CRITIQUE OF INDIVIDUALISM 158

WE MUST NOT EMBRACE INDIVIDUALIST APPROACHES AT THE EXPENSE OF THE COMMUNITY

AUTONOMY IS IMPORTANT, BUT WE MUST NOT SEE INDIVIDUALS AS DETACHED AND DSAGGREGATED IF WE ARE TO ACHIEVE COMMUNITY

A corollary not well understood, especially among critics of communitarian thought, is that community presumes separateness as well as integration. To be sure, people need strong communities if they are to develop and flourish as fully realized persons. Nevertheless every person is unique, separate, and morally autonomous. This separateness creates what John Rawls calls "an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." This idea does not require us to think of people as disaggregated or "abstract." Individual persons are not necessarily detached from their social contexts; they are not necessarily arm’s-length participants in contracts of limited obligation; they do not necessarily believe that all their choices should be autonomous. They are likely to be socially embedded, socially implicated, even socially encumbered. Yet they do make choices; they struggle against authority; and they sometimes cast off their received identities. There is nothing objectionably "individualistic" in recognizing these facts, or in treating the well-being of individual persons as the criterion by which we judge policies and practices.

AN INDIVIDUALISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD IS A FALSE ONE — WE ALL

LIVE IN COMMUNITIES EVERY DAY

And yet the world of these ideological opponents, composed as it is of autonomous individuals, markets, and states, is not the world that anyone lives in–not even the free enterprise or welfare liberal ideologists. This ideological world is a world without families. It is also a world without neighborhoods, ethnic communities, churches, cities and towns, even nations (as opposed to states). It is, to use the terminology of the German sociologist-philosopher Juergen Habermas, a world of individuals and systems (economic and administrative), but not a lifeworld. The lifeworld missing in these conservative and liberal ideologies is the place where we communicate with others, deliberate, come to agreements about standards and norms, pursue in common an effort to create a valuable form of life–in short, the lifeworld is the world of community.

BOTH MARKET-BASED AND GOVERNMENT-BASED SOLUTIONS EMBRACE INDIVIDUALISM, NOT COMMUNITY BUILDING

In seeking to solve our problems through individual opportunity we have come up with two master strategies. We will provide opportunity through the market or through the state. The great ideological wars of our current politics focus on whether the most effective provider of opportunity is the market or the state. On this issue we imagine a radical polarity between conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat. What we often do not see is that this is a very tame polarity, because the opponents agree so deeply on most of the terms of the problem. Both solutions are individualistic. Whatever their opponents say, those who support a strong government seldom believe in government as such. They simply see it as the most effective provider of those opportunities that will allow individuals to have a fair chance at making something of themselves. Those who believe in the market think free competition is the best context for individual self-realization. Both positions are essentially technocratic. They do not imply much about substantive values, other than freedom and opportunity. They would solve our problems through economic or political mechanisms, not moral solidarity.