Whatever happened to the communitarian movement? It’s still knocking about, not least of all in the halls of the current Administration in Washington. "Communitarianism" bespeaks a disposition that can take many forms, but its more recent epiphany as a movement is chiefly the work of sociologist Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University, who in the late 1980s orchestrated a Communitarian Manifesto to which a number of figures associated with FT, including this writer, subscribed. It was a Tocquevillian call to check the unbridled assertion of individualistic rights with the claims of community, tradition, and personal responsibility. At least that is how I and others understood it, but soon Prof. Etzioni was taking the initiative in directions where I and others could not go. After some friendly discussions of our differences, I quietly dissociated myself.

The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism by Bruce Frohnen (University Press of Kansas) is a sharply critical treatment of the movement that highlights the ways in which the communitarian impulse has been hijacked by people such as Mario Cuomo and Hillary Clinton. Reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, Roger Kimball shares Frohnen’s misgivings. "We can get a hint of what communitarianism in action looks like from a speech that President Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, delivered in 1991 when she was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. Imagining what a typical little girl named Renata would be thinking and learning in the year 2004, Secretary Shalala reports that ‘Renata doesn’t know any moms who don’t work, but she knows lots of moms who are single. She knows some children who have two dads, or live with their mothers and their grandmothers. In her school books, there are lots of different kinds of friends and families.’ After school, Renata goes to a city-run day care center where ‘sometimes, she and her best friend, Josh, play trucks, sometimes they play mommy and daddy, and Josh always puts the baby to bed and changes the diapers, just like his own dad does at home.’ At Thanksgiving, Renata’s teacher will tell a story about how people from Europe came to the United States, where the Indians lived. She will say, ‘It was just the same as if someone had come into your yard and taken all your toys and told you they weren’t yours anymore.’"

Shalala and others know that the egalitarian utopia they have in mind will not come about by itself. For that they need programs such as the federal "Goals 2000" Act, which sets up national standards in education for "gender-equitable and multicultural" teaching. While presenting themselves as champions of equality, these communitarians take it upon themselves to reeducate the rest of society. This troubles Frohnen: "Reeducation is by nature inegalitarian. In any program of reeducation a self-selected group of intellectuals asserts that it has the authority to decide what kind of character and belief everyone should have." I don’t think we should be bothered by the inegalitarian nature of reeducation or education. That’s inevitable. We should be bothered by the substance of what is taught, and by the exclusion of parents from a determinative say in what their children are taught.

Frohnen, Kimball, and others are also concerned about the communitarians’ instrumental approach to "civil religion." Religion is a very good thing for social cohesion and the cultivation of virtues, but the benefits cannot be separated from commitment to the transcendent. The irony of communitarianism, says Frohnen, is that its adherents place themselves beyond the beliefs they seek to foster, and thus "sap the sources of the communal feelings they crave." This is a more serious criticism than the movement’s offenses against egalitarianism.

Liberalism Beyond Crisis

That modern liberalism is in crisis no thoughtful person should doubt. I believe the crisis is, at bottom, one of authority. To put it too briefly, liberalism cannot give an account of obliging social and political truths that are in accord with human flourishing. Some years ago, the Urban League encouraged people to wear buttons declaring, "Give a damn"—meaning we should care about justice, the cities, the poor, the young, and so forth. But, put to the wall, modern liberalism cannot convincingly explain why we should give a damn. In 1971 John Rawls attempted such an explanation in A Theory of Justice, and it was all the rage for a long while. We haven’t heard much about Rawls lately. A Theory of Justice turned out to be the last gasp of a liberalism whose crisis turned out to be terminal.

Etzioni and his colleagues were right to see that religion, and traditional communities grounded in religion, could give the convincing reasons that liberalism lacked. Frohnen may judge them too harshly on the basis of others, such as Mrs. Clinton and Secretary Shalala, who tried to use communitarianism to revive liberalism as we knew it. But Etzioni, too, had a blind spot when it came to religion. Religion is divisive, it was thought, while morality brings us together; let us therefore embrace the morality while steering clear of the religion. But, of course, they should not be, and finally cannot be, separated that way. In fact, the communitarian movement also wanted to steer clear of morality at the points where it threatened to be divisive. This was most notably the case with abortion. Etzioni wanted nothing to do with the question. And yet the most inescapable of communitarian questions is the question posed by abortion: Who belongs to the community for which we accept common responsibility?

As a theory and practice of politics, modern liberalism is not in crisis; it is dead. Political identity and political allegiance in this or any other society can be constituted only by the acknowledgment of obliging truths that direct us to care for one another in the service of a transcendent end (telos). As in "one nation under God"—meaning a people under judgment and providential care. Modern liberalism lost its telos a long time ago; it is all means without ends, and in recent years even the means went haywire. People such as Rawls tried to reconstitute the political community by reviving the old notion of the social contract. But the fictional persons behind Rawls’ famously complicated "veil of ignorance" were essentially asking themselves only one question: "What’s in it for me?" That’s hardly the basis for reestablishing community.

To their credit, the communitarians realized that, and reached out to "tradition," "civil society," and other sources that supply meanings that are more than the product of individual willfulness. With the passing of communitarianism, or perhaps with the beginning of a quite new phase of communitarianism, serious political thought is moved slowly, hesitantly, protestingly, to the question of ends. The movement is so painfully reluctant because it is rightly intuited that there is no way of engaging the question of telos without, in one way or another, deliberating the ultimate end by which penultimate ends are made morally compelling. For secular liberals, this is not where modernity was supposed to end up.