Community and Sociology
David E. Pearson
p romoting ideology in the guise of social science
has been a part of the sociological scene ever since
Auguste Comte propounded his scheme for a utopian
community based on sociological principles more than
a century ago. The communitarian movement, whose
protagonists include a number of eminent sociologists,
is one recent and highly visible manifestation of this
disciplinary predilection. Its ambitious goal is to com-
bine individual liberties and widespread choice,
modernity's brightest issue, with the equally alluring
cohesiveness and coherence that represent the best of
tradition.
Writings such as Amitai Etzioni's Spirit of Commu-
nity, the communitarian movement's manifesto, claim
that this challenge has been successfully met. We can,
he informs us, have the best of both modernity and tra-
dition while eliminating many of the negative aspects
of each: an unbridled, radical individualism, on the one
hand, and authoritarianism and smothering conformity,
on the other. If he is correct, he has resolved the prob-
lem of choosing between freedom and restraint that has
puzzled social philosophers from Plato to Popper and
that has bedeviled sociologists for well over a century.
If he is right, we are as a society poised to move beyond
our present disorganization and excessive individual-
ism to a world that is at once just as vibrant for the
individual and yet eminently more sane socially. If he
is fight, at long last we can have it all.
The problem with this utopian vision is its sheer
impracticality. It will not work because it misappre-
hends, at a most fundamental level, human character
and the character of human social groupings. The re-
mainder of this essay will describe the nature and
source of these misapprehensions. Using The Spirit of
Community as a springboard, I will examine two
closely related themes that characterize many
communitarian writings. The first is that the purpose
of community is to exhibit a particular version of the
general welfare, an egalitarian one, whose sustenance
in turn presumes a special sort of political and eco-
nomic organization. The second theme is that it is the
charge of social science, and sociology in particular,
to help bring that sort of community about.
The Spirits of Individuals
A concern with human happiness lies at the very
core of the communitarian vision, in which utopianism
runs head-on into utilitarianism. Communities clearly
produce a degree of happiness, for some people, at
any rate. If they do this for some, communitarians ar-
gue, they should do it for everyone. Echoing Jeremy
Bentham's dictum about "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number," a greater quantity of happiness for
a greater number of people makes for a greater com-
munity. From this, it is easy to conclude that an ap-
propriate criterion for evaluating the moral standing
of a community should be whether it evidences "mor-
ally unjustifiable" signs of privilege for some of its
members, signs that are by no means strictly limited
to things economic. Even if by some alchemy every-
COMMUNITY AND SOCIOLOGY / 45
one's economic needs were suddenly satisfied, the
community's moral standing would remain suspect,
Etzioni tells us, if it was less than fully responsive to
their spiritual requirements and "authentic needs."
Communities should be "authentic," with authentic-
ity rendered virtually synonymous with a thorough-
going egalitarianism.
One problem with this otherwise rosy vision is that
it conflates the concepts of happiness and community,
which are not, in point of fact, identical. The desire to
promote widespread happiness is a laudable philo-
sophical sentiment, but sociologically speaking, hap-
piness is not the reason human communities arose,
nor does it represent their ultimate purpose. Rather,
they came about for more pragmatic reasons: On the
one hand, they represented a buffer against what we
might consider certain types of unhappiness (starva-
tion, for example, and pillage and murder); on the other
hand, they represented a resource that could be em-
ployed by members in their efforts to improve their
individual situations. But saying this is hardly to sug-
gest that communities must therefore be guarantors of
survival and status advancement for every individual.
If history is any guide, it is clear that in their efforts to
ensure the general welfare, communities, even demo-
cratic ones, will countenance suffering on the part of
some, perhaps even many, of their members. The "gen-
eral welfare," in the inclusive, self-actualizing sense
that many communitarians tend to use the term, is a
pleasant but by no means necessary by-product of
collective life.
Perhaps more than anything else, coming to terms
with the idea of relentlessly self-interested individu-
als, whose prospects for individual survival and sta-
tus advancement are more propitious in a collective
context, represents the basis of a sociological under-
standing of community. But understanding that com-
munity is, in the final analysis, a community of the
self-interested is clearly foreign to the gentler com-
munitarian view of human nature. For comrnunitarians,
people are motivated not by self-interest but by com-
passion and altruism. People help one another not be-
cause of any expectation for reciprocal benefit but,
rather, because it simply is the right thing to do.
The world might be a better place if this were true,
but it assuredly is not. The ethnographic record is clear:
People in all societies, during all periods of history, have
evidenced a profound hunger for status and have en-
gaged in myriad forms of competition to achieve it. In-
deed, class, status, and power have been the sine qua
non of all societies, especially the modern ones. From
Max Weber, in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, through Kai Erikson, in his WaywardPuri-
tans, sociologists have pointed out these features as
present even in a this-worldly society of saints. More-
over, they were present with a vengeance in this
century's many failed experiments with an often bru-
tally enforced egalitarianism. Charles Horton Cooley
had it precisely fight in 1909 when he noted that in
premodern societies, talents and peculiarities of tem-
perament were intimately understood, people were re-
spected or despised accordingly, and the resulting
differences translated directly into differences of posi-
tion and power. Cooley observed that status competi-
tion and the resulting hierarchies of privilege occurred
even among very young children and were virtually
impossible to eradicate "even by the most inquisitorial
methods," and he concluded therefore that they must
issue directly from a basic feature of human nature. Thus
the universal presence of inequality in all societies, from
the most primitive hunter-gatherer types to those most
thoroughly modernized. Reality is hardly sanguine for
those interested in promoting a social order based on a
widespread egalitarianism.
The Spirits of Groups
If self-advancement is ubiquitous among individu-
als, why should it not also be a prominent feature of
the groups they comprise? What are groups, after all,
except vehicles for the more effective pursuit of indi-
vidual goals? But this differs considerably from the
communitarian's view of groups, and to see where the
differences lie, we first need to consider their deirmi -
tion of community, which, Etzioni tells us, entails "a
web of affect-laden relations among a group of indi-
viduals" and involves a "measure of commitment to a
set of shared values, norms, and meanings." But this
seems as apposite of small groups as it does of many
larger groups and social categories. So which of these
in fact represents "community": the large groups, the
small ones, or both?
Communitarians opt for the inclusive view, in which
one size fits all. We all belong to a range of groups of
varying sizes, each one of which represents a potential
community membership. At the same time, community
is more than any of these single involvements. Com-
munity, writ large, should not be conceived as a unitary
construct but, rather, as a variegated "community of
communities." This is a phrase that conjures up more
sentiment than sociological precision. It calls to mind a
menu of groups and associations, from which an indi-
vidual selects some subset to be the objects of his com-
mitment and devotion. At the same time, this community
of communities seems more like a Russian matryushka
46 / SOCIETY �9 JULY/AUGUST 1995
doll, wherein each of a person's various community
memberships, memberships in groups that range from
the small to the quite large, are each nested comfort-
ably within the others. But whichever image we prefer,
the constant is that the concept of community is actu-
ally plural. One can be a member of the gay commu-
nity, say, or a professional community, or both. One
can be a member of the feminist community, the Jew-
ish community, the environmentalist community, a resi-
dential community, and so on. The concept rapidly
devolves into a sort of infinite regression, with com-
munities of various types, and our commitments thereto,
spanning the range from elemental social units such as
families and groups of friends all the way up to the
overarching society itself.
Community, writ large, should
not be conceived as a unitary
construct but, rather, as a variegated
"community of communities."
But are all these truly communities in any reason-
able sense-- indeed, even in the communitarians'
sense--of the term? Do they all provide their mem-
bers with a structure of meaning, with the sense of
identity and moral cohesion that we call "solidarity"?
It is frankly hard to imagine that they do. While some
of these memberships might in fact approximate what
Weber once described as communal social relation-
ships, others appear to be quite different types, with a
far greater potential for divisiveness and conflict. And
it is here that communitarians must be forced to enter
the realm of hard Weberian fact.
To the question of whether our social relationships
are actually (or even potentially) in the service of wide-
spread solidarity, or whether they instead serve a dif-
ferent master, Weber's answer was emphatic. Consider
first communal social relationships, the ideal-type that
he described as "based on a subjective feeling of the
parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they be-
long together." It is a definition not greatly dissimilar
to communitarians' notion of community, to be sure.
But as Weber was quick to point out, communal rela-
tionships seldom, if ever, exist in pure ideal-typical
form. In the real world, and even for the communal
relationship's archetype, the family, considerable
variation exists with regard to the sentiments and in-
terests that members share. In the family and other
intimate relationships, exploitation and coercion are
commonplace. There are differences in opportunity
and in outcome. Indeed, as many of us can attest, fami-
lies and other intimate relationships represent not only
the locus of greatest human affection but also that of
the most virulent discord.
If conflict and inequality are commonplace even
for those relationships closest to the communal type,
if there are practical limits to love even among actual
brothers, it should come as no surprise that brotherly
love in the more general sense will be less than uni-
versal among people for whom the ties that bind are
less compelling. Most relationships are based not on
kinship, of course, but on common qualities, such as
race or ethnic background; on common situation, such
as age or membership in a particular profession; or on
common behaviors, such as sexual preference or po-
litical affiliation. Communitarians such as Etzioni
readily subsume these beneath their rubric of "com-
munity." But as Weber pointed out, most of these
groupings are based far less on sentiment and far more
on rational calculations of self-interest than are rela-
tionships of the communal kind. They are what he re-
ferred to as "associative relationships," in which
membership provides little assurance of unity or sense
of belongingness. Associative relationships, conse-
quently, carry an even higher potential for conflict and
inequality and are hardly what most of us think of when
the term "community" is invoked.
I expect many communitarians would respond that
people are members of a variety of groups and that
not every membership necessarily represents a com-
munity commitment. A black woman might feel a
sense of belonging with the black community, for in-
stance, but not with the feminist community; a resi-
dent of a certain geographic area need not feel any
attachment to others from his area, preferring instead
the community of his profession, and so on. Thus, if
some groups prove incapable of providing their mem-
bers with an adequate sense of belongingness or are
otherwise unpalatable, this is of little practical conse-
quence. If for whatever reason the community voices
that people hear sound oppressive, if their "moral in-
frastructure" begins to deteriorate, people can just
change their place of residence, join different social
clubs, change churches or professions. This is a view
of community that is inherently volitional, constituted
of a collection of similar people who have voluntarily
chosen to be together.
But how potent can a community's values be if, as
Etzioni instructs us, we are obliged to subject them to
a continual process of moral evaluation? How persua-
COMMUNITY AND SOCIOLOGY / 47
sive can their moral voices be when, if they prove de-
ficient, we can swap them for another set of voices
essentially at will? How much compliance can com-
munities exact when those who fail to adhere to their
standards have the option of joining or forming other
communities--when they have the option of simply
opting out? The answer, as Ferdinand T6nnies knew
when he distinguished between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft, surely seems to be not much. To earn
the appellation "community," it seems to me, groups
must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a mea-
sure of compliance from their members. That is,
communities are necessarily--indeed, by definition--
coercive as well as moral, threatening their members
with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them
the carrot of certainty and stability if they don't. But
by celebrating group choice, communitarians (like the
"New Individualist" baby boomers, described by Paul
Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, who form the
movement's core constituency), "quite unself-con-
sciously envision the antithesis of community and fam-
ily, in neither of which does one choose the other
members nor enjoy equal status." In the volitional
world of the authentic community, the groups one
chooses to belong to are ultimately of less consequence
than the essential fact of being able to choose them in
the first place. Call it a radical groupism, if you will, a
foregrounding of group choice as the essence of mo-
rality and community that invariably denotes all com-
munity choices as equally valid. In this sense, anyway,
communitarianism appears to be indistinguishable
from the radical individualism it decries.
A related and more practical shortcoming to the idea
of unrestricted choice involves its implicit assumption
that communities will provide people with largely un-
restricted entry and egress. What is assumed, again turn-
ing to Weber's terms, is that communities will be open
rather than closed. Of course some groups are in fact
open, but the reason for this is hardly to promote gener-
alized societal amity. Rather, it is because groups trmd
that under some circumstances openness improves their
situation, advances their members' interests, relative to
other groups. Analogously, groups will be closed to the
extent that this advances their members' interests. While
the reasons for closure are various, the real-world fact
of extensive group closure is incontrovertible. Indeed,
the very definition of organization incorporates the idea
of boundary maintenance, of restricting the number and
type of people who can enter and, not uncommonly,
their ability to exit as well. Sociology, Weberian or oth-
erwise, offers little basis for the belief in a harmonious,
volitional community of communities.
To be fair, it is not that communitarians are entirely
blind to these realities. Etzioni recognizes, as did Emile
Durkheim a century ago, that volitional group mem-
berships produce a sense of belongingness that is less
than compelling; indeed, as he phrases it, they are
"rather anemic." In The Division of Labor in Society,
Durkheim observed that as societies modernized, their
earlier world-defining beliefs, what he called the "Col-
lective Conscience," were gradually being eroded.
They were being replaced by a new, more abstract and
general set of beliefs, among them that people should
make useful economic contributions, a quasi-religious
belief in moral individualism, and an ideal of social
justice. Recognizing that these beliefs alone would not
provide societies with sufficient moral cohesion,
Durkheim suggested that group memberships, in par-
How potent can a community's values
be if we are obliged to subject them to a
continual process of moral evaluation?
ticular professional associations, might provide the
necessary remainder. But implicit in this, of course, is
the idea that volitional group memberships are by
themselves also insufficient. Durkheim's U.S. contem-
porary, Cooley, suggested much the same thing. He
noted that people in modern societies readily formed
a large number of groups--clubs, fraternal societies,
educational and occupational associations, and the
like--groups with some potential for real intimacy.
But he went on to point out that such groupings, based
on congeniality, were far less substantial than com-
munities of ascription, in particular family and neigh-
borhood, which, he said, expressed "a more universal
human nature." In the face of sociological theory and
evidence, what then is the basis for the communi-
tarians' community of communities?
Instead we anticipate, and find empirically, some-
thing more closely approximating a community of
competing communities. On the contemporary scene
we find ethnic, gender, professional, lifestyle, and a
wide assortment of other groupings, many of which
are at odds with one another and in fierce competition
for economic resources and political power. Rather
than contributing to the overarching community that
is the United States, some of these groups do not hesi-
tate to subvert it to their benefit, while others appear
to be doing nothing so much as working, tirelessly, to
48 / SOCIETY �9 JULY/AUGUST 1995
destroy any larger set of enjoining moral principles, if
not U.S. society itself. So in the real world there seems
to be a problem with keeping the communitarians'
cacophony of moral voices in harmony, a problem with
keeping the members of this community of commu-
nities from slitting each other's throats.
The Egalitarian Spirit
Again, it is not that communitarians, some of whom
have produced important works in the area of organi-
zational sociology, are altogether blind to these perils.
Much in the same way that we need to be on the look-
out for self-centered individuals, Etzioni tells us, we
need to watch out for self-centered communities. But
as soon as they consider what should be done with the
outlaws once they have been rounded up,
communitarians step onto the slippery s