Status Updates From The Quest for Community: A ...

real problem is not the loss of old contexts but rather the failure of our present democratic and industrial scene to create new contexts of association and moral cohesion within which the smaller allegiances of men will assume both functional and psychological significance. It is almost as if the forces that weakened the old have remained to obstruct the new channels of association

Modern philosophies of freedom have tended to emphasize, as we have seen, either the individual's release from power of every kind—generally, through an appeal to natural rights—or the individual's participation in some single structure of authority like the General Will, which replaces all other structures.

modern democratic thought has settled single-mindedly upon the same elements that are crucial to the political community: the abstract individual and the State.

Individual versus State is as false an antithesis today as it ever was. The State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does on what it takes from competing social relationships—family, labor union, profession, local community, and church

ours is a State characterized by ever-rising centralization of function and authority. Both characteristics—social atomization and political centralization—are the unmistakable attributes of the beginnings of mass society. And because of these social and political realities the requirements of liberal democracy

State and individual were the two elements of the unitary theory of democracy. The abstract individual was conceived as the sole bearer of rights and responsibilities. The State, conceived in the image of people who lay incorruptible beneath the superstructure of society, would be the area of fraternity and secular rehabilitation. All that lay between these two elements..were suspect for their fettering influence

The longing for community which now exists as perhaps the most menacing fact of the Western world will not be exorcised by incantations drawn from the writings of Bentham, Mill, and Spencer. No theory of freedom in our age will be either effective or relevant that does not recognize the present centrality of the quest for community

the conditions we see spreading in the Western world today: on the one hand, enlarging masses of socially “free,” insecure, individuals; on the other, the constant increase in the custodial powers of a State that looms ever larger as the only significant refuge for individuals who insist upon escaping from the moral consequences of individualism

Economic freedom cannot be separated from the non-individualistic contexts of association and community of moral purpose. Capitalism has become weakest, as a system of allegiances and incentives, where these social resources have become weak and where no new forms of association and symbolism have arisen to replace the old

To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms

Totalitarianism is an affair of mass attitudes. Its success depends on incorporating into new structures of power those values with the widest appeal to a population. It cannot be reduced, in its fundamentals, to such manifestly abhorrent facts as racial extermination, capitalist enslavement, or military dominance

This conception of mass participation in power, with its corollary of mass power as mass freedom, has proved to be the most revolutionary of all political doctrines in the modern world. If the power of government is but the reflection of the will of the masses, or, rather, of the interests of the masses, and if the General Will is merely a means of forcing individuals to be free...

The medieval Church had sought to bind man spiritually as well as economically, culturally as well as politically, into an undiversified unity of membership that would leave nothing outside it. The State must similarly seek to make itself the harmonious coordinator of all human interests, being no less sensitive to the economic, the charitable, the communal, and the symbolic needs of the people

The modern State is monistic; its authority extends directly to all individuals within its boundaries. So-called diplomatic immunities are but the last manifestation of a larger complex of immunities which once involved a large number of internal religious, economic, and kinship authorities

Newly created in a harsh time of creation, white-collar man has no culture to lean upon except the contents of a mass society that has shaped him and seeks to manipulate him to its alien ends. For security's sake he must attach himself somewhere, but no communities or organizations seem to be thoroughly his.

Contemporary prophets of the totalitarian community seek, with all the techniques of modern science at their disposal, to transmute popular cravings for community into a millennial sense of participation in heavenly power on earth. When suffused by popular spiritual devotions, the political party becomes more than a party. It becomes a moral community of almost religious intensity, a deeply evocative symbol of collec

Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demonic fears and passions. Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals

From this basic conception of the effects of the Revolution upon traditional society, the conservatives proceeded to a view of man and society that stressed not the abstract individual and impersonal relations of contract but personality inextricably bound to the small social group; relationships of ascribed status and tradition; the functional interdependence of all parts of a society

For the Philosophical Conservatives the greatest crimes of the Revolution in France were those committed not against individuals but against institutions, groups, and personal statuses. These philosophers saw in the Terror no merely fortuitous consequence of war and tyrannic ambition but the inevitable culmination of ideas contained in the rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment.

“It is this autonomous individual who really ushers in modern civilization and who is completely annihilated in the final stages of that civilization,”

in the Western world today a culture compounded not of traditional faith and confidence, but one agitated by feelings of fear and anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness, and meaninglessness. So long as a strong cultural heritage existed, and with it a sense of membership, the modern ethic of individualism was tolerable. “But when the remnants of a common world broke down, the individual was thrown into complete loneliness

Berdyaev sees before him in the modern world the “disintegration of the human image”; Toynbee sees the proletarian, he who has lost all sense of identity and belonging; for Ortega y Gasset it is mass man, the anonymous creature of the market place and the mass ballot; for John Dewey, it is the lost individual—bereft of the loyalties and values which once endowed life with meaning.

The stability of the individual was a function of his unalterable instincts and his sovereign reason; the stability of society was guaranteed by the laws of historical change. The two goals of scientific universality and moral emancipation from the past became largely indistinguishable in the philosophy and the social science of the age.

a specter is haunting the modern mind, the specter of insecurity. Surely the outstanding characteristic of contemporary thought on man and society is the preoccupation with personal alienation and cultural disintegration

one revolts against what he is totally alienated from

Thus liberalism can beget totalitarianism. The great liberal project, “the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past,” risks producing emancipated individuals eager for the embrace of a far more tyrannical authority than church or class or family

The liberated individual is just as likely to become the alienated individual, the paranoid individual, the lonely and desperately-seeking-community individual. And if he can't find that community on a human scale, then he'll look for it on an inhuman scale—in the total community of the totalizing state

you ignored the human impulse toward community that made totalitarianism seem desirable—the yearning for a feeling of participation, for a sense of belonging, for a cause larger than one's own individual purposes and a group to call one's own