communitarianism prescriptivist, descriptive, Individualism and Communitarianism social value individual values constructionism public liberalism commitment
The thesis that the community, rather than the individual, the state, the nation, or any other entity, is and should be at the centre of our analysis and our value system. Although it is an influential strand in political philosophy, it has not been systematized—as liberalism has, for example by Rawls , as utilitarianism has, or as Marxists have developed ‘grand theory’. Nevertheless, certain key themes are clear.
Primarily, communitarians emphasize the social nature of life, identity, relationships, and institutions. They emphasize the embedded and embodied status of the individual person, by contrast with central themes in particular in contemporary liberal thought which are taken to focus on an abstract and disembodied individual. They tend to emphasize the value of specifically communal and public goods, and conceive of values as rooted in communal practices, again by contrast with liberalism, which stresses individual rights and conceives of the individual as the ultimate originator and bearer of value. The centrality of the real, historical, individual person in communitarian theory, though, distances it equally from certain varieties of Marxism—specifically strong varieties of historical determinism and those varieties of state socialism where power is highly centralized.
Communitarians can be understood to be conducting a straightforwardly prescriptivist argument: human life will go better if communitarian, collective, and public values guide and construct our lives. There is also a descriptive thesis: that the communitarian conception of the embodied and embedded individual is a truer and more accurate model, a better conception of reality, than, say, liberal individualism or atomism, or structuralist Marxism. The descriptive and prescriptive levels of analysis can be fused—communitarians argue