, who favour political legislation that can help restructure education. Students in Japan's primary school system learn about working together as a group, and rewards and punishments are given to the class as a whole rather than to individual students.

What distinguishes the political project of communitarianism is the promotion of all three forms of valued communal life. However, this raises the concern that pursuing the goods of different communities may actually conflict. Pro-family measures include more time and energy spent by parents on raising their children, more flexible work schedules for parents, and government mandates for six months of paid leave and a year of unpaid leave. Etzioni, a prominent advocate of these policies, argues that these measures will help families. Public policies and heart changes are likely to result in a shift toward a more private and family-oriented society.

"Once citizens have been made aware of the need to clean up public life in the US, they must make it their civic duty to organise others locally, regionally, and nationally to act on their understanding of what it takes to do so," writes Etzioni of the American political system, concluding that only widespread participation in public affairs by upright citizens can remedy the situation. (Etzioni) But few people have the time and energy to devote themselves fully to both family life and public affairs, and favouring one ideal is most likely to weaken the other.. Nothing about republican America in Jefferson's time is by chance dependent on politically

engaged, family-free male citizens. Societies populated by people who enjoy affluent and happy family lives, on the other hand, tend to be ruled by despots who can count on a submissive and politically indifferent populace to enforce their will.

Conflicting commitments plague communitarians who advocate both greater involvement in public affairs and closer ties to the workplace (to the point where it becomes a psychological community). The "proud craftsmen" of Jacksonian era and Louis Brandeis's "industrial democracy, in which workers participated in management and shared responsibilities for running the business" of Michael Sandel are two examples. Workers' civic capacities may not be improved by identifying with their workplace and participating in industrial democracy, according to some studies. Few people have the time and energy to be actively involved in both their professional and personal lives. This is similar to how having a full-time job and a full-time family life can conflict. Remember that the ancient Athens republican society relied on active, public-spirited males who were freed from the necessity of working for their families (slaves did most of the drudge labor).

It's also important to keep in mind that a person's commitment to their job can interfere with their ability to maintain healthy family relationships. Workplace communitarianism in Japan, according to Tatsuo Inoue of Tokyo University, often results in "karoshi" (death from overwork) and denies employees the "right to sit down at the dinner table with their families," as Tatsuo puts it. To borrow a phrase from Ronald Dworkin, liberals (like communitarians) sometimes have to choose

between ideals (such as freedom and equality) that conflict with one another if a serious effort is made to realise any one of them fully.

In some cases, however, promoting one form of communal life may actually serve to strengthen other forms rather than weaken them, and political communitarians will naturally support such a shift. Critics have objected to "walled communities," or residential community associations, on the grounds that they detract from the public's sense of belonging to the polity and weaken social cohesion and trust (McKenzie). How might urban planning be changed so that people can build strong local communities without compromising their connection to the national community, possibly even strengthening more general forms of public-spiritedness in the process. There have been a slew of helpful suggestions in this vein. Many architects and urban planners in the United States, referred to as "New Urbanists," advocate for measures to strengthen community building, such as affordable housing, public transportation and pedestrian-focused environments, that would not have the "privatising" consequences of gated communities. To put it simply, "virtually everything they want to do is now illegal," says Gerald Frug. Cities would have to rewrite municipal zoning laws and development policy from top to bottom to promote the new urbanist version of urban design." Policy recommendations that explicitly favour complementary forms of communal attachments are needed, as this shows.

It is wrong to assume that individual rights and communitarian goals always conflict, just like it is wrong to assume that communitarian goals and individual rights always conflict. Having more secure democratic rights in Singapore, for

example, could have the effect of bolstering the country's commitment to the greater good. If you're hoping to get into politics in Singapore, the government won't hide the fact that it makes it difficult for many people to do so. Eleven opposition politicians went bankrupt between 1971 and 1993, according to Attorney General Chan Sek Keong (and hence ineligible to run in elections). Regardless of the motivation, such actions send a message of disloyalty to the entire community: If you're not a member of the ruling party's top brass, you're better off staying out of politics and focusing on your personal life. It's hard to blame people for ignoring their social and political duties "when they hear so many cautionary tales: Of Singaporeans whose careers came to a premature end after they voiced their disapproval; of critics who found themselves under investigation; of individuals detained without trial even though they seemed not to pose any real threat; of tapped phones and opened letters." — Singaporean journalist Cherian George As these stories demonstrate, in Singapore it is better to focus on your own interests and leave politics to the professionals.' For example, if you want to build community support, then allowing opposition candidates to run for office without fear of retaliation is an important first step.[21] (see also Chan 2014). When a community is small, the communitarian case for democratic elections is more powerful because it is easier to establish a sense of community solidarity (in larger political communities, such as China, elections may contribute to disharmony; see Bell 2015, chs. 1 and 4).

When it comes to politics of community, the Singaporean case points us back to a communitarian defence of cultural specificity. When it comes to democracy, Singapore's democratic reformers typically refer to "minimal democracy," which is what Western analysts refer to as free and fair elections. It's the same in Hong

Kong, where social critics' claim of "full" democracy turns out to be (nothing more than) an elected legislature and Chief Executive. However, the republican tradition in communitarian thought, with its vision of strong democracy supported by active, public-spirited citizens who participate in political decision-making and hold shape the future direction of their society, appears to be largely absent from public discourse in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as perhaps East Asia more generally. Even though many East Asians want to ensure that their democratic rights are upheld, this rarely leads to demands that all citizens be committed to politics on a regular b...