WHAT COMMUNITARIANISM IS 51

COMMUNITARIANISM WORKS AT ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT

ARGUMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITARIANISM APPLIES AT ALL LEVELS OF HUMAN ORGANIZATION AND GOVERNMENT

ROBERT N. BELLAH, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, 1995-96, A Defense of "Democratic Communitarianism" The Responsive Community, Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 1995/96 http://www.gwu.edu/~icps/bellah.html // acs-EE2001

But the argument for democratic community–rooted in the search for the common good–applies to groups of any size, and ultimately to the world as a community. It is a political argument grounded on the belief that a politics based on the summing of individual preferences is inadequate and misleading. Democratic communitarianism presumes that morality and politics cannot be separated and that moral argument, painful and difficult though it sometimes is, is fundamental to a defensible stance in today’s world.