A Whole Greater Than Its Parts?

By WALTER SHAPIRO

The word stumbles awkwardly off the tongue, all 16 didactic letters, sounding like a fuzzy echo from a long-ago college lecture. Communitarianism. Was it a late-medieval religious heresy, a 19th century utopian philosophy or an aesthetic theory that predated socialist realism? The correct answer is none of the above. But if a new group of centrist academics -- sociologists, political scientists and law professors -- has its way, the term will soon take a place among the important isms that shape the U.S. political dialogue.

Communitarianism, loosely defined, is a fledgling and provocative effort to temper the excesses of American individualism with a strong assertion of the rights of the larger society. The social tension between the citizen and the community in democratic theory is at least as old as the 18th century differences between the rights-based philosophy of Locke and the majoritarian beliefs of Rousseau. But few voices in modern American intellectual life have challenged the primacy of the unfettered individual. To fill this void is the goal of the communitarians.

The group, under the leadership of prominent sociologist Amitai Etzioni, took public shape just a few weeks ago with the launching of a quarterly journal, Responsive Community. "To the A.C.L.U., libertarians and other radical individualists," Etzioni and his co-editors declared in their statement of purpose, "we say that the rights of individuals must be balanced with responsibilities to the community."

Rights and Responsibilities, the magazine's subtitle, represents shorthand for a public debate that extends far beyond Etzioni and his coterie. William F. Buckley Jr. in his latest book, Gratitude, puts an old-line conservative imprimatur on national service. The February issue of Harper's features a symposium on whether the Constitution needs a "Bill of Duties" to offset the Bill of Rights. The Harper's panel, which included Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a co-editor of Responsive Community, came to no firm conclusion. But Glendon conveyed a sense of how communitarians view personal responsibility with this hypothetical constitutional language: "The nurture and education of children are duties primarily incumbent on the parents."

The communitarians did not plan to make their assault on the public consciousness just as the nation began fighting in the Persian Gulf. But a rethinking of the relationship between a citizen and his country is particularly apt at a time when America is waging its first major war in this century with a volunteer army. Encouraged by the suddenly reawakened sense of national community, Etzioni observes that often "war brings out latent things in a society."

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.