A Whole Greater Than Its Parts?

(2 of 2)

Ideas develop at their own pace, but American intellectual movements these days tend to be born over lunch. Supply-side economics flowered in 1974 when economist Arthur Laffer drew tax and revenue curves on a cocktail napkin. For communitarianism, the seminal breaking of the bread came last summer at the faculty club at George Washington University, where Etzioni teaches; his luncheon companion was political scientist William Galston, the issues director of Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign. Sensing a shared perspective, Etzioni plied Galston with hypothetical conflicts. Are sobriety checkpoints for drivers of motor vehicles an infringement of civil liberties? What should the police be legitimately allowed to do to disrupt open-air drug markets?

These questions represented to Etzioni case studies in which the aggressive ! defense of individual legal rights is at odds with the safety of the larger community. But Galston, who signed on as a co-editor of Responsive Community, stresses that his own approach "is not to water down or trump certain rights in the name of something else. Instead, we need to think in a fresh way about what rights we do have."

Etzioni seems animated by his own agenda: intense hostility to legal efforts by civil libertarians to restrict police behavior and uphold individual rights. He says, "I'm hard put to find any organization that is so actively opposed to communitarian issues as the A.C.L.U." The American Civil Liberties Union already has critics to spare; George Bush made it a major theme of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Moreover, A.C.L.U. executive director Ira Glasser argues, "The problem with the Etzioni group is that they assume incorrectly that individual rights are not a public good."

Such skirmishes detract attention from the much broader role communitarianism could play amid the desolate landscape of American domestic policy. Who else speaks to the need to reanimate public service and restore civic virtue? Glendon captures this spirit when she says, "We are discontented with the orthodoxies of the right and the left. My hope is that there is a constituency in America for truth telling, moderation and complexity." Several articles in the inaugural issue of Responsive Community provide tantalizing hints of new ways of looking at old problems. Galston, for one, suggests a bold reformulation of divorce laws to emphasize the needs of children over the financial and emotional demands of their parents.

Communitarianism is an idea still in flux, more than a slogan but less than a coherent philosophy. Even the name may give way to something more catchy; Galston tentatively offered up "neo-progressives." But whatever the label and whatever its political future, it is an encouraging sign that thinkers are groping to find alternatives to the selfishness inherent in interest-group liberalism and conservative laissez-faire economics.