## 1. Universalism Versus Particularism



Communitarians have sought to deflate the universal pretensions of
liberal theory. The main target has been Rawls description of the
original position as an "Archimedean point" from which the
structure of a social system can be appraised, a position whose
special virtue is that it allows us to regard the human condition
"from the perspective of
 eternity",[3]
 from all social and temporal points of view. Whereas Rawls seemed to
present his theory of justice as universally true, communitarians
argued that the standards of justice must be found in forms of life
and traditions of particular societies and hence can vary from context
to context. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor argued that moral
and political judgment will depend on the language of reasons and the
interpretive framework within which agents view their world, hence
that it makes no sense to begin the political enterprise by
abstracting from the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs,
practices, and institutions (Taylor 1985, ch. 1; MacIntyre 1978,
chs.18-22 and 1988, ch.1; Benhabib 1992, pp. 23-38, 89n4).
Michael Walzer developed the additional argument that effective social
criticism must derive from and resonate with the habits and traditions
of actual people living in specific times and places. Even if there is
nothing problematic about a formal procedure of universalizability
meant to yield a determinate set of human goods and values, "any
such set would have to be considered in terms so abstract that they
would be of little use in thinking about particular
distributions" (Walzer 1983, 8; Young 1990, 4). In short,
liberals who ask what is just by abstracting from particular social
contexts are doomed to philosophical incoherence and liberal theorists
who adopt this method to persuade people to do the just thing are
doomed to political irrelevance.



Rawls has since tried to eliminate the universalist presuppositions
from his theory. In *Political Liberalism*, (Rawls 1993) he
argues in a communitarian vein that his conception of the person as
impartial citizen provides the best account of liberal-democratic
political culture and that his political aim is only to work out the
rules for consensus in political communities where people are willing
to try for consensus. In the *Law of Peoples*, (Rawls 1999) he
explicitly allows for the possibility that liberalism may not be
exportable at all times and places, sketching a vision of a
"decent, well-ordered society" that liberal societies must
tolerate in the international realm. Such a society, he argues, need
not be democratic, but it must be non-aggressive towards other
communities, and internally it must have a "common good
conception of justice", a "reasonable consultation
hierarchy", and it must secure basic human rights. Having said
that, one still gets the sense that the liberal vision laid out in
*A Theory of Justice* is the best possible political ideal, one
that all rational individuals would want if they were able to choose
between the available political alternatives. There may be justifiable
non-liberal regimes, but these should be regarded as second best to be
tolerated and perhaps respected, not idealized or emulated.



Other liberal theorists have taken a harder line against communitarian
concessions, arguing that liberal theory can and should present itself
as a universally valid ideal. Brian Barry, for one, opens his widely
cited book *Justice as Impartiality* by boldly affirming the
universality of his theory: "I continue to believe in the
possibility of putting forward a universally valid case in favor of
liberal egalitarian principles" (Barry 1995, 3). Barry does
recognize that a theory of justice must be anchored in substantive
moral considerations, but his normative vision appears to be limited
to the values and practices of liberal Western societies. He seems
distinctly uninterested in learning anything worthwhile from
non-Western political traditions: for example, his discussion of
things Chinese is confined to brief criticisms of the Cultural
Revolution and the traditional practice of foot-binding. One might
consider the reaction to a Chinese intellectual who puts forward a
universal theory of justice that draws on the Chinese political
tradition for inspiration and completely ignores the history and moral
argumentation in Western societies, except for brief criticisms of
slavery and imperialism.



Still, it must be conceded that 1980s communitarian theorists were
less-than-successful at putting forward attractive visions of
non-liberal societies. The communitarian case for pluralism for the
need to respect and perhaps learn from non-liberal societies that may
be as good as, if not better than, the liberal societies of the West
may have been unintentionally undermined by their own use of (counter)
examples. In *After Virtue*, Alasdair MacIntyre defended the
Aristotelian ideal of the intimate, reciprocating local community
bound by shared ends, where people simply assume and fulfill socially
given roles (MacIntyre 1984). But this pre-modern Gemeinschaft
conception of an all-encompassing community that members
unreflectively endorse seemed distinctly ill-suited for complex and
conflict-ridden large-scale industrialized societies. In *Spheres
of Justice*, Michael Walzer pointed to the Indian caste system,
"where the social meanings are integrated and
hierarchical" (Walzer 1983, 313) as an example of a non-liberal
society that may be just according to its own standards. Not
surprisingly, few readers were inspired by this example of non-liberal
justice (not to mention the fact that many contemporary Indian
thinkers view the caste system as an unfortunate legacy of the past
that Indians should strive hard to overcome). In short, this use of
ill-informed examples may have unintentionally reinforced the view
that there are few if any justifiable alternatives to liberalism in
modern societies. Communitarians could score some theoretical points
by urging liberal thinkers to be cautious about developing universal
arguments founded exclusively on the moral argumentation and political
experience of Western liberal societies, but few thinkers would really
contemplate the possibility of non-liberal practices appropriate for
the modern world so long as the alternatives to liberalism consisted
of Golden Ages, caste societies, fascism, or actually-existing
communism. For the communitarian critique of liberal universalism to
have any lasting credibility, thinkers need to provide compelling
counter-examples to modern-day liberal-democratic regimes and 1980s
communitarians came up short.



By the 1990s, fairly abstract methodological disputes over
universalism versus particularism faded from academic prominence, and
the debate now centers on the theory and practice of universal human
rights. This is largely due to the increased political salience of
human rights since the collapse of communism in the former Soviet
bloc. On the liberal side, the new, more political voices for liberal
universalism have been represented by the likes of Francis Fukuyama,
who famously argued that liberal democracy's triumph over its
rivals signifies the end of history (Fukuama 1992). This view also
revived (and provoked) the second wave communitarian critique of
liberal universalism and the debate became much more concrete and
political in orientation.



Needless to say, the brief moment of liberal euphoria that followed
the collapse of the communism in the Soviet bloc has given way to a
sober assessment of the difficulties of implementing liberal practices
outside the Western world. It is now widely recognized that brutal
ethnic warfare, crippling poverty, environmental degradation, and
pervasive corruption, to name some of the more obvious troubles
afflicting the developing world, pose serious obstacles to the
successful establishment and consolidation of liberal democratic
political arrangements. But these were seen as unfortunate (hopefully
temporary) afflictions that may delay the end of history when liberal
democracy has finally triumphed over its rivals. They were not meant
to pose a challenge to the *ideal* of liberal democracy. It was
widely assumed that liberal democracy is something that all rational
individuals *would* want if they could get it.



The deeper challenge to Western liberal democracy has emerged from the
East Asian
 region.[4]
 In the 1990s, the debate revolved around the notion of "Asian
values", a term devised by several Asian officials and their
supporters for the purpose of challenging Western-style civil and
political freedoms. Asians, they claim, place special emphasis upon
family and social harmony, with the implication that those in the
chaotic and crumbling societies of the West should think twice about
intervening in Asia for the sake of promoting human rights and
democracy. As Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew put it, Asians have
"little doubt that a society with communitarian values where the
interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits
them better than the individualism of
 America".[5]
 Such claims attracted international attention primarily because East
Asian leaders seemed to be presiding over what a U.N. human
development report called 'the most sustained and widespread
development miracle of the twentieth century, perhaps all
 history'.[6]
 In 1997-98, however, the East Asian miracle seemed to have
collapsed. And it looks like Asian values was one casualty of the
crisis.



The political factors that focused attention on the East Asian
challenge remain in place, however. East Asian economies did
eventually recover. China in particular looks set to become an
economic and political heavyweight with the power to seriously
challenge the hegemony of Western liberal democratic values in
international fora (see Bell 2015). Thus, one hears frequent calls for
cross-cultural dialogue between the West and the East designed to
understand and perhaps learn from the other side. Failing to take
seriously East Asian political perspectives risks widening
misunderstandings and setting the stage for hostilities that could
have been avoided.



From a theoretical point of view, however, it must be conceded that
the official debate on Asian values has not provided much of a
challenge to dominant Western political outlooks. The main problem is
that the debate has been led by Asian leaders who seem to be motivated
primarily by political considerations, rather than by a sincere desire
to make a constructive contribution to the debate on universalism
versus particularism. Thus, it was easy to dismiss--rightly so,
in most cases--the Asian challenge as nothing but a self-serving
ploy by government leaders to justify their authoritarian rule in the
face of increasing demands for democracy at home and abroad.



Still, it would be a mistake to assume that nothing of theoretical
significance has emerged from East Asia. The debate on Asian values
has also prompted critical intellectuals in the region to reflect on
how they can locate themselves in a debate on human rights and
democracy in which they had not previously played a substantial part.
Neither wholly rejecting nor wholly endorsing the values and practices
ordinarily realized through a liberal democratic political regime,
these intellectuals are drawing on their own cultural traditions and
exploring areas of commonality and difference with the West. Though
often less provocative than the views of their governments in the
sense that few argue for the wholesale rejection of Western-style
liberal democracy with an East Asian alternative these unofficial East
Asian viewpoints may offer more lasting contributions to the debate.
Let me (briefly) note three relatively persuasive East Asian arguments
for cultural particularism that contrast with traditional Western
arguments for liberal universalism (see Bell 2006, ch. 3):


1. Cultural factors can affect the *prioritizing* of rights, and
this matters when rights conflict and it must be decided which one to
sacrifice. In other words, different societies may rank rights
differently, and even if they face a similar set of disagreeable
circumstances they may come to different conclusions about the right
that needs to be curtailed. For example, U.S. citizens may be more
willing to sacrifice a social or economic right in cases of conflict
with a civil or political right: if neither the constitution nor a
majority of democratically elected representatives support universal
access to health care, then the right to health care regardless of
income can be curtailed. In contrast, the Chinese may be more willing
to sacrifice a civil or political liberty in cases of conflict with a
social or economic right: there may be wide support for restrictions
on the right to form independent labor associations if they are
necessary to provide the conditions for economic development.
Different priorities assigned to rights can also matter when it must
be decided how to spend scarce resources. For example, East Asian
societies with a Confucian heritage will place great emphasis upon the
value of education, and they may help to explain the large amount of
spending on education compared to other societies with similar levels
of economic development.
2. Cultural factors can affect the *justification* of rights. In
line with the arguments of "1980s communitarians" such as
Michael Walzer, it is argued that justifications for particular
practices valued by Western-style liberal democrats should not be made
by relying on the abstract and unhistorical universalism that often
disables Western liberal democrats. Rather, they should be made from
the inside, from specific examples and argumentative strategies that
East Asians themselves use in everyday moral and political debate. For
example, the moral language (shared even by some local critics of
authoritarianism) tends to appeal to the value of community in East
Asia, and this is relevant for social critics concerned with practical
effect. One such communitarian argument is that democratic rights in
Singapore can be justified on the grounds that they contribute to
strengthening ties to such communities as the family and the nation
(see below, section III).
3. Cultural factors can provide moral foundations for
*distinctive* political practices and institutions (or at least
different from those found in Western-style liberal democracies). In
East Asian societies influenced by Confucianism, for example, it is
widely held that children have a profound duty to care for elderly
parents, a duty to be forsaken only in the most exceptional
 circumstances.[7]
 In political practice, it means that East Asian governments have an
obligation to provide the social and economic conditions that
facilitate the realization of this duty. Political debate tends to
center on the question of whether the right to filial piety is best
realized by means of a law that makes it mandatory for children to
provide financial support for elderly parents as in mainland China,
Japan, and Singapore or whether the state should rely more on indirect
methods such as tax breaks and housing benefits that simply make
at-home care for the elderly easier, as in Korea and Hong Kong. But
the argument that there is a pressing need to secure this duty in East
Asia is not a matter of political controversy.



Thinkers influenced by East Asian cultural traditions such
Confucianism have also argued for distinctive as-yet-unrealized
political practices and institutions that draw on widely-held cultural
values for inspiration. For example, the Chinese thinker Jiang Qing
has argued for a tricameral legislature appropriate for the Chinese
context, with a meritocratic "House of Exemplary Persons"
and a "House of Cultural Continuity" that would complement
and balance a democratic legislature (Jiang 2012). Korean scholars
Hahm Chaihark and Jongryn Mo argue for the need to revive and adapt
for the contemporary era such Choson dynasty institutions as policy
lectures and the Confucian censorate, traditional institutions that
played the role of monitoring the dealings of the Emperor (Hahm
(Chaihark) 2003, Mo 2003, Bell 2000, ch. 5).



In contrast to 1980s communitarian thinkers, East Asian critics of
liberal universalism have succeeded in pointing to particular
non-liberal practices and institutions that may be appropriate for the
contemporary world. Some of these may be appropriate only for
societies with a Confucian heritage, others may also offer insights
for mitigating the excesses of liberal modernity in the West. What
cannot be denied is that they have carried forward the debate beyond
the implausible alternatives to liberalism offered by 1980s
communitarian thinkers.



It is worth emphasizing, however, that contemporary communitarians
have not been merely defending parochial attachments to particular
non-liberal moralities. Far from arguing that the universalist
discourse on human rights should be entirely displaced with
particular, tradition-sensitive political language, they have
criticized liberals for not taking universality seriously enough, for
failing to do what must be done to make human rights a truly universal
ideal. These communitarians--let us label them the
"cosmopolitan critics of liberal universalism"--have
suggested various means of improving the philosophical coherence and
political appeal of human rights.



In fact, there is little debate over the desirability of a core set of
human rights, such as prohibitions against slavery, genocide, murder,
torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, and systematic racial
discrimination. These rights have become part of international
customary law, and they are not contested in the public rhetoric of
the international arena. Of course many gross violations occur off the
record, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International have the
task of exposing the gap between public allegiance to rights and the
sad reality of ongoing abuse. This is largely practical work, however.
There is not much point writing about or deliberating about the
desirability of practices that everyone condemns at the level of
principle.



But political thinkers and activists around the world can and do take
different sides on many pressing human rights concerns that fall
outside what Walzer terms the "minimal and universal moral
code" (Walzer 1987, 24; Walzer 1994). This gray area of debate
includes criminal law, family law, women's rights, social and
economic rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the attempt to
universalize Western-style democratic practices. The question is: how
can the current thin list of universal human rights be expanded to
include some of these contested rights?



Charles Taylor has put forward the following proposal (Taylor 1999).
He imagines a cross-cultural dialogue between representatives of
different traditions. Rather than argue for the universal validity of
their views, however, he suggests that participants should allow for
the possibility that their own beliefs may be mistaken. This way,
participants can learn from each others' "moral
universe". There will come a point, however, when differences
cannot be reconciled. Taylor explicitly recognizes that different
groups, countries, religious communities, and civilizations hold
incompatible fundamental views on theology, metaphysics, and human
nature. In response, Taylor argues that a "genuine, unforced
consensus" on human rights norms is possible only if we allow
for disagreement on the ultimate justifications of those norms.
Instead of defending contested foundational values when we encounter
points of resistance (and thus condemning the values we do not like in
other societies), we should try to abstract from those beliefs for the
purpose of working out an "overlapping consensus" (to
borrow from Rawls's 1993 terminology) of human rights norms. As
Taylor puts it, "we would agree on the norms while disagreeing
on why they were the right norms, and we would be content to live in
this consensus, undisturbed by the differences of profound underlying
belief" (Taylor 1999, 124).



While Taylor's proposal moves the debate on universal human
rights forward, it still faces certain difficulties. For one thing, it
may not be realistic to expect that people will be willing to abstract
from the values they care deeply about during the course of a global
dialogue on human rights. Even if people agree to abstract from
culturally specific ways of justifying and implementing norms, the
likely outcome is a withdrawal to a highly general, abstract realm of
agreement that fails to resolve actual disputes over contested rights.
For example, participants in a cross-cultural dialogue can agree on
the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment while
radically disagreeing upon what this means in practice--a
committed Muslim can argue that theft can justifiably be punished by
amputation of the right
 hand,[8]
 whereas a Western liberal will want to label this an example of cruel
and unusual punishment.



As we have seen, the debate on universalism versus particularism has
moved from fairly abstract methodological disputes between
Anglo-American philosophers to relatively concrete international
political disputes between philosophers, social scientists, government
officials, and NGO activists. The distinctive communitarian
contribution has been to cast doubt on universal theories grounded
exclusively in the liberal moralities of the Western world, on the
grounds that cultural particularity should both make one sensitive to
the possibility of justifiable areas of difference between the West
and the rest and to the need for more cross-cultural dialogue for the
purpose of improving the current thin human rights regime. Various
contributions from East Asia and elsewhere have given some meat to
these challenges to liberal universalism. In any case, let us now turn
to the second main area of controversy between liberals and
communitarians--the debate over the self that has similarly moved
from philosophy to politics.


## 2. The Debate Over the Self



Communitarian thinkers in the 1980s such as Michael Sandel and Charles
Taylor argued that Rawlsian liberalism rests on an overly
individualistic conception of the self. Whereas Rawls argues that we
have a supreme interest in shaping, pursuing, and revising our own
life-plans, he neglects the fact that our selves tend to be defined or
constituted by various communal attachments (e.g., ties to the family
or to a religious tradition) so close to us that they can only be set
aside at great cost, if at all. This insight led to the view that
politics should not be concerned solely with securing the conditions
for individuals to exercise their powers of autonomous choice, as we
also need to sustain and promote the social attachments crucial to our
sense of well-being and respect, many of which have been involuntarily
picked up during the course of our upbringing. First, however, let us
review the ontological or metaphysical debate over the self that led
to this political conclusion. 



In an influential essay titled "Atomism", Charles Taylor
objected to the liberal view that "men are self-sufficient
outside of society". (Taylor 1985, 2000) Instead, Taylor defends
the Aristotelian view that "Man is a social animal, indeed a
political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an
important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis" (Taylor
1985, 190). Moreover, this atomistic view of the self can undermine
liberal society, because it fails to grasp the extent to which
liberalism presumes a context where individuals are members of, and
committed to, a society that promotes particular values such as
freedom and individual diversity. Fortunately, most people in liberal
societies do not really view themselves as atomistic selves.



But do liberal thinkers actually defend the idea that the self is
created *ex-nihilo*, outside of any social context and that
humans can exist (and flourish) independently of all social contexts?
In fact, Taylor's essay was directed at the libertarian thinker
Robert Nozick. As it turns out, the communitarian critique of the
atomistic self does not apply to Rawslian liberalism: in Part III of
*Theory of Justice*, Rawls pays close attention to the
psychological and social conditions that facilitate the formation of
liberal selves committed to justice. But few readers ever got to Part
III of Rawls' massive tome, so communitarians got quite a bit of
mileage from their critique of liberal atomism. This charge
didn't stick, however.



While liberals may not have been arguing that individuals can
*completely* extricate themselves from their social context,
the liberal valuation of choice still seemed to suggest an image of a
subject who impinges his will on the
 world.[9]
 Drawing on the insights of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, communitarians
argued that this view neglects the extent to which individuals are
embodied agents in the world. Far from acting in ways designed to
realize an autonomously arrived-at life-plan, vast areas of our lives
are in fact governed by unchosen routines and habits that lie in the
background. More often than not we act in ways specified by our social
background when we walk, dress, play games, speak, and so on without
having formulated any goals or made any choices. It is only when
things break down from the normal, everyday, unchosen mode of
existence that we think of ourselves as subjects dealing with an
external world, having the experience of formulating various ways of
executing our goals, choosing from among those ways, and accepting
responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. In other words,
traditional intentionality is introduced at the point that our
ordinary way of coping with things is insufficient. Yet this breakdown
mode is what we tend to notice, and philosophers have therefore argued
that most of our actions are occasioned by processes of reflection.
Liberals have picked up this mistaken assumption, positing the idea of
a subject who seeks to realize an autonomously arrived-at life-plan,
losing sight of the fact that critical reflection upon one's
ends is nothing more than one possibility that arises when our
ordinary ways of coping with things is insufficient to get things
done.



Some liberals have replied by recognizing the point that vast areas of
our lives are governed by unchosen habits and routines, that the
deliberate, effortful, choosing subject mode may be the exception
rather than the rule. They emphasize, however, that the main
justification for a liberal politics concerned primarily with securing
the conditions for individuals to lead autonomous lives rests on the
possibility and desirability of *normative* self-determination,
that is, on the importance of making choices with respect to things
that we *value* (Doppelt 1989). While it may be true that
certain communal practices often, or even mostly, guide our behavior
behind our backs, it doesn't follow that those practices ought
to be valued, or reflectively endorsed in non-ordinary moments of
existence, much less that the government ought somehow to promote
these practices. And what liberals care about ultimately is the
provision of the rights, powers, and opportunities that individuals
need to develop and implement their own conceptions of the good
life.



This qualified version of the liberal self, however, still seems to
imply that moral outlooks are, or should be, the product of individual
choice. One's social world, communitarians can reply, provides
more than non-moral social practices like table manners and
pronunciation norms--it also provides some sort of orientation in
*moral* space. We cannot make sense of our moral experience
unless we situate ourselves within this given moral space, within the
authoritative moral horizons. What Charles Taylor calls "higher,
strongly evaluated goods" (Taylor 1989)--the goods we
should feel committed to, those that generate moral obligations on us
regardless of our actual preferences are not somehow invented by
individuals, but rather they are located within the social world which
provides one's framework of the lower and the higher. Thus, the
liberal ideal of a self who freely invents her own moral outlook, or
private conception of the good, cannot do justice to our actual moral
experience.



But once again, liberals need not deny the assumption that our social
world provides a framework of the higher and the lower nor need it be
presumed that we must regard our own moral outlook as freely invented.
Will Kymlicka, for example, explicitly recognizes that things have
worth for us in so far as they are granted significance by our
culture, in so far as they fit into a pattern of activities which is
recognized by those sharing a certain form of life as a way of leading
a good life (Kymlicka 1989, 166). That one's social world
provides the range of things worth doing, achieving, or being does
not, however, undermine the liberal emphasis on autonomy, for there is
still substantial room for individual choice to be made within this
set. The best life is still the one where the individual
*chooses* what is worth doing, achieving, or being, though it
may be that this choice has to be made within a certain framework
which is itself unchosen.



Communitarians can reply by casting doubt on the view that choice is
*intrinsically* valuable, that a certain moral principle or
communal attachment is more valuable simply because it has been chosen
following deliberation among alternatives by an individual subject. If
we have a highest-order interest in choosing our central projects and
life-plans, regardless of what is chosen, it ought to follow that
there is something fundamentally wrong with unchosen attachments and
projects. But this view violates our actual self-understandings. We
ordinarily think of ourselves, Michael Sandel says, "as members
of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this
history, as sons or daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this
republic", (Sandel 1981, 179) social attachments that more often
than not are involuntarily picked up during the course of our
upbringing, rational choice having played no role whatsoever. I
didn't choose to love my mother and father, to care about the
neighborhood in which I grew up, to have special feelings for the
people of my country, and it is difficult to understand why anyone
would think I have chosen these attachments, or that I ought to have
done so. In fact, there may even be something distasteful about
someone who questions the things he or she deeply cares
about--certainly no marriage could survive too long if
fundamental understandings regarding love and trust were constantly
thrown open for discussion! Nor is it obvious that, say, someone who
performs a good deed following prolonged calculation of pros and cons
is morally superior than a Mother-Teresa type who unreflectively,
spontaneously acts on behalf of other people's interests.



Liberals can reply that the real issue is not the desirability of
choice, but rather the *possibility* of choice. There may well
be some unchosen attachments that need not be critically reflected
upon and endorsed, and it may even be the case that excessive
deliberation about the things we care about can occasionally be
counter-productive. But some of our ends may be problematic and that
is why we have a fundamental interest in being able to question and
revise them. Most important is not choosing our own life-plans;
rather, liberalism founded on the value of self-determination requires
only that we be able to critically evaluate our ends *if need
be*, hence that "no end or goal is exempt from possible
re-examination" (Kymlicka 1989, 52; Dworkin 1989, 489; Macedo
1990, 247). For example, an oppressed woman has a fundamental interest
in being able to critically reflect upon traditional understandings of
what it means to be a good wife and mother, and it would be unjust to
foreclose her freedom to radically revise her plans.



This response, however, still leaves open the possibility of a deep
challenge to liberal foundations. Perhaps we are able to reexamine
some attachments, but the problem for liberalism arises if there are
others so fundamental to our identity that they cannot be set aside,
and that any attempt to do so will result in serious and perhaps
irreparable psychological damage. In fact, this challenge to
liberalism would only require that communitarians be able to identify
one end or communal attachment so constitutive of one's identity
that it cannot be revised and rejected. A psychoanalyst, for example,
may want to argue that (at least in some cases) it is impossible to
choose to shed the attachment one feels for one's mother, and
that an attempt may lead to perverse and unintended consequences. A
feminist theorist may point to the mother-child relationship as an
example of a constitutive feature of one's identity and argue
that any attempt to deny this fails to be sensitive to women's
special needs and experiences (Frazer & Lacey 1993, 53-60).
An anthropologist may argue on the basis of field observations that it
is impossible for an Inuit person from Canada's far north to
suddenly decide to stop being an Inuit and that the only sensible
response is to recognize and accept this constitutive feature of his
identity. Or a gay liberation activist may claim that it is both
impossible and undesirable for gays to repress their
biologically-given sexual identity. These arguments are not
implausible, and they seem to challenge the liberal view that no
particular end or commitment should be beyond critical reflection and
open to revision.



Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that we can identify one
particular attachment so deeply-embedded that it is impossible to
really bring to conscious awareness and so significant for one's
well-being that an individual can only forsake commitment to its good
at the cost of being seriously psychologically disturbed. This end is
beyond willed change and one loses a commitment to it at the price of
being thrown into a state of disorientation where one is unable to
take a stand on many things of significance (Taylor 1989, 26-7).
Does this really threaten liberal politics? It may, if liberal
politics really rests on the liberal self. Fortunately, that is not
the case. Rereading some of the communitarian texts from the 1980s,
there seems to have been an assumption that once you expose faulty
foundations regarding the liberal self, the whole liberal edifice will
come tumbling down. The task is to criticize the underlying philosophy
of the self, win people on your side, and then we can move on to a
brand new communitarian society that owes nothing to the liberal
tradition. This must have been an exhilarating time for would-be
revolutionaries, but more level-headed communitarians soon realized
that overthrowing liberal rights was never part of the agenda. Even if
liberals are wrong to deny the existence of constitutive
ends--even if the philosophical justifications for a liberal form
of social organization founded on the value of reflective choice are
rotten to the core--there are still many, relatively pragmatic
reasons for caring about rights in the modern world. To name some of
the more obvious benefits, liberal rights often contribute to
security, political stability and economic modernization.



In short, the whole debate about the self appears to have been
somewhat misconceived. Liberals were wrong to think they needed to
provide iron-clad philosophies of the self to justify liberal
politics, and communitarians were wrong to think that challenging
those foundations was sufficient to undermine liberal politics. Not
surprisingly, both sides soon got tired of debating the pros and cons
of the liberal self. By the early 1990s, this liberal-communitarian
debate over the self had effectively faded from view in Anglo-American
 philosophy.[10]



So what remains of the communitarian conception of the self? What may
be distinctive about communitarians is that they are more inclined to
argue that individuals have a vital interest in leading decent
communal lives, with the political implication that there may be a
need to sustain and promote the communal attachments crucial to our
sense of well-being. This is not necessarily meant to challenge the
liberal view that some of our communal attachments can be problematic
and may need to be changed, thus that the state needs to protect our
powers to shape, pursue, and revise our own life-plans. But our
interest in community may occasionally conflict with our other vital
interest in leading freely chosen lives, and the communitarian view is
that the latter does not automatically trump the former in cases of
conflict. On the continuum between freedom and community,
communitarians are more inclined to draw the line towards the
latter.



But these conflicts cannot be resolved in the abstract. Much turns on
empirical analyses of actual politics--to what extent our
interest in community is indeed threatened by excess liberal politics,
to what extent the state can play a role in remedying the situation,
to what extent the nourishment of communal ties should be left to
civil society, and so on. This is where the political communitarians
of the last decade have shed some light. Let us now turn to the
politics of community, the third major strand of the communitarian
thought.


## 3. The Politics of Community



In retrospect, it seems obvious that communitarian critics of
liberalism may have been motivated not so much by philosophical
concerns as by certain pressing political concerns, namely, the
negative social and psychological effects related to the atomistic
tendencies of modern liberal societies. Whatever the soundness of
liberal principles, in other words, the fact remains that many
communitarians seem worried by a perception that traditional liberal
institutions and practices have contributed to, or at least do not
seem up to the task of dealing with, such modern phenomena as
alienation from the political process, unbridled greed, loneliness,
urban crime, and high divorce rates. And given the seriousness of
these problems in the United States, it was perhaps inevitable that a
second wave of 1990s communitarians such as Amitai Etzioni and William
Galston would turn to the more practical political terrain of
emphasizing social responsibility and promoting policies meant to stem
the erosion of communal life in an increasingly fragmented
 society.[11]
 Much of this thinking has been carried out in the flagship
communitarian periodical, *The Responsive Community*, which is
edited by Amitai Etzioni and includes contributions by an eclectic
group of philosophers, social scientists, and public policy makers
[this periodical, regrettably, folded in 2004 due to financial
constraints]. Etzioni is also the director of a think-tank,
*Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies*, that produces
working papers and advises government officials in
 Washington.[12]



Such political communitarians blame both the left and the right for
our current malaise. The political left is chastised not just for
supporting welfare rights economically unsustainable in an era of slow
growth and aging populations, but also for shifting power away from
local communities and democratic institutions and towards centralized
bureaucratic structures better equipped to administer the fair and
equal distribution of benefits, thus leading to a growing sense of
powerlessness and alienation from the political process. Moreover, the
modern welfare state with its universalizing logic of rights and
entitlements has undermined family and social ties in civil society by
rendering superfluous obligations to communities, by actively
discouraging private efforts to help others (e.g., union rules and
strict regulations in Sweden prevent parents from participating
voluntarily in the governance of some day care centers to which they
send their children), and even by providing incentives that discourage
the formation of families (e.g., welfare payments are cut off in many
American states if a recipient marries a working person) and encourage
the break-up of families (e.g., no-fault divorce in the US is often
financially rewarding for the non custodial parent, usually the
father).



Libertarian solutions favored by the political right have contributed
even more directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and
valued forms of communal life, particularly in the UK and the US. Far
from producing beneficial communal consequences, the invisible hand of
unregulated free-market capitalism undermines the family (e.g., few
corporations provide enough leave to parents of newborn children),
disrupts local communities (e.g., following plant closings or the
shifting of corporate headquarters), and corrupts the political
process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest
groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no
longer represent the community at large). Moreover, the valorization
of greed in the Thatcher/Reagan era justified the extension of
instrumental considerations governing relationships in the marketplace
into spheres previously informed by a sense of uncalculated
reciprocity and civil obligation. This trend has been reinforced by
increasing globalization, which pressures states into conforming to
the dictates of the international marketplace.



More specifically in the American context, communitarian thinkers such
as Mary Ann Glendon indict a new version of rights discourse that has
achieved dominance of late (Glendon 1991). Whereas the assertion of
rights was once confined to matters of essential human interest, a
strident rights rhetoric has colonized contemporary political
discourse, thus leaving little room for reasoned discussion and
compromise, justifying the neglect of social responsibilities without
which a society could not function, and ultimately weakening all
appeals to rights by devaluing the really important ones.



To remedy this imbalance between rights and responsibilities in the
US, political communitarians proposed a moratorium on the manufacture
of new rights and changes to our "habits of the heart"
away from exclusive focus on personal fulfillment and towards concern
with bolstering families, schools, neighborhoods, and national
political life, changes to be supported by certain public policies.
Notice that this proposal takes for granted basic civil and political
liberties already in place, thus alleviating the concern that
communitarians are embarking on a slippery slope to authoritarianism.
Still, commmunitarian thinkers quietly lifted the call for a
moratorium on the minting of new rights, presumably because of growing
consensus that marginalized groups, such as same-sex couples seeking
the right to legally sanctioned marriage, have a legitimate claim to
new rights (Macedo, 2015) and would be paying the price for the
excesses of others if the moratorium is put into effect.



More serious from the standpoint of those generally sympathetic to
communitarian aspirations, however, is the question of what exactly
this has to do with community. For one thing, Etzioni himself seeks to
justify his policies with reference to need to maintain a balance
between social *order* and freedom, (Etzioni 1996) as opposed
to appealing to the importance of community. But there is nothing
distinctively communitarian about the preoccupation with social order;
both liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Burkean conservatives
affirm the need for order. And when the term community is employed by
political communitarians, it seems to mean anything they want it to
mean. Worse, as Elizabeth Frazer has argued, it has often been used to
justify hierarchical arrangements and delegitimize areas of conflict
and contestation in modern societies (Frazer 1999).



Still, it is possible to make sense of the term community as a
normative
 ideal.[13]
 Communitarians begin by positing a need to experience our lives as
bound up with the good of the communities out of which our identity
has been constituted. This excludes contingent attachments such as
golf-club memberships, that do not usually bear on ones sense of
identity and well-being (the co-authors of *Habits of the
Heart* (Bellah *et al*. 1985) employ the term
"lifestyle enclaves" to describe these attachments).
Unlike pre-modern defenders of *Gemeinshaft*, however, it is
assumed that there are *many* valued forms of communal life in
the modern world. So the distinctive communitarian political project
is to identify valued forms of community and to devise policies
designed to protect and promote them, without sacrificing too much
freedom. Typically, communitarians would invoke the following types of
communities:


1. Communities of place, or communities based on geographical location.
This is perhaps the most common meaning associated with the word
community. In this sense, community is linked to locality, in the
physical, geographical sense of a community that is located somewhere.
It can refer to a small village or a big city. A community of place
also has an affective component--it refers to the place one calls
"home", often the place where one is born and bred and the
place where one would like to end one's days even if home is
left as an adult. At the very least, communitarians posit an interest
in identifying with familiar surroundings.



In terms of political implications, it means that, for example,
political authorities ought to consider the existent character of the
local community when considering plans for development (Jane Jacobs
famously documented the negative effects of razing, instead of
renovating, run-down tenements that are replaced by functionally
adequate but characterless low-income housing blocs (Jacobs 1965).
Even big cities can and should strive to protect and promote a
distinctive ethos (Bell and de-Shalit 2011). Other suggestions to
protect communities of place include: granting community councils veto
power over building projects that fail to respect existent
architectural styles; implementing laws regulating plant closures so
as to protect local communities from the effects of rapid capital
mobility and sudden industrial change; promoting local-ownership of
corporations; (Shuman 1999) and imposing restrictions on large-scale
discount outlets such as Wal-Mart that threaten to displace small,
fragmented, and diverse family and locally owned stores (Ehrenhalt
1999).
2. Communities of memory, or groups of strangers who share a
morally-significant history. This term--first employed by the
co-authors of *Habits of the Heart*--refers to imagined
communities that have a shared history going back several generations.
Besides tying us to the past, such communities turn us towards the
future--members strive to realize the ideals and aspirations
embedded in past experiences of those communities, seeing their
efforts as being, in part, contributions to a common good. They
provide a source of meaning and hope in peoples lives. Typical
examples include the nation and language-based ethnocultural
groups.



In Western liberal democracies, this typically translates into various
nation-building exercises meant to nourish the bonds of commonality
that tie people to their nations, such as national service and
national history lessons in school textbooks. Self-described
republicans such as Michael Sandel place special emphasis upon the
national political community and argue for measures that increase
civic engagement and public-spiritedness (Sandel 1996). However, there
is increased recognition of the multi-national nature of contemporary
states, and modern Western states must also try to make room for the
political rights of minority groups. These political measures have
been widely discussed in the recent literature on nationalism,
citizenship, and multiculturalism (Kymlicka 1995, Miller 1995, Macedo
2000, Tamir 1993).
3. Psychological communities, or communities of face-to-face personal
interaction governed by sentiments of trust, co-operation, and
altruism. This refers to a group of persons who participate in common
activity and experience a psychological sense of togetherness as
shared ends are sought. Such communities, based on face-to-face
interaction, are governed by sentiments of trust, cooperation, and
altruism in the sense that constituent members have the good of the
community in mind and act on behalf of the community's interest. They
differ from communities of place by not being necessarily defined by
locality and proximity. The differ from communities of memory in the
sense that they are more "real", they are typically based
on face to face social interaction at one point in time and
consequently tend to be restricted in
 size.[14]
 The family is the prototypical example. Other examples include
small-scale work or school settings founded on trust and social
cooperation. 



Communitarians tend to favor policies designed to protect and promote
ties to the family and family-like groups. This would include such
measures as encouraging marriage and increasing the difficulty of
legal marriage dissolution. These policies are supported by empirical
evidence that points to the psychological and social benefits of
marriage (Waite 1996). Communitarians also favor political legislation
that can help to restructure education in such a way that peoples
deepest needs in membership and participation in psychological
communities are tapped at a young age. The primary school system in
Japan, where students learn about group cooperation and benefits and
rewards are assigned to the classroom as a whole rather than to
individual students, could be a useful model (Reid 1999).



What makes the political project of communitarianism distinctive is
that it involves the promotion of all three forms of valued communal
life. This leads, however, to the worry that seeking the goods of
various communities may conflict in practice. Etzioni, for example,
argues for a whole host of pro-family measures: mothers and fathers
should devote more time and energy to parenting (in view of the fact
that most childcare centers do a poor job of caring for children),
labor unions and employers ought to make it easier for parents to work
at home, and the government should force corporations to provide six
months of paid leave and another year of unpaid leave (Etzioni 1993,
ch.2 and Etzioni 1996, ch.6). The combined effect of these changes of
the heart and public policies in all likelihood would be to make
citizens into largely private, family-centered persons.



Yet Etzioni also argues that the American political system is corrupt
to the core, concluding that only extensive involvement in public
affairs by virtuous citizens can remedy the situation: "once
citizens are informed, they must make it their civic duty to
*organize others* locally, regionally, and nationally to act on
their understanding of what it takes to clean up public life in
America" (Etzioni 1993, 244) But few can afford sufficient time
and energy to devote themselves fully to both family life and public
affairs, and favoring one ideal is most likely to erode the other.
Surely it is no coincidence that republican America in
Jefferson's day relied on active, public-spirited male citizens
largely freed from family responsibilities. Conversely, societies
composed of persons leading rich and fulfilling family lives (such as
contemporary Singapore) tend to be ruled by paternalistic despots who
can rely on a compliant, politically apathetic populace.



Communitarians who advocate both increased commitment to public
affairs and strengthened ties to the workplace (to the point that it
becomes a psychological community) also face the problem of
conflicting commitments. Michael Sandel, for example, speaks favorable
of "proud craftsmen" in the Jacksonian era and of Louis
Brandeis's idea of "industrial democracy, in which workers
participated in management and shared responsibilities for running the
business" (Sandel 1996, 170, 213) Identification with the
workplace and industrial democracy are said to improve workers civic
capacities, but that may not be the case. In the same way that
extensive involvement in family life can conflict with commitments to
public life, few persons will have sufficient time and energy for
extensive participation in both workplace and public affairs. Recall
that the republican society of ancient Athens relied on active,
public-spirited males freed from the need to work (slaves did most of
the drudge labor).



It is also worth noting that devotion to the workplace can undermine
family life. As Tatsuo Inoue of Tokyo University argues,
Japanese-style communitarianism--strong communal identity based
on the workplace--sometimes leads to *karoshi* (death from
overwork) and frequently deprives workers of "the right to sit
down at the dinner table with their families" (Inoue 1993). Just
as liberals (pace Ronald Dworkin) sometimes have to choose between
ideals (e.g., freedom and equality) that come into conflict with one
another if a serious effort is made to realize any one of them fully,
so communitarians may have to make some hard choices between valued
forms of communal life.



Still, there may be some actual or potential win-win scenarios cases
where promoting a particular form of communal life can promote, rather
than undermine, other forms--and political communitarians will of
course favor change of this sort. For example, critics have objected
to residential community associations, or "walled
communities", on the grounds that they undermine attachment to
the polity at large and erode the social cohesion and trust needed to
promote social justice and sustain the democratic process (McKenzie
 1994).[15]
 Might it then be possible to reform urban planning so that people can
nurture strong local communities without undermining attachment to the
national community, perhaps even strengthening broader forms of
public-spiritedness? Many practical suggestions along these lines have
been raised. Architects and urban planners in the US known as the New
Urbanists, for example, have proposed various measures to strengthen
community building--affordable housing, public transport,
pedestrian focused environments, and public space as an integral part
of neighborhoods--that would not have the
"privatizing" consequences of gated communities. The
problem, as Gerald Frug points out, is that "virtually
everything they want to do is now illegal. To promote the new urbanist
version of urban design, cities would have revise municipal zoning
laws and development policy from top to
 bottom."[16]
 This points to the need for public policy recommendations explicitly
designed to favor complementing forms of communal attachments.



Just as it would be wrong to assume that communitarian goals always
conflict, so one should allow for the possibility that individual
rights and communitarian goals can co-exist and complement each
 other.[17]
 In Singapore, for example, it can be argued that more secure
democratic rights would have the effect of strengthening commitment to
the common national
 good.[18]
 The Singapore government does not hide the fact that it makes life
difficult for many who aim to enter the political arena on the side of
opposition parties: Between 1971 and 1993, according to Attorney
General Chan Sek Keong, eleven opposition politicians were made
bankrupt (and hence ineligible to run in
 elections).[19]
 Whether intended or not, such actions send an unpatriotic message to
the community at large: Politics is a dangerous game for those who
haven't been specially anointed by the top leadership of the
ruling party, so you should stick to your own private affairs. As
Singaporean journalist Cherian George puts it, one can hardly blame
people for ignoring their social and political obligations "when
they hear so many cautionary tales: Of Singaporeans whose careers came
to a premature end after they voiced dissent; of critics who found
themselves under investigation; of individuals who were detained
without trial even though they seemed not to pose any real threat; of
tapped phones and opened letters". The moral of these stories:
In Singapore, better to mind your own business, make money, and leave
politics to the
 politicians.'[20]
 Put positively, if the aim is to secure attachment to the community
at large, then implementing genuinely competitive elections, including
the freedom to run for the opposition without fear of
 retaliation,[21]
 is an important first step (see also Chan 2014). The communitarian
case for democratic elections is particularly powerful in small
communities where it is easier to establish a sense of communal
solidarity (in larger political communities, such as China, elections
may contribute to disharmony; see Bell 2015, chs. 1 and 4).



The Singapore case, however, points to another dimension of the
politics of community that brings us back to the communitarian defense
of cultural particularism. Democratic reformers in Singapore typically
think of democracy in terms of free and fair competitive elections
what Western analysts often label "minimal democracy". In
Hong Kong, the situation is similar--the aspiration to
"full" democracy put forward by social critics turns out
to mean (nothing more than) an elected legislature and Chief
Executive. Put differently, it is quite striking that the republican
tradition in communitarian thought with its vision of strong democracy
supported by active, public-spirited citizens who participate in
political decision-making and held shape the future direction of their
society though political debate seems largely absent from political
discourse in Singapore and Hong Kong, and perhaps East Asia more
generally. Many East Asians are clamoring for secure democratic
rights, but this rarely translates into the demand that all citizens
should be committed to politics on an ongoing basis or the view that,
as David Miller puts it, "politics is indeed a necessary part of
the good life" (Miller 2000). At one level, the relative absence
of republican ideals can be explained by the fact that there are no
equivalents of Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in East Asian
philosophy. It can also be argued that republicanism fails to resonate
because East Asians typically place more emphasis on other forms of
communal life--the family in particular has been important theme
in Confucian ethical theory and practice (relative to Western
philosophy). To the extent that different forms of communal life do
conflict in practice, in short, it may the case that different
cultures will draw the line in different places. 



But this is not to suggest that each community draws the line in its
own way, and there is no more room for moral debate or social
critique. While there may be a strong case for endorsing "the
way things are done" if shared understandings conform to the
views shared by both defenders and critics of the political status
quo, more often than not social critics will find fault with the
communitarian excesses in particular societies. For example, Chang
Kyung-Sup argues that Korean "familism" harms individuals
and poses a serious stumbling block to the establishment of a
democratic polity in Korea (see Chang 2004). In this context, it may
well be counter-productive to place too much emphasis on the moral
qualities of family
 life[22].
 But other societies--relatively individualistic societies
suffering from the undesirable social consequences of divorce and
single-parent families or communitarian societies that justify
sacrificing families in the interests of the workplace--may need
to rejuvenate family life and they may well look to Korean
"familism" for ideas. In other words, what seems like a
communitarian excess' in one society can be a source of
inspiration for another. 



So, the conclusion is, yes, community is valuable--at least as
valuable as the need for freedom, if not more
 so[23].
 Communitarians have usefully distinguished between forms of valuable
communities and Anglo-American political communitarians have designed
menus of policy options to promote those forms of communities. The
varieties of communitarian politics in East Asia offers further
possibilities. However, which form of community to emphasize and which
form to deemphasize depends upon the needs and problems of particular
societies. The political implications of communitarianism, in short,
depend upon the cultural outlooks and social priorities of particular
 contexts[24].
 



Let me end with the question of why East Asians should look to
communitarianism when the rich and diverse Confucian tradition can be
drawn upon to express communitarian values. After all, there is
substantial overlap between the two philosophies--both emphasize
the value of relationships for the good life as well as stress the
importance of education and non-coercive modes of moral education with
legal rights as last resort fall-back mechanisms (see Bell 2008, ch.
9)--so why not stick to the "local" philosophy of
Confucianism? In an East Asian context, it seems strange to promote a
communitarian philosophy that was shaped by concerns about
individualistic excesses in Western countries when the communitarian
Confucian tradition continues to shape values and inform "habits
of the heart" (see Sun 2013; Hammond and Richey 2015; Billioud
and Thoravel 2015). And it's still a matter of argument whether
communitarianism really constitutes a philosophy or tradition, as
opposed to a critical extension of the liberal tradition. But nobody
doubts that Confucianism constitutes its own tradition. So what good
reason can there be for East Asians to identify with communitarianism
rather than Confucianism? 



One response is that Confucianism has been tainted by its apparent
endorsement of immoral practices, such as patriarchal values that have
contributed to the subordination and suffering of women. But
contemporary feminist theorists have reinterpreted Confucianism to
make it more compatible with modern-day values while maintaining
commitment to central Confucian values (see, e.g., Chan 2007). And
those central Confucian values--commitment to the family, to the
material well-being of the people, to meritocracy in education and
politics, to ritual (*li*), humaneness (*ren*),
diversity in harmony (*he*), and this-wordly outlooks--may
in fact be more appropriate for modern-day societies than many other
philosophies (consider the fact that most Western philosophers prior
to the twentieth century devalued the family). Bai Tongdong, for
example, argues that a modernized form of central Confucian values can
inspire humane governance both at home and abroad (Bai 2019). 



In an East Asian context, what communitarianism can do is help to
remedy the drawbacks of Confucianism. For example, there is a tension
between the universalizing impulses of early
Confucianism--Confucius and Mencius did not consider the
possibility of morally legitimate alternatives to their
values--and the moral pluralism that tends to characterize the
modern world. Communitarians can remind Confucians that their
philosophy may be more appropriate in certain settings than others,
and that they should allow for the possibility of morally legitimate
alternatives in different contexts. It seems strange, for example, for
Confucians to think that Christian believers should change their
primary religious allegiance from God to family ancestors (just as it
seems strange for Christians to ask Confucians to do the opposite).




Communitarian insights about civil society as the sites for moral
education can help to remedy the Confucian focus on the family as the
only (or main) springboard for moral learning. Confucians have long
argued that it is possible and desirable to extend family values
outside the family, but the family-centered reality in most East Asian
societies with a Confucian heritage suggests that Confucianism may not
be sufficient. There has been some work exploring the
'intermediary associations' in Confucianism (see, e.g., de
Bary 1998), but the communitarians debates in the West may offer more
insights in this respect. Also, the Confucian emphasis on meritocratic
rule by the most talented and virtuous members of the community may
encourage excessive political passivity on the part of ordinary
citizens. Again, Confucians can look to communitarianism (as well as
contemporary debates about deliberative democracy) for insights about
values and practices that allow ordinary citizens to make meaningful
contributions to the political process, even in political contexts
(such as China) without democratic elections to choose top leaders.
Democratic education is not, to say the least, a Confucian imperative.
In short, communitarian insights can usefully supplement Confucian
values in an East Asian context, just as they can supplement liberal
values in Western societies. 

 Overall, though, it must be conceded
that communitarianism has lost salience as a motivating political
ideal in both East Asia and the West. Do we have any reason to think
it might be revived? In East Asia, we can expect that communitarian
themes will continue to take the form of Confucian values. In the
West, however, the excesses of populism may present an opportunity for
communitarian-inspired political activists. Populism, arguably, is a
response to the decline of valued forms of community. Strongmen such
as Donald Trump rail against elites and promise to restore traditional
sources of meaning to disempowered and atomized individuals. But the
problem is not elitism or hierarchy per se. Any modern society needs
hierarchies and the task is to distinguish between bad forms of
hierarchy that benefit the powerful and oppress the weak, and good
forms of hierarchy that express morally defensible values (Bell and
Wang 2020). Hierarchical forms of communal life can be reinterpreted
and modernized so they are compatible with progressive values.
What's missing is a social and political movement that can
restore and reinterpret forms of communal life appropriate for the
modern world.