Toward a Global Thin Community

Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Cosmopolitan Commitment

Mark Olssen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317250319
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Toward a Global 'Thin' Community re-examines aspects of the liberal-communitarian debate. While critical of both traditions, this book argues that a coherent form of communitarianism is the only plausible option for citizens today. Using the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Olssen shows how we can overcome traditional problems with communitarianism by using an ethic of survival that he identifies in the writings of Nietzsche and others to provide a normative framework for twenty-first century politics at both national and global levels. "Thin" communitarianism seeks to surmount traditional objections associated with Hegel and Marx, and to safeguard liberty and difference by applying a robust idea of democracy."

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Introduction: The 'Thin' Community and Liberalism

‘Thin’ communitarianism is not technically a form of liberalism at all, if one means by liberalism a theoretical doctrine that gives to the individual a foundational role. For thin communitarianism, although it gives importance to liberal end values and ideals, such as freedom, respect for human life, recognition of human dignity, equal worth, and the rule of law, and in this sense sees the individual as morally foundational, does so within a particular view of the individual which sees her as socially and historically constituted. In that freedom is possible, and desirable, it presupposes for its development and expression certain culturally constituted skills, capabilities, values, and norms, as well as certain institutional structures. In short, a common good. The fundamental claim of thin communitarianism is that individual survival and flourishing presupposes as necessary a form of common life that is both publicly constituted and reproduced.

Liberals will be already suspicious that this description echoes a concern with the collective action or common good that they see as both dangerous and wrong. Yet the thesis that I will endeavour to maintain is that while community values and institutions underpin individual development, autonomy, and freedom, and that a concern with the common good is a necessary to political theory, such representations do not cancel a concern with pluralism, difference, or diversity. Indeed, rather than cancelling freedom, they represent its necessary presupposition. I will seek to argue this by maintaining that pluralism and unity are not mutually exclusive ontological dimensions, but rather always function simultaneously as a balance of forces.

The fundamental errors of liberalism and neoliberalism are firstly that their descriptive ontology about the foundational role of individuals is simply untrue. Like stories about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, the story liberals have sought to foist upon us is a mythic story of human development that represents it as the product of autonomous individual endeavor. In this process, as Kant characterizes it, reality is perceived by the senses through innate mental categories and concepts; that is, there exist given and natural conditions through which reality is experienced. This is the enlightenment dream of a universal reason as ascertained by ‘pre-social’ beings capable of autonomous moral and practical choice by virtue of their nature.

Collective coordination operates through spontaneously generated market structures that enhance individual claims to choice and autonomy. My thin communitarian argument will reject that markets can so enhance either choice or autonomy. Rather, I will claim that unsupervised markets destroy the common values and community structures necessary for their development and existence. Rather than serving as the hallmarks of nature, freedom and autonomy only make sense within the context of a public space where market exchanges are controlled within a political realm; that is, that they constitute a subordinate activity.

In staking my claim to what I call ‘thin’ communitarianism, the suspicious liberal will hopefully be awkwardly disadvantaged by my claim that my own representation distances itself from more traditional characterizations of communitarianism. Firstly, the ‘thin’ community does not seek to preserve or reassert any traditional form of ‘organic unity’, nor conservative, nor traditional socialist restoration of true moral values. Neither does it aim at offsetting or preventing a social or moral crisis, or collapse; nor does it aim at moral regeneration, and although it develops a notion of the common good, it does not seek to achieve unity, harmony, or moral, social, or political integration. In short, the notion of community articulated does not aim to impose any creed or system of values, or to strengthen unity or integration beyond what is necessary for survival and continuance of life forms, whether conservative, with a big or small ‘c’, or concerned with classical or revised conceptions of socialism.

Thin communitarianism is a term used in order to recognize social ontological possibilities that express accurately post-Einsteinian values of interdependence between all things as well as the social and historical character of existence. Another way to put this is to enable us to avoid the bizarre myths of liberalism. Central here is the view concerning the nature of reason as ahistorical that has its origins in Descartes’s and Hobbes’s early modern conceptions, but which is consolidated in Kant and all the dominant varieties of liberal theory. Such a view gives us a social ontology which places rational individuals as neutral, or ‘freestanding’, stacked against the artificiality of society and the distortions of collective endeavor. It is a conception where in ‘liberal-speak’ the right is prior to the good that I maintain is a fallacy. As if individuals simply existed as solitary atoms and had no need to cooperate and work together, in order to maintain themselves as individuals.

For thin communitarianism, three fundamental axioms are in order.

1. A recognition of the social and historical constitution of selfhood and its rejection, as in liberal and neoliberal theory, of the self as an isolated asocial, ahistorical, unconnected atom, who has reason prior to social engagement. For thin communitarianmism, the self, while the malleable product of socialization, is not without species needs or characteristics.
2. An abandonment of the search for universal naturalistic principles to ground claims, but rather a theory which constructs universal principles based on pragmatic grounds of avoiding danger and enhancing security in the quest for survival and well-being. Such goals are dealt with differently in different times and places, and in this sense are local and contextual. While there are some remarkably persistent universal dimensions to survival, such as the need for sustenance by all life forms, different groups’ quests for survival are necessarily modulated in terms of the exigencies of time and place.
3. A rejection of the neoliberal emphasis on markets and the associated doctrines of equilibrium or self-regulation, as well as free-trade. While markets are important institutions of exchange, they require political direction and control. For thin communitarians human freedom arises within communities and presupposes reciprocal exchanges in structured worthwhile activities. The unfettered development of neoliberal free-market ideology over the last half century has exacerbated global poverty, devastated many countries in Africa, accelerated negative externalities and failures around climate change, and had disintegrative effects on both public and private sector work and on local communities in many countries. What is required is political coordination.

Thin communitarianism in this sense rejects the liberal and neoliberal theory of markets as self-regulating or naturally or spontaneously developing, but sees markets as subordinate to the political and ethical decisions of human beings in communities. While markets may serve to promote human purposes, or frustrate them, they cannot be seen as natural or freestanding. Freedom and choice are public goods which vary necessarily in terms of their limits and scope in different historical circumstances. In this sense thin communitarianism attests to the publicness of existence. While the private is accepted as an important domain, it is, as it were, on lease, in the sense that it constitutes a constructed, or permitted, space. It varies in scope and size in different historical contexts. In addition to the publicness of existence, and the social and historical nature of the self, thin communitarianism posits the development of individuals as occurring in a process of interaction and engagement within communities. This is what is meant by the notion that selves are encumbered.

The communitarian nature of development, as of justice, while it means at one level that all is local and contextual, does not result in an anthropological relativism. Nor does it result in affirming ‘nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’ to the exclusion of the global, as has been claimed.¹ Certain values to do with survival, security, and danger are present across communities and yet manifest themselves differently in different times and places. While in this sense they are locally articulated, common elements stretch across individual communities to constitute a network of communities where recognizably common elements of life’s quest to continue are organized differently. These common attributes spring, not from nature or universal principles of reason, or God, but from the material situation of life in relation to the biosphere, where survival is both an individual and common concern. Personal liberty, for instance, as with privacy, can be seen as essential for well-being, yet varies in the way it is realized according to the stage of historical development in the productive, social, and political forces of a society. Similarly, survival, or danger, while recurrent in all communities, manifest themselves differently in different contexts. The development of communities will thus reflect both common structural and personal imperatives and yet express them differently in each case. What communitarianism must enunciate in order to overcome criticisms of relativism or nationalism is a distinction between life’s real necessities and their infinitely variable discursive articulation in different times and places.

Thin Communitarianism and the Welfare Liberal Tradition

Thin communitarianism can be located in a tradition that has deep roots in recent European theory, reformulating the ideas of the ‘new liberals’ of the late nineteenth century, such as T. H. Green, J. A. Hobson, and L. T. Hobhouse in a way suitable for twenty-first century philosophical and political conditions. In one important sense, this study seeks to transpose the accomplishments of the social democratic tradition that influenced the development of the welfare state in the twentieth century onto a more realist and pluralist basis, replacing their residual attachments to philosophical idealism, as embodied in the writings of Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel, with the more pluralistic sensibilities of Nietzsche and Foucault. Such an approach will permit a re-theorization of the issues of unity, normocentricity, monism, and rationalism. Hegel is a well known advocate of a modern conception of Recht who has a bad reputation among liberals because of his view that participation in certain institutions is constitutive of freedom, translated as meaning that if we are to live freely it is equivalent to participation in society according to identical norms. Freedom means, in this view, being a certain sort of social actor, which liberals see as being too conformist and anti-individualist. Moreover, in that for Hegel existing as an ethical being means to act according to reason as the means of actualizing freedom, freedom thus requires a certain mode of existence. As ethical rationalism is meant to equate in harmonious union with ‘the whole’, which is itself Rational, and ultimately equates with Truth, or ‘what there truly is’, individuality is suppressed by normocentricity.

To the extent that community is seen as essential to the survival and constitution of individuals, liberals have frequently claimed that such a view leads to illiberal conclusions. They claim that seeing community as a real entity separate from individuals entails evaluating it as more important than individuals; or as coercing individuals; or as infringing their liberties; or as implying, or arguing, that individuals should sacrifice their interests to it. Expressed like this, liberal arguments frequently represent communitarian positions as dangerous forms of tyranny and the enemy of liberty. Yet if individuals are dependent in some senses on community structures, in the provision of social and institutional resources (language, expertise, libraries, information, transport, electricity, sewage, communication, etc.) then there are at least some important senses in which this is so. If individuals are embedded within communities, and if they cannot run their lives, or even exist, without the support of community structures, and collective agencies such as ‘states’, ‘governments’, or ‘businesses’, then it is simply facile to represent one as the enemy of the other. What is required, rather, is the articulation of the principle by which individual needs and interests can be coordinated with the requirements of collective power. That principle developed through this study will be a robust conception of democracy. In terms of this, I will seek to reconceptualize the relations between individual and community.

In its most general sense, what the communitarian position represents is that culture and community are essential to human life because humans are social and historically constituted beings. This is why social interaction is essential to individual development and flourishing. This is not to say, however, that social existence is ‘rational’ in Hegel’s sense, as expressing the truth. Neither is history rational. Quite the opposite. With Foucault, we see history as in many senses arbitrary, or happenstance. This is not to say there are not reasons to act, but they do not derive from the rationality or truth of history. There is a sense, of course, in which institutions and cultures are ‘rational’, and that is in the sense that clearly institutions arise from what participants in a community will see as necessary or important at a particular time in order to serve the needs of a particular community. Important here, however, contra Hegel, is that there is no necessary parallel to a timeless conception of ‘truth’, in the sense of ‘what there truly is’. Such institutions may be later judged as cruel, or ill-founded, or as having served a particular purpose badly. It is then in this more limited sense that human individuals are social beings, and that a concept of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life in community, is relevant, and that individual principles and development, or Moralität, operate in and through it. This is to say, further, that it is only in the context of a community, and within certain social institutions, that social intercourse can take place, that one can actually be an individual, that is, a moral being.

When I say community here, I do not mean a bounded or sealed territory, but rather an all-encompassing arena without fixed borders. In this sense every community shares certain things with others, which moves beyond borders to link politically to forms of republicanism and cosmopolitanism. That social and community engagement is essential to the human good is not an option but the brute reality of human existence. It constitutes the basis and support of all other aspects of life—good or bad. If well structured, it constitutes the basis and support for all aspects of a worthy life, being one life among many. That liberals find this truth unpalatable I find incredible. I find cancer unpalatable, but I do not concoct a fairy-story of life without cancer in order to appease this fact. I live with it because it is adequate to the human situation.

The views of the ‘new liberals’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Bosanquet, Hobson, Green, and Hobhouse, constitute an important influence on the thin communitarian position. Of these, Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse are the most important. Both Green and Hobhouse were precursors to the welfare state tradition of the twentieth century. Green sought to reformulate liberal theory in the light of the appalling social conditions that prevailed in nineteenth-century England during the Industrial Revolution. What Green sought to do was to provide a philosophical defense for an extension of the state’s role and to reconcile this with the freedom of individuals to pursue alternative options in life, a value which was central to the classical liberal mindset. Thus, while classical liberals had defended a concept of ‘negative’ liberty where the state should do nothing but ensure that each individual is not interfered with or coerced by other human beings, Green added to this that it should also ensure the conditions for ‘positive’ liberty, which related to the general development of personality or ‘self-realization’. Green argued that government interference was sometimes necessary to ensure the true aims of liberty, in that its central role should be providing the conditions for all people to realize their positive powers or capacities and ensuring that each person had an equal opportunity to do what is worthwhile.

In that there are issues to be discussed concerned with idealism, or the residual influence of the likes of Rousseau or Hegel in the work of Green, the writings of L.T. Hobhouse have influenced thin communitarianism in even greater respects. Although influenced by Green’s social and ethical outlook, Hobhouse was critical of the influence of Kant and Hegel in Green’s work, claiming that it showed insufficient respect for the natural sciences, for knowledge based on experience, or for a general theory of evolution. In addition, Hobhouse anticipates writers like Michel Foucault and the poststructuralist tradition in that he was not prepared to reify mind as an ahistorical given in the traditional idealist sense but would treat it as “an empirical fact within the world of time” and as something largely socially produced in the context of history (Collini, 1979: 157).² Hence, although Green’s adherence to the themes of ‘self-realisation’, ‘harmony’, and ‘the common good’ showed traces of idealist influence, they were restated by Hobhouse on a more realist basis with a strong reference to the empirical sciences.³ Notwithstanding this, Hobhouse’s conception of ‘harmony’ and the ‘common good’ are inadequately theorized in relation to how diversity and difference can be accounted for, and much work remains to be done as to how a conception of democracy can safeguard the individual in relation to collective power.

Hobhouse is important to my conception of communitarianism in that, like Green, he held that liberty was important, not as a natural right of the person but as a ‘necessity of society’ (Hobhouse, 1911: 123) and as such must be socially provided for. For Hobhouse, the ultimate end for the foundation of liberalism was his notion of the ‘development of character’. While this referred to individuals, Hobhouse recognized that individuals were reciprocally tied to their communities, and that indeed, no development of the former could take place without preserving the integrity of the latter. Liberalism, as he theorized it, should create as many choices for people as possible to enable the development of character, and the function of the state is “to secure the conditions upon which mind and character may develop themselves” (1911: 158). Thus Hobhouse (1911: 100) argues, similarly to Green, that in order to ensure freedom and equality it is necessary to extend the sphere of social control.

In that the ‘new liberals’ of the late nineteenth century are important, it is in that they emphasize the social conditions of selfhood while still maintaining a strong emphasis on individuals and their development. Although they were referred to as ‘new’ liberals in their time, I will refer to them as social democrats.⁴ This work is an attempt to continue their tradition and to restore it in the light of several conditions. One is to recast their insights onto a new, stronger philosophical base, freeing it from the problems associated with philosophical rationalism and idealism, with the naïve emphasis on unity and nationalistic accounts of community as bounded and sealed arenas. Writings within the liberal-communitarian debate have raised a number of problems which will need to be addressed. Another task is to adapt their philosophies to be relevant to the global world of the twenty-first century, where we have witnessed the emergence of postnational regional organizations; the failure of states to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The 'Thin' Community and Liberalism
• Part I Two Thinkers
• Part II Assembling Normative Theory
• Part III Toward a Global Thin Community
• References
• Index
• About the Author