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| Volume XII, Summer 2005, Number 2 |
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| EXCERPT: Communitarianism vs. Individual Rights In the West and the Islamic World |
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| David Lea |
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Dr. Lea is an associate professor of philosophy at the American University of Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates.
LIBERALISM
In the 1970s, Ronald Dworkin contrasted liberal commitment to individual rights with utilitarian calculations associated with economic rationalism and policy- driven initiatives aimed at general social welfare and security.1 Dworkin stated that a commitment to the protection of individual rights distinguishes liberal society: It is willing to suffer disadvantages to policy and economic rationalism in order to preserve the freedom and dignity of the individual. Dworkin argued that greater levels of general welfare might be achieved by imposing a seamless uniformity that disregards individual rights. However, this would compromise the liberal philosophy of Western society, which values an individual's dignity and freedom.
In making these points, Dworkin defended tolerance and restraint with respect to the actions of dissenting individuals and groups that may offend the general mainstream of society. At the time, this philosophical perspective was particularly apposite. It appeared just after the bitter winding down of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict, in which allegations of civil disobedience and disloyalty had frequently surfaced.
It was frequently claimed by those who supported the U.S. and Western military involvement in the war that the actions of a minority of dissenters were undermining the efforts of the troops and thereby damaging the best interests of society. On this basis, many people argued that these dissenters should be suppressed. Dworkin's defense of individual rights served to remind people that any such policy contradicted the reason the West had entered the conflict -- to oppose totalitarian states. Dworkin argued that toleration was the price that society would have to pay to distinguish itself from its enemies and remain a polity that accorded dignity and respect to the individual as well as to dissenting minorities.
Until the 1980s, the liberal political philosophies of people such as Dworkin and the late John Rawls, often regarded as the doyen of late-twentieth-century liberalism, dominated academia and were widely regarded as authoritative presentations of the superior justice of liberal democratic societies.2 They forcefully demonstrated how liberal societies achieved individual justice and justice for minorities through the institution of equal individual rights. Policies based on universal rights were essentially seen as protecting individuals against the interests and politics of the collective.
THE COMMUNITARIAN CHALLENGE
In the 1980s, however, these arguments came into question. A powerful "communitarian" or "culturist" movement began to gain force and stress the value of the community.3 These academics questioned the liberal tendency to articulate principles of justice based on the "bi-polarity" of the individual, on the one hand, and the state, on the other. They argued that justice must go beyond the idea of equal rights for all citizens and provide special rights for communities and cultural groupings so that these cultural groups could survive and endure the overwhelming threats to their traditions.
The political philosophers who initially criticized liberalism argued that an emphasis on the overwhelming importance of the individual was contrary to actual lived experience. Communitarians argued that liberal philosophy, which based its systems of justice on the preeminent liberty of the individual, projected a notion of the self that conveyed "radically unengaged individuality." This "liberal self" represented the "thin view of the self" -- deracinated, disengaged from culture and community and accordingly suffering the modern diseases of alienation and anomie.4 These thinkers believed that the emphasis on equal individual rights had failed to protect -- and had even undermined -- communities and cultural groups because cultural differences were ignored. Some academics suggested that the notion of citizenship should be redefined so that cultural communities, like trade unions and corporations, could gain collective rights.
1 R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Duckworth, 1977).
2 Ibid.; and J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971).
3 V. Van Dyke, "Justice as Fairness for Groups?" American Political Science Review, No. 69, 1975, pp. 607-614; M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982); A. Etzioni, The Moral Dimension; Toward A New Economics (The Free Press, 1988); W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Clarendon Press, 1989); Charles Taylor, Sources of Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989); A. Margali and J. Raz, "National Self Determination," The Journal of Philosophy, No. 87, 1990, pp. 439-461; and W. Kymlicka, "Individual and Community Rights," Group Rights, ed. J. Baker (University of Toronto Press, 1994). MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd Edition (Duckworth,1993).
4 Ibid., Sandel, pp. 12,13.
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