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4. What Angels of Our Nature? Communitarianism, Social Constructivism, and Communities of Discourse
- Southern Illinois University Press
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WHAT ANGELS OF OUR NATURE? 4 WHAT ANGELS OF OUR NATURE? COMMUNITARIANISM, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM, AND COMMUNITIES OF DISCOURSE Moral voices achieve their effect mainly through education and persuasion, rather than through coercion. Originating in communities, and sometimes embodied in law, they exhort, admonish, and appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. —Amitai Etzioni, The Essential Communitarian Reader Idistinguished the liberal model of the public sphere from the interest -based model on the grounds that the former tries to balance selfinterest and public good while the latter ignores public good altogether. Communitarians argue that the distinction is essentially false—the liberal model necessarily ends up in the interest-based model due to its unwillingness to impose a particular set of morals on its citizens. They argue that it is impossible for a democratic government to remain neutral because it requires a democratic culture. There is empirical support for this claim. Dahl and others have articulated the conditions historically connected to democratic practice, some of which are institutional (e.g., civilian control of the military, a distinction between the military and the police forces, multiple sources of power) but many of which are cultural. The ethos must be one that values honesty, promotes concern for the public good, urges tolerance, reveres long-term over short-term planning, demands quality universal education, encourages people to work within political systems to effect political change (Nie et al. 16– 24; see also Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics 244–51, On Democracy 145– 59). As Sandel says, the communitarian premise is that WHAT ANGELS OF OUR NATURE? to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. (Democracy’s Discontent 274) Because it undercuts the development of such an ethos, the liberal model’s neutrality toward morals is both misleading and damaging. It is misleading because the liberal model does have a moral agenda (autonomy is assumed to be an inherent good), and damaging because it encourages people to think of morality as a private issue (thereby enabling people to ignore their responsibilities toward their communities). Beiner’s reductio ad absurdum typifies this criticism: The liberal state ought to be uncompromisingly neutral [toward] a conception of the good life geared toward the attainment of chemical euphoria at every opportunity and a conception of the good life focused on ideas of social responsibility. . . . It should not require a very sophisticated moral reflection to see that this provides a recipe not for principled liberal statesmanship but for the moral self-destruction of the liberal state. To the extent that the state comes to understand itself in these terms, it brings down upon itself just this kind of self-vitiating calamity. (67) Communitarians argue that liberalism’s attempt to preserve individual autonomy at all costs has killed the spirit of community engagement. And the main critical project of communitarianism is to revivify that spirit. Political theorists usually use the terms “civic-republican” and “communitarian ” interchangeably (Benhabib, “Models of Public Space”; Habermas ; Bohman and Rehg; Sandel), so that Arendt, Aristotle, Sandel, and Taylor are all in the same category. But Arendt seems to me to be in a very different category from Beiner, Etzioni, Sandel, or Walzer. First, Arendt does not endorse a social constructivist model of discourse (I am not convinced all communitarians do either, though). Second, for agonists, the value of rhetoric comes from its ability to disrupt communities, to flummox consensus, and thereby hamper hegemony, but community and consensus seem closely connected for communitarians. Finally, agonism is heavily conflictual, and that is not clearly the case with communitarians. Thus, heterogeneity is a necessary condition for agonists, while homogeneity is the necessary condition for communitarians. Communitarians argue that there should be more argument about WHAT ANGELS OF OUR NATURE? morals, that public discourse should not avoid such topics, at the same time that they call for more community. But, depending on their model for discourse, this is potentially either contradictory, or a hidden call for the government to enforce more conformity. The potential problem, in other words, is that communitarianism may be even less able to handle difference than liberal political theory. Earlier, I described a matrix in which there were four kinds of public discourse—irenic/expressive; irenic/deliberative; agonistic/expressive; agonistic/deliberative. In an irenic...