Community and Ideology (Routledge Revivals)

An Essay in Applied Social Philosphy

Raymond Plant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415564304
• eBook ISBN: 9781135191467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Initially published in 1974, this is a work of applied social and political philosophy which relates the philsophical analysis to various forms of community work theory and practice. Raymond Plant emphasizes that 'community' has a wide range of both descriptive meanings and evaluative connotations, linking this dual role of the word in the description and evaluation of social experience to its history in ideological confrontations. The book takes account of some liberal criticisms of the community ideal, and finally seeks to re-state a theory of community compatible with a liberal ideology.

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Philosophy and community work

Rootlessness is by far the most dangerous disease of society.

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

‘Community’ is crucial to our social and political understanding but, at the same time, it is an elusive concept defying attempts at clear cut analysis. This has not, however, prevented ‘community’ from becoming something of a vogue word in social description at the present time: community action; community politics; community studies; community organisation; community development; community school; community church; community mental health and even community television are all part of contemporary sociological, educational, theological and political thought and experience. In all of these areas of study and action the elusive concept of community defines and specifies the thought and the activity in question.

At the same time terms which are usually taken to stand at the opposite pole to that of community, with its emphasis upon rootedness, cohesion and belonging, are part of the stock in trade of cultural Jeremiahs on both the left and the right: alienation; estrangement; anomie; rootlessness; loss of attachment are all, we are so often told, part of the crisis of modern mass society. Salvation and redemption are to be found in community; but what is it?

In this book we shall be concerned with the notion of community primarily in so far as it is related to community work, community development and community organisation. At the same time, the concept of community which specifies and individuates community work from other social work activities does not exist in an isolated and dislocated fashion, independent of the perspectives which we have on community elsewhere. Indeed, however far fetched it may seem at this juncture, it will be part of the thesis of this book that the notion of community used in these social work contexts in fact has its roots in a disposition of thought about society which originated at the end of the eighteenth century.

What specifies this book as a work of philosophy is its analytical approach to the subject, concerned to elucidate the meaning of ‘community’ and related concepts. Not so long ago a reader consulting a work on the philosophy of a subject, whether it be education or politics, art or history, would have expected to find either arguments in favour of certain high level general directives which would guide practitioners in these particular spheres, or would have found merely a catalogue of uplifting ideals. Certainly common usage still preserves such a conception of philosophy in, for instance the, phrase ‘philosophy of life’. However, such a view of philosophy, at least so far as the Anglo-Saxon tradition is concerned, has virtually disappeared. Now the emphasis is much more on conceptual analysis or conceptual exploration—the attempt to explicate the presuppositions and descriptions embodied in a pattern of human activity and endeavour, whether it be mathematics or social work, art or history.

Against the earlier rather élitist view of the philosopher both the hard headed and the sceptical scored a point when they argued that the philosopher, operating in the empirical vacuum of his study, has nothing at all to contribute to any understanding of a first order body of knowledge or activity. Such an objection has obvious force, but virtually no philosopher would at the present time see the role of his activity in terms of attempts to issue directives and to formulate ideals vis-a-vis a pattern of activity to which he has only an external relationship. On the contrary, his role is much more second order and parasitic. He is concerned far more with the elucidation of concepts and ideas connected to such first order pursuits—in this particular case the idea of community. He is not concerned with competing with the social scientist in trying to discover data concerning the distribution of community power, for example, but with trying to understand what the sociologist, the politically committed, the social worker and men in the street mean when they talk about ‘community’.

This does not entail that the philosophical task is wholly descriptive—on the contrary. If the philosopher sees inconsistencies and obscurities in the way in which a body of theory is articulated then, of course, he has a right to appraise and evaluate such a body of theory in the light of these discoveries. However, this critical task, should it be deemed necessary, must wait upon a patient attempt to penetrate and get to know from the inside that body of theory which has attracted the philosopher’s interest. Only when he is versed in it, has seen its point, has attempted to explain its character from the inside, is the philosopher in a position to make evaluative and critical comment upon it. Evaluation and criticism are the evaluation and criticism of something, something with an identity and a character. It is only in so far as the philosopher has established the identity of a theory from within, as it were, that his evaluation and criticism can have any cutting edge at all.

The motivation of the philosopher in considering the theoretical self-understanding of a form of human activity such as community work, organisation, action and development, if it is not to be merely academic curiosity, must in some way or other be to spread some kind of enlightenment, self consciousness and self knowledge. His purpose must be to follow through implications, see connexions, probe assertions about values and elucidate the grounds of ideas—tasks which are very often neglected by the busy practitioners of the activity whose theoretical dimensions the philosopher explores. His aim is not so much to solve any of the outstanding practical difficulties within, in our case, community work, as to spread an awareness among those involved of the kind of language, its grammar, its logic and its implications which the community worker uses to describe to himself and communicate to others the point of his activity. In this context the analysis will be concerned with community and a cluster of concepts around it—action, locality, participation, interest, norms, etc., to determine their meaning and the pattern of their interrelationships. Of course, many may be impatient with such a philosophical analysis—it deals with mere words, concerned with linguistic niceties, grammatical and semantic rectitude, and the natural temptation of the social worker, faced with pressing and urgent problems, to dismiss as unimportant a philosophical approach to his subject may be very great—the kind of irritation which beset Marx when he argued in his Theses on Feuerbach that philosophers have only interpreted the world, the task, however, is to change it. It is nevertheless a temptation which needs to be vigorously resisted because it is based upon a fundamentally mistaken view of the relation of theory to practice. There is a tendency to assume that activities and the language used in their description are only externally related—that they are separate and separable things. On such an assumption those who are of a practical rather than a theoretical cast of mind can thus be spared the effort of attending too closely to the theoretical and conceptual discussion of their activities. Such a picture of the relation of theory to practice is mistaken.

Activities and human actions generally are only identified and specified through a system of concepts. A pattern of determinate activity is only what it is in so far as it is described, identified and conceived in a particular way, according to social and linguistic rules, standards and conventions. Actions do not exist as ‘brute facts’ in the world but are mediated through descriptions. The sheer physical movements of a person’s body whether he be engaged in making love or war only constitute those particular actions because certain descriptions are brought to bear. Actions, as opposed to sheer bodily movements, in a very real sense embody ideas and concepts and only in so far as they do are they defined, specified and individuated. In consequence, to examine philosophically a set of concepts relating to a particular mode of human activity is not to examine a mere epiphenomenon of that activity, a detachable and unimportant part, but rather to examine that activity itself from a particular point of view. To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the mode of social intercourse into which it enters. This applies to the notion of community generally and to community work in particular. The philosopher examining the nexus of concepts surrounding the notion of community is thereby examining an integral part of that particular social practice.

From the point of view of the community worker there are less abstract gains too. In this context the philosopher is concerned to discuss primarily the meaning of ‘community’ which after all specifies and picks out this particular aspect of social work from the whole of social work. Presumably then, some awareness of what is involved in the notion of community is a gain. As John Stuart Mill said in another context (1910), p. 2:

All action is for the sake of some end and the rules of action it seems natural to suppose must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient. When we engage in a pursuit, a clear and precise conception of what we are pursuing would seem to be the first thing that we need instead of the last thing we are to look forward to.

The same is true mutatis mutandis of the practice of community work. The principles and practical techniques of community work are coloured by and given point by the notion of community which here is precisely the object of philosophical analysis. This point has been well made by Ray Lees (1972, p. 99) when in commenting on Timms (1968) he says:

As Timms has commented on social workers, ‘like students of social administration they have often espoused a cause when they should have attempted to explore a meaning’. Political philosophy has an important contribution to offer this kind of exploration. It can make clear the value assumptions hidden in notions of community, of social improvement and participation, pinpointing important ethical considerations.

Finally, from the point of view of the philosopher and the community worker there are gains to be had in the philosophical treatment of the activity. From the philosopher’s point of view there is a body of theory intrinsically related to an important social function in our society to be elucidated which is moreover concerned in a practical way with an important area of traditional philosophical controversy, namely the general relationship of the individual to society. By the same token, however, because the community worker is so involved in evaluative judgmetns about the need to develop a particular quality and type of social experience—that covered in a shorthand way by the word ‘community’—he may well find philosophical discussion helpful in that similar kinds of judgments about the desirable character of social experience have often been made and defended by a large number of social and moral philosophers. Indeed, this very point is echoed in Younghusband (1968, p. 115) when the members of the committee indicated what they considered to be the most important components in the training of community workers:

Their tasks in intervening in the human situation, their interest in social change, their concern with social dysfunction as they and their agencies see it mean that social philosophy becomes an important frame of reference…. Examination of values is therefore essential to the teachina of government, politics and social administration and above gll in the teaching of the principles and practice of community work where the focus moves from academic discussion to principles and methods of action.

This book should be seen as an attempt to contribute in a small way to the fulfilment of this need which is not, as it were, ‘wished onto’ busy practitioners by the philosopher but, as the above quotation makes clear, arises naturally when community workers reflect on the question of the justification of their own activity.

One final point might be made at this juncture. It might well be thought that philosophical interest in social work generally, and work in the community in particular, is a new and indeed rather an exiguous phenomenon. Such a view would, however, reveal an ignorance of both the history of philosophy and of social work. In the later years of the nineteenth century, and in the early years of this, a good many philosophers were theoretically interested in and indeed actively engaged in social work of all kinds. This was largely a result of the influence of the moral and political theorising of Thomas Green who was for some time White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. Many of Green’s pupils took very seriously his teaching on the role of the state, the nature of welfare and the notion of citizenship, and made either practical or theoretical contributions to social work. Perhaps the most notable of these was Beraard Bosanquet who was both an important academic social and political theorist and a well known figure on the Council of the Charity Organisation Society. He combined these functions on occasion and produced several contributions to the philosophical understanding of social work aims and methods, particularly Three Lectures on Social Ideals (1917a), Politics and Charity (1917b) and Philosophy and Casework (1917c). Indeed, his major general work on social and political philosophy, The Philosophical Theory of the State (1923), a book incidentally dedicated to Charles Loch of the Charity Organisation Society, may still be read with interest and profit by social workers, an observation which is particularly true for community workers in relation to his chapter on ‘Institutions as ethical ideals’, with its sensitive discussion of the neighbourhood community, Indeed, Bosanquet was so convinced of the relation of philosophical understanding to practice that he prefaced his book with the remark that the work of the social reformer should no more be regarded as an appendix to social theory than the work of the doctor is regarded as a mere appendix to physiology. In his Non-Directive Approach in Group and Community Work (1967, p. 9), T.R.Batten says of the rise of community work:

Community work in its modern sense in Britain was begun in the 19th century by upper and middle class idealists and reformers who sought to articulate the often appalling conditions in which the working class people lived in the new industrial towns.

Many such reformers acted in this way because of what they had learned from the teaching of Green and Bosanquet.

Since this time, however, both philosophy and social work have developed in their own directions. Philosophers became more interested in logic and epistemological problems and less concerned with social and political thought (see Plant in Cox and Dyson, 1972, vol. II, ch. 4); social work, on the other hand, has tried to find a base more secure than the shifting sands of philosophy and has found it in this or that psychological theory usually of a Freudian type. However, in more recent times the philosophical climate has become more amenable to broader interests (see Plant in Cox and Dyson, 1972, vol. III, ch. 2) and at the same time social workers have become disenchanted with the too individualistic perspective offered by Freudian theory, and have tried to relate their client’s problems far more to the community at large, and in doing so have been forced to raise fundamental questions about the nature of society. Whereas Bosanquet, for example, was concerned to provide some specifically philosophical basis for social work, the present author is concerned with a less ambitious undertaking, namely to explore the kinds of bases which social and, in particular, community workers offer for their own activity. It may be that these bases need revision, but it is up to the practitioners to change if they feel it necessary but perhaps drawin...

Table of contents

• The International Library of Welfare and Philosophy
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Philosophy and community work
• 2 Community as fact and value
• 3 The liberal community and community work
• 4 Human nature, community and the concept of mental health
• 5 Postscript: Community work and social casework
• Suggestions for further reading
• Bibliography