The Communitarian Network: Sociology, Sociologists, and Possible Responses to the New Right (1996) more

The Communitarian Network: Sociology, Sociologists, and Possible Responses to the New Right B. Ricardo Brown Department of Sociology and the Center For Cultural Studies City University of New York Graduate Center A Paper Presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 19, 1996, New York, New York. Please do not reference without permission. B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 1 My presentation concerns what might be considered, at first glance, a local or marginal issue of New Right Ideology: the rise of the particular ideological practice of communitarianism. But obviously I want to talk about communitarianism because I believe that by precisely situating it, we can open up an additional avenue for our struggle against the reactive ideological practices of the New Right. It seems that the presence of the Right is everywhere. But despite monumental efforts, we have yet to capture the full meaning of this presence. In part, this is because we are confronted with a moving target. We “just know” that the New Right is “out there,” but whenever we try to understand it as a whole, it seems to vanish into a hodge- podge of organizations and discourses. That the task of situating the Right has proved so difficult raises the troubling possibility that there might be no unitary politics of the New Right, and therefore no single authoritarian ideology emanating from a central source. Instead, we can find the authoritarianism that the New Right expresses thoughout the entire fabric of society. In my paper, I argue that examining communitarianism is instructive because First, it can tell us a good deal about the workings of ideology, especially the ideologies of the middle classes, and Second, it reminds us how fascism exists not only “on the right,” but how it can become allied with and permeate moderate and even progressive responses to it. Since we are here at the ASA, and the question before us is one of responding to the Right, I will concentrate in this talk on the alliance between communitarianism and sociology. Since at least the 1992 election cycle, the advocacy of something called “family values” has cast a shadow over discussions of public policy. The right wing political intervention coded in the phrase has generated a number of reactions from the moderate to progressive opposition. Many simply scoff at what they perceived as opportunistic pandering, false consciousness, politics as usual, etc. Others have responded in what they thought to be a more “thoughtful” manner. This group acknowledged that the rhetoric of family values do seem to “resonate” with the so-called “general public,” .....and this led many to argue that moderates and progressives also needed their own language for discussing family and social responsibility. Communitarianism is one such “thoughtful” response to the New Right’s intervention. The resurgence of the Right is, according to Amitai Etzioni, a call for the middle class to “get it’s house in order.” Although frequently characterized by President (and candidate Clinton) as “forgotten,” communitarian politics to directed squarely at the middle classes. Etzioni says that “People often ask me if I am talking to the ghettos, and I-- I am speaking first of all to the middle class” (McNeil-Lerher Newshour ). And his message is, on the surface, a simple one: To quote Etzioni again: "...the best way to curb authoritarianism and right-wing tendencies is to stop the anarchic drift by introducing carefully calibrated responses to urgent and legitimate public concerns about safety and the control of epidemics.” Rhetorically neither “left nor right,’ the Communitarian Network presents itself, and communitarianism in general, as the only alternative that the middle class has to the overt authoritarianism of the Right. In fact, this anxiety is important in situating B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 2 communitarianism within the present social relations of the middle classes and as an expression of these relations. And as even a superficial reading of communitarian works exposes, their real fear is of the Right. In my paper, I argue that the ideological practices of the Communitarians are coterminous with those of the New Right and are directed specifically towards the vast middle classes. In their attempt to counter the New Right, the communitarians adopt some of the Right’s most controversial positions as their own and simply reinterpret them as issues of communal existence. The presence of the New Right is evident throughout communitarian writings. One hears the themes of “family values” quite clearly in the Communitarian Platform. The Communitarians denounce what they see as a general breakdown of the values that they say “gave us as a nation a shared sense of community.” This breakdown is brought about in part by a moral relativism that is expressed in the increase in divorce and single-parent families, crime, and epidemics (which is always a code word for HIV-AIDS). They argue that the United States has experienced an explosion of rights and “rights-talk” to the exclusion of issues of duty, responsibility, moral obligations, and shared (community) values. From values education and the White House conferences on character building.... to the so-called violence, or “v-chip” and denunciations of “rights-talk,” the rhetoric of communitarianism has emerged repeatedly in recent discussions of national public policy. By holding so-called teach-ins, the efforts of the Communitarian network to make itself heard in Congress have been quite effective. The influence of communitarians on the Clinton Administration has been repeatedly noted in the press. Clinton has praised Etzioni's exposition of the communitarian vision, The Spirit of Community. (AND so too has Tony Blair of the British Labot party leader). Four members of the Clinton administration endorse the Communitarian Platform. President Clinton's rhetoric of the forgotten middle class, his ending of public assistance, and his references in the 1995 State of the Union address to the "breakdown of community," among other things, are all instances where his and the communitarian discourse intersects with reactive social policy that is said to be “beyond the politics of right or left” (Derber 1994). But this is also where the situation of communitarianism within the academy becomes so important. We can not ignore the sites where communitarian knowledge is produced within the academy and within sociology itself. Communitarianism represents an attempt at a major intervention by academics, especially sociologists, into the realm of public policy. As Phillip Selznick says, the articulation of a crisis of community means that "serious issues of public policy are at stake" (1987:447), as well as questions of sociological knowledge. Selznick explicitly highlights the "connection between sociological understanding and the communitarian perspective"(1987:477). Sociology, he argues, is concerned with "the self as a social product" and not with the "abstract individual" postulated by liberal philosophy. What he terms "welfare liberalism" can not let go of this idea of the B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 3 preordained individual. This, Selznick says, is the true failure of liberalism and also the point at which the communitarians make their most vital sociological critique. Selznick agrees with the communitarians that we are experiencing the loss of community as a "comprehensive framework for social life... [as] a locus of commitment" (1987:447). The communitarians see this loss as affecting both "society," and the discipline of sociology because society is, after all, its object of study. For Selznick, and also for Alan Wolfe, the loss of social and moral commitment is at the center of the loss of the "coherence of our discipline and its dignity as well" (1987:450). Presumably, the closing and consolidating of sociology departments in recent years is a symptom of this loss of disciplinary coherence (see Aronowitz 1994). This same appreciation of the of the implications of the disintegration of disciplinary boundaries is seconded by Alan Wolfe, who says that sociologists should position themselves as moral philosophers of society, "the guilty conscience of economics and politics" (1989:190-193). The communitarians do not philosophize in a vacuum. Arguing from positions that are, at the very least, sympathetic to communitarianism, Selznick, Wolfe, and Etzioni all situate communitarianism and the Communitarian Network in a unique relationship to the process of academic knowledge production (Aronowitz 1992:34). Etzioni, himself, noted that the Communitarian Network was formed in 1990 at a Washington meeting of “fifteen ethicists, social philosophers, and social scientists.”---The network now boasts about 6000 members.---- And the Communitarian Network has served to provide a important link between academic knowledge production and the formulation of public policy. It is important for no other reason than the congressional teach-ins and White House conferences gain legitimacy and audiences, relying in part on the academic credentials of the participants. But there are other reasons that it is important. The organizational structure of the American Sociological Association (ASA) provided a pivotal node (or resource) for the deployment of the Communitarian Network's ideological practices. The first Annual Conference of the Communitarian Network in L.A. coincided with the 1994 Annual Meeting of the ASA. At this same time, Etzioni, already a founder of the Communitarian Network, was formally elected President of the American Sociological Association. Under his tenure, the ASA’s 1995 Annual Meeting was called "The Community of Communities," a phrase Etzioni uses to describe the nation as a whole. And it is interesting to note that just prior to last years ASA conference, Etzioni posted a strongly worded statement to the Progressive Sociologist Network--- an Internet discussion group--- alleging that he had learned of a conspiracy afoot by “so-called progressives” to disrupt the meeting in protest of the overt influence of the Communitarian Network. And in recognition of his clout, Etzioni’s PSN letter, with its more outrageous statements edited out, appeared in Footnotes. Of course, no such disruptions took place because none were ever really planned, but once again Etzioni was able to use the medium provided by the structure of the discipline. B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 4 It seems clear that we can take from the commuitarians the important message that academic knowledge production can not be separated from the production of social policy (if it ever could), That even relatively obscure, or “outdated” sociological work has ideological, and therefore political, significance precisely because its legitimacy does not derive from its status as sociological discourse per say, .....Instead, its legitimacy is derived from a social context of which it is just one expression. We can not ignore how sociological knowledge can be used in the service of reactive politics, and the communitarians have moved the struggle over sociological knowledge into everyday politics in an overt, and successful, manner. Given this success, an obvious question to end with is whether there is indeed a real need for social, and socialist, intellectuals to come up with an alternative language of family, community, and responsibility? And further, should we imitate their success at using the structure of the discipline---and the instability of the disciplines boundaries--- to insist on our own relevance to current policy debates? I would certainly say that there are lessons to be learned from the Communitarian Network’s strategies. However, I do not believe we need an alternative language. To create one would be to engage in that same kind of knowledge production. For example, the communitarian call for a strengthening of community, and a greater concern for families and children, as the solution for our many “social ills” sounds O.K...... who could reasonably disagree and not appear a simple misanthrope? But one writing by Etzioni can stand as a stark remainder of the dangers of uncritically embracing calls for greater community. In his essay “Liberals and Communitarians,” Etzioni states that community exists in terms of three things, it’s size and geographic space (--- which he calls its scope), structures such as kinship relations (substance), and patterns of dominance, which are allied with a single morality that binds all social ties. But Etzioni gives more than just this simple definition of community. In a rather telling rhetorical maneuver, Etzioni’s essay features section headings for scope and substance, but when we turn expecting to find a section of the third part of community, dominance, we find that the term has been replaced by the phrase “The Responsive Community.” Etzioni tells us that the Responsive community has at hand sufficient means of coercion to maintain stability. But more ideally, it has sufficient power to force the internalization of its morality, making it appear so natural that it seems an essential part of an individual: it becomes her identity. Etzioni in a later interview assures us of his meaning. To quote him, “While the concept of community may harbor the threat of coercion, it is not necessarily the coercion of the state, but [it might also be] the moral compulsion of a Salem-like community...” To avoid such a colonial situation, it might be better to remember that while there is no general public, critiques do have specific audiences and that our audiences and critiques are different from theirs. For their public policy audience, communitarians use specific sociological knowledge to describe a compassionate society, where the needs of individuals are provided for by a “responsive community.” But it is the responsiveness B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 5 of authority, a compassion based upon duty and guilty conscience,,.... and no where is there ever any mention of social justice or human emancipation. While the communitarian’s fear of the New Right is understandable, and can even evoke empathy, a politics based upon fear is inherently reactive, and ultimately legitimizing of the status quo. It is a question of whether a reactive politics becomes the public face of sociology, and therefore, sociology becomes a public excuse for this reactive politics..... Or whether there still might emerge an truly radical sociological knowledge that serves the various struggles against fascism by critiquing how we can come to desire duty and obligation, that is, how we come to desire our own repression.. The communitarians are important because they remind us that reactive ideological practices exist not just on the right, and that they certainly exist within the academy, but also that they can exist anywhere. This might even mean that in addition to showing us that there is no single right wing ideology,--- they also suggest that there is no single, unitary, politics of community. _____________ The author would like to thank Nancy K. Cauthen for her always accurate and insightful comments on various drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Amy Ansell, Stanley Aronowitz, Kenneth Cauthen, John L. Hammond, Jacob Terry, Celia Winkler, and the members of the CUNY Grundrisse Working Group for many helpful discussions. Please address comments and correspondence to: brbrowniii@earthlink.net). B. Ricardo Brown “The Communitarian Network....” 6