Communitarian Response Research Articles

We returned home empty-handed: COVID-19, care, and contested citizenship of Naga migrant workers in northeast India.

COVID-19 highlighted interconnections between matters of identity and citizenship, vulnerability, and inclusion in/exclusion from systems of care in times of crisis. Migrant workers from Nagaland state, northeast India, were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic's socioeconomic consequences. The public health emergency brought into question who is 'Indian' and the citizenship rights attached to that identity, heightening migrants' exclusion from central structures. Communitarian responses in Nagaland enhanced resilience in the face of often inadequate government responses; however, COVID-19 also exposed structural inequalities within and between Naga communities. This study shows that identity-based citizenship regimes and multi-nation federalism interact to increase minorities' exclusion during crises, and that crises can strengthen both divisions and solidarity at the local level in multi-nation federal systems. Inclusion in and exclusion from systems of care are shaped by and can reshape notions of identity and citizenship, underlining the need for inclusive sociopolitical systems to mitigate crises in multi-nation federal states.

Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism (excerpt)

Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism (excerpt)

The Conflict Between Public Health And Civil Liberties: The Initial UK Government Policy Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to illustrate the tension between public health and civil liberties through the case study of the UK government’s emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the area of public health, this tension is predominantly approached by reference to two theories: liberalism and communitarianism. This paper studies these positions and how they are manifested in evidence-based policymaking by combining a study of public health policy with a study of public health ethics. The studies help demonstrate the UK government’s framing of health policy relating to Covid-19 in terms of liberalism and communitarianism. The paper concludes that in the initial UK government response to Covid-19, the government discourse evoked communitarian values and framed its policies as being evidence-led and as prioritising public health. However, the policy measures themselves manifested liberal values: they had the underlying concern of not infringing excessively on civil liberties, and individuals were given autonomy of decision making within the measures that were taken. The article concluded that emergency times require a communitarian response based on preventative action. This article is the first to combine public health policy with public health ethics to demonstrate how values form a key part of decision making.

Commons and cooperatives: A new governance of collective action

AbstractThe Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is emerging as a social movement capable of moving society beyond the imbalances of the capitalist market economy and its top‐down regulation by the state. But the SSE's progress has been slow while unresolved challenges (e.g., climate, inequality) continue to intensify. Among communitarian responses to these challenges, the commons have shown great potential as a shared governance mechanism for the responsible management of common‐pool resources. To the extent that this success encourages broader applicability for commons, we focus also on commoning as crucial social practice rooted in collective action and adaptive governance. Adding this dimension of activism opens the possibility of enriching the SSE both in theory and practice for the purpose of strengthening its institutional make‐up, in particular cooperatives occupying a central position in SSE. Commoning enables us to conceive of tangible connections between commons and cooperatives as complementary modes of anti‐capitalist organization. We can illustrate this complementarity by analyzing how Ostrom's “design principles” for commons can help strengthen the ICA's Cooperative Principles. Useful lessons can be learned from concrete examples of commons–cooperative alliances, such as Ecuador's Buen Vivir initiative, the Enercoop PACA project in France, and Oakland's OmniCommons space.

Happiness Is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism

Happiness Is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism

Communitarian Dimensions in the Socio-Political Thought of the Solidarity Movement in 1980–1981

The purpose of this paper is an interpretation of the social and political thought of the Solidarity movement in the light of the political philosophy of communitarianism. In the first part of the paper, the controversies between liberalism and communitarianism are characterized in order to outline the communitarian response toward the authoritarian/totalitarian challenge. In the second part, the programme of a self-governing republic created by Solidarity is interpreted in the spirit of communitarianism. I reconstruct the ideal vision of human being expressed in of ficial trade union’s documents and essays of Solidarity’s advisers e.g., Stefan Kurowski and Jozef Tischner, and the efforts of the movement for telling the truth about history and its vision of Polish history. Also, I interpret the programme of Self-Governing Republic adopted during the First National Convention of Delegates of Solidarity. In these programmatic documents of Solidarity, one may find ideas characteristic both of the communitarian and liberal political philosophy. However, the liberal ones—including, primarily, the guarantee of human and citizens’ rights, and of individual liberties—were subordinated to the postulate of reconstructing the national and social community. In the course of transformation after 1989, these communitarian elements of Solidarity programme, incompatible with liberal ideological agenda, have been erased.

Brain drain: A communitarian response to Brock and Blake

The problem of brain drain, the movement of skilled citizens of developing countries to developed ones, arises largely because of seriously unequal life prospects in different countries. Hence, there is something profoundly wrong with the brain drain, something that calls for a moral response. Brock and Blake offer such a response by debating the ethical rights and responsibilities of skilled professionals, and of the societies in which they live, from the perspective of moral liberalism. The aim of my paper is to develop a response to some of their arguments from the perspective of moral communitarianism, with particular reference to the work of one of its classical proponents in African philosophy, Kwame Gyekye.

Against Individualism and Comparing the Philosophies of Rosemont and Sandel

ABSTRACTAgainst Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion presents Henry Rosemont’s reflection on possible Confucian-based avenues for considering solutions to contemporary moral, political, and spiritual problems. Rosemont contends that the ideologies of capitalist economies, which are based largely on competition, and belief in autonomous individuality, including abstract notions of human rights, are fundamentally unable to deal effectively with many of today’s most pressing issues. For example, he argues against appealing to universalist principles in an attempt to dissolve ethical and political tensions between cultures and states. In accordance with this orientation, his work is then best judged on the contributions it makes to constructing new perspectives on the problems addressed rather than how accurately he represents any tradition. In fact, Rosemont readily admits that he may be “unfair” to individualism or “creative[ly] misreading” early Confucianism.In this review article, I will argue that some of the differences Rosemont finds between his Confucian critique of individualism and the communitarian critique of individualism are, in fact, not all that dissimilar. For example, while Rosemont sees Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel as “individualists,” the general orientation of their communitarian response to libertarianism shares much in common with the Confucian “role ethics” perspective on the person and morality or ethics. In this way, I will argue that while Confucian role ethics and communitarian perspectives certainly have their respective emphases, they also have a lot to offer one another.

What We Can Intend: Recognition and Collective Intentionality

AbstractThe concept of recognition has played a role in two debates. In political philosophy, it is part of a communitarian response to liberal theories of distributive justice. It describes what it means to respect others’ right to self‐determination. In ethics, Stephen Darwall argues that it comprises our judgment that we owe others moral consideration. I present a competing account of recognition on the grounds that most accounts answer the question of why others deserve recognition without answering the question of what is involved in recognizing them. This paper answers the latter. I argue that, in general, recognition is something that we do to others rather than something that we think about others. In particular, recognition is an intentional action to treat another individual as a legitimate, self‐determining agent. I then show that recognition's realizability requires that agents understand their intentions as dependent on others for their satisfaction. Thus, relations of recognition are instances of collective intentionality.

Re-Membering Personal History and Land in John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

Re-Membering Personal History and Land in John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation William Arce Rarely does a family memoir speak poignantly about a contemporary national debate, but this is the case with John Phillips Santos’ autobiography Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999)1 and recent discussions about immigration. In the wake of Arizona’s SB 1070, and President Barack Obama’s second term initiative for comprehensive immigration reform, the U.S. once again prepares for a national debate on immigration, national identity, and border enforcement.2 In stark opposition to the tense national discourse regarding immigration, Santos’ memoir provides a sobering poetic commentary on migration patterns, family history and a people’s connection to land. Santos revisits the legacy of his antepasados (ancestors) and reclaims the history of the lands from which they migrated without dwelling on borders, cultures, and politics. Undoing what he claims is a Mexican cultural characteristic of forgetting, “Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering” (5), his autobiography uses poetic writing as a vessel for rescuing personal and national history from the immense waters of a forgotten past and the turbulence of debates on immigration. Santos’ memoir opens new territory in the genre of Mexican American autobiographies by moving beyond the traditional geo-political confines of nation state. It is a transnational-American-autobiography, that is, an autobiography where borders are arbitrary, and hegemonic pressures to culturally assimilate are significant only when they cloak the true history of a people’s migrations. The U.S. and Mexico are important as topographical markers in the memoir since they locate Santos’ family within a specific time and place, but they are not competing cultural structures that force family members into old patterns of assimilation and/or strategic forms of acculturation. The memoir appears to have a much larger objective, one that Santos makes clear early in the text where he frames his purpose in the form of a question: “Where did our forebears come from and what have we amounted to in this world?” (9). In his autobiography, one of Santos’ major claims is that true national belonging in the U.S. necessitates a genealogical restoration that transcends national geo-political [End Page 2] boundaries. He argues for a cultural citizenship that is anchored in the fulfillment of what he calls a “compromiso,” a promise to keep the stories of one’s ancestors alive. Unlike “other” immigrant groups in the U.S., for Chicanos/as, the American Southwest is a homeland that precedes the arrival of Europeans and, therefore, Santos’ autobiography interrogates larger national discussions of what constitutes Americanness. He questions current constructions of nation along the lines of land, birthplace, race, language, religion, and ethnicity since they fail to properly represent the varied historical strands used to weave the tapestry of American history. Instead, he reimagines nation as a more inclusive concept, a construct in which one can choose to participate. In this essay I explore Santos’ concept of “el compromiso” (the social promise) in order to illustrate how personal genealogy can generate a more inclusive form of national belonging. In the field of Chicano literature, Santos is not alone in writing about family history. In his now-classic study of Chicano autobiographies, Genaro M. Padilla visits a treasure trove of nineteenth-century texts written by Mexican and Mexican Americans who, as he argues, wrote autobiographies as a “personal and communitarian response to the threat of erasure” (x). In early autobiographies, such as John N. Seguin’s Personal Memoir of John N. Seguín (1858), Mariano G. Vallejo’s Recuerdos Históricos y Personales Tocante a la Alta California (1875), and Cleofas Jaramillo’s Shadows of the Past (1941), Mexicans and their Mexican-American progeny wrote to preserve their history in a land that once belonged to them. Cleofas Jaramillo, for example, writes in the introduction to Shadows of the Past, “My humble effort in writing this book is with the sole desire of preserving in writing our rapidly vanishing New Mexico Spanish folklore” (10). Mexican American autobiography emerged as a discursive necessity, testifying to the deep roots of the Mexican community and history in...

Red ink: Native Americans picking up the pen in the Colonial period

This dissertation looks at the ways that Native Americans appropriated alphabetic literacy for their own purposes in the colonial period. Studies of Native writing tend to begin with the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom whose A Sermon Preached by Samson Occom (1772) is the first known publication by a Native author on the North American continent. This work, however, locates Occom near the end of a series of earlier Native contacts with the written word, the fragments of which are scattered throughout the archive of the colonizer. While scholars have become largely familiarized with the representational modes in American literature that force the Native figure into patterns of either assimilation or extinction, I complicate this paradigm by exploring the interventions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Natives whose writings reflect active attempts at community building within traditional Native frameworks. I argue that once Native writings are removed from their colonized contexts and recentered in Native space, we begin to see how such notes, letters, fragments, written testimonies, and eventually, publications were composed in the service of survivance and continuance rather than as capitulations to the dominant culture. Too often the Native acquisition of literacy has been equated with being fitting into a cultural straight jacket, as though once the rhetorics of print discourse have been adopted, one can speak only through the colonizer's voice. Not until recently have some critics, articularly Native American scholars, come to question the interpretive utility of such convictions, and begun to think instead upon the contiguous line of Native tradition that runs from the era prior to colonization into the present day. I draw from the archival resources of both American and Native American Literature in an attempt to review the phenomena of colonization as a series of negotiations and survival strategies that can be more fully comprehended through a focused recognition of indigenous rhetorical and intellectual traditions. Rather than regarding the moment (or moments) of cultural contact as one in which European culture violently and tragically dismantles Native culture, I suggest how an understanding of this period must be complicated by a deeper recognition of the communitarian responses Native Americans were forging to European presence on indigenous soil.

Myśl komunitariańska w perspektywie debaty nad formułą społeczeństwa obywatelskiego

The objective of this article is to examine how the idea of civic society has shaped in order to prove this concept is ambiguous with rich tradition of thought.Observing modern theoretical and political discussions, it can be stated that the term of civic society occurs just and only in a modern sense, which means total and unjustified rejection of republican input on the development of this idea. The elimination of the thought of Aristotle, Cicero and their Middle Ages and later followers makes a theoretical construction of civic society very complicated and reduces its implementation value. For to show how modern civic society referring to the classical political thought may look, the author presents output of communitarian philosophy, which worked out a novel approach to this problem. This approach varies from the liberal conception with the fact it speaks in favour of civic participation, raises the importance of civic virtues, and prefers ‘positive’ freedom to the ‘negative’ one. Communitarianism in philosophy, like other schools of thought in contemporary political philosophy, can be defined by its response to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, and also – in my opinion – to the political doctrine in statu nascendi. Communitarianism emphasizes the need of balance the individual rights and interests with those ones of the community as a whole. MacIntyre, Taylor and Walzer argue that individual people are shaped by culture and values of their own communities. Some of communitarian theorists, for example Alisdair MacIntyre, condemn modern politics, especially liberalism and the institutions of a liberal state, as irredeemably fallen. In contrast, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer offer competing communitarian responses to the contemporary challenge of pluralism, tolerance and freedom. The original approach of communitarianism is not a simple mutation of republicanism, because it rejects its typical dogmas, such as: state and common wealth as natural creations. Whereas the tradition deriving from Aristotle has glorified state and focused the attention of the society on matters of republic, the philosophy of MacIntyre, Taylor and Walzer concentrates on cultivating local and neighbouring communities.

Expanding People's Might—Putting Social Infrastructure into the hands of the Community

There is increasing evidence of the social infrastructure failing the rural poor. In view of the failure of the responsible agency to deliver on various fronts; it is essential to examine possible solutions to bridge the gaps in the provision of social infrastructure and services. Possible solutions like technological innovation and social mobilization through communitarian responses present challenges in replication and extension. Greater centralization or decentralization to address service delivery failure is limited, in that, it is known to lead to entrenchment of power—either at the global or local levels. These limitations enforce the quest for alternatives. This article presents one such alternative—of expanding people's control, by transferring infrastructure directly into the hands of the people, through community organizations. It also explores the necessary amendments and regulations that need be made before such transference takes place; and the necessary caveats.

‘You Take Alasdair Macintyre Much too Seriously’ (Ronald Preston) — but Do Preston or Macintyre Take the Global Economy Seriously Enough?

Ronald Preston found Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of plurality and incommensurability unconvincing, holding that, ultimately, a common rationality enabled disparate perspectives to achieve shared positions. This commitment made Preston sceptical of theologies which drew on MacIntyre to deny the possibility of meaningful dialogue with economics but he ignored the argument that shared liberal roots might constrain his own critique of market institutions. Preston's theological conversation with economics assumes a state-based capitalism, political dominance over economics and a thin plurality. Globalisation challenges such foundations severely but MacIntyre's focus on communities of tradition offers only a weak challenge to global economic power. Preston's understanding of the significance of finitude in economics and MacIntyre's focus on the problems of plurality and the communitarian response are both important in any response to contemporary globalisation. This article explores whether the respective virtues of Preston's and MacIntyre's approaches can coalesce in a theology adequate to the global era.

In the company of black men: the African influence on African American culture in New York City

From the subaltern assemblies of the enslaved in colonial New York City to the benevolent New York African Society of the early national era to the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in twentieth century Harlem, voluntary associations have been a fixture of African-American communities. In the Company of Black Men examines New York City over three centuries to show that enslaved Africans provided the institutional foundation upon which African-American religious, political, and social culture could flourish. Arguing that the universality of the voluntary tradition in African-American communities has its basis in collectivism-a behavioral and rhetorical tendency to privilege the group over the individual-it explores the institutions that arose as enslaved Africans exploited the potential for group action and mass resistance. Craig Steven Wilder's research is particularly exciting in its assertion that Africans entered the Americas equipped with intellectual traditions and sociological models that facilitated a communitarian response to oppression. Presenting a dramatic shift from previous work which has viewed African-American male associations as derivative and imitative of white male counterparts, In the Company of Black Men provides a ground-breaking template for investigating antebellum black institutions.

Immigration Justice: Beyond Liberal Egalitarian and Communitarian Perspectives

Immigration law resides within a complex web of interconnected political, cultural, and economic realities. Politically the world is organized around nation states, which exercise the legal authority to control their borders. Multiple factors push people into emigrating from their country of origin or pull people toward immigrating to particular countries. Given historic migration patterns and the fluidity of national borders, cultures transcend these boundaries, creating demand for transnational mobility. The global economy coupled with disparate economic opportunities between nations spurs immigration. War, civil unrest, and natural disasters also contribute to the international movement of peoples. In this article, I explore the foundations of a socially just immigration regime. Part one provides an overview of the push–pull factors influencing the decision of individuals and families to migrate. Part two places these decisions within the context of United States immigration law, exploring both the statutory and con-stitutional restrictions on entry into the United States. Part three examines the difficulties inherent in attempts to develop a coherent and just immigration policy out of liberal political theory or the communitarian response. In Part four, I place the immigration justice issue within the framework of Roman Catholic social teaching, concluding that such a framework provides a secure basis for constructing a just immigration jurisprudence. Finally, Part five briefly reflects on the justness of current United States immigration law in light of the theory developed in Part four.

Autonomy vs. Solidarity: Liberal, Totalitarian and Communitarian Traditions

This article examines how liberal, totalitarian, and communitarian traditions attempt to balance individual autonomy with communal solidarity. Modernity has been a great liberator, freeing individuals from restrictions of tradition, cian, and place. Liberalism celebrates this freedom in market, politics, and society. But the result, according to critics, is a society of unencumbered individuals who have lost the language of cooperation and community. The totalitarian response to the failings of liberalism is to subsume the individual within the total state. Individual autonomy is suppressed so that the true social self can be discovered in solidarity with the state that is the truthbearer of culture and historical destiny. The communitarian response is to preserve the advantages of liberalism with its emphasis on human rights, universal tolerance, and free association, while attempting to revive a type of communal solidarity that is similar yet different from that found in traditional societies and totalitarian regimes. But the similarity of communitarian and totalitarian responses is problematic, as is the communitarian emphasis on romantic localism and its tendency to leave serious questions of economic power unexamined.

Confucian and Communitarian Responses to Liberal Democracy

As East Asian societies struggle with the implications of modenity, the degree to which their Confucian heritage can support institutions of liberal democracy has been much debated. Recently, several authors have argued that the nations of Confucian Asia are indeed modernizing, but in the direction of “illiberal democracy”, which they see as an approach to democratic practice that takes communitarian concerns like social solidarity and political virtue into greater account than other, more liberal democratic societies do. In line with that argument, this article makes an introductory comparison of classical Confucian and contemporary communitarian thought, criticizes the view of Confucianism as necessarily authoritarian and suggests that Confucian theory and practice provides a strong and in many ways unique communitarian response to liberalism, without fundamentally invalidating those humanistic principles basic to democratic reform.

Durkheim through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkheim, Post Modernist, and Communitarian Responses to the Enlightenment. By Douglas F. Challenger. Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. 233 pp. Cloth, $59.50; paper, $21.95

Durkheim through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkheim, Post Modernist, and Communitarian Responses to the Enlightenment. By Douglas F. Challenger. Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. 233 pp. Cloth, $59.50; paper, $21.95

Durkheim through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkheimian, Postmodernist, and Communitarian Responses to the EnlightenmentDouglas F. Challenger Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995, pp. xi, 231

Durkheim through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkheimian, Postmodernist, and Communitarian Responses to the EnlightenmentDouglas F. Challenger Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995, pp. xi, 231 - Volume 28 Issue 4