From my latest TCS column:
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone recently offered 10 tenets of modern liberalism, which included the following nugget:
It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."
It is this communitarian aspect of modern liberalism, of course, which marks a principal difference between the modern version and classical liberalism. I suspect it is this over-broad understanding of what it means to be a community that is one of the things conservatives and libertarians steeped in the classical liberal tradition find most off-putting about modern liberalism.
The great moral difficulty with communitarianism is that, if taken to extremes, it treats individuals as though they were little more than cells of a larger organism. Just as when doctors kill cells to prevent cancer from spreading, communitarianism readily justifies state intrusion into the private sphere in the name of some communal good.
Worse yet, communitarian societies require a standard of behavior more demanding than most members of an unredeemed society are unable or unwilling to meet most of the time, and that all are unable to meet all of the time. Hence, it is hardly surprising that world history is littered with the failures of communitarian utopia. The communitarian agenda simply cannot be attained without invoking the state's monopoly on coercive force. Hence, as has been observed of the British (New) Labour Party's version of communitarianism, it amounts to "the nationalization of people instead of companies, as individuals are subsumed by their designated communities."
This is precisely why conservatives have always balanced the communitarian elements of our philosophy with a strong commitment to ordered liberty. Our goal is not some national "community" whose rules are enforced by the state, but rather the promotion of intermediating institutions that build what George Weigel calls "a citizenry regulating itself from within according to a shared public 'language of good and evil.'"
Conservatives believe that the state cannot build such a citizenry, because the state cannot make people virtuous. Virtue is an adaptive response to the instinctive human recognition of (and need for) a transcendent moral order codified in a body of natural law. People are most likely to act virtuously when they believe in an external power, higher and more permanent than the state, who is aware of their shortcomings and will punish them in the next life even if they escape retribution in this life.
Civic virtue also can be created by secular communities. As James Q. Wilson observes, "something in us makes it all but impossible to justify our acts as mere self-interest whenever those acts are seen by others as violating a moral principle." Rather, "[w]e want our actions to be seen by others—and by ourselves—as arising out of appropriate motives." Voluntary communities strengthen this instinct in two ways. First, they provide a network of reputational and other social sanctions that shape incentives. Virtuous communities will use those sanctions to encourage virtue among their members. Second, because people care more about how they are perceived by those close to them, communal life provides a cloud of witnesses about whom we care and whose good opinion we value. We hesitate to disappoint those people and thus strive to comport ourselves in accordance with communal norms.
The nanny state is a poor substitute, at best, for the virtue inculcating power of faith and voluntary community. We may fear the faceless bureaucrat, but he does not inspire us to virtue. Conduct that rises above the lowest common moral denominator thus cannot be created by state action. But while the state cannot make its citizens virtuous, it can destroy the intermediary institutions that do inculcate virtue. As Richard Epstein observes, "Communities can be destroyed from without; but they cannot be created from without; they must be built from within."
To be clear, I am not arguing for some libertarian utopia in which the state has no role beyond that of a night watchman. As Edmund Burke once observed, there is "a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue." At that limit, the state properly steps in.
The Calvinist principle of sphere sovereignty offers one way of thinking about the line between legitimate and illegitimate uses of government power. Social institutions—including both the state and the corporation—are organized horizontally, none subordinated to the others, each having a sphere of authority governed by its own ordering principles. Expansion of any social institution beyond its proper sphere necessarily results in social disorder and opens the door to tyranny. The trouble with the state thus is not its existence, but its expansion beyond those functions prescribed by custom and convention, which were legitimized by ancient usage, into the pervasive nanny state perpetually grasping at aspects of social life to drag into its slavering maw.
From a perspective founded on sphere sovereignty, the progressive communitarian's basic flaw is his willingness to invoke the coercive power of the state in ways that deny the right of mankind acting individually or collectively through voluntary associations to order society. In contrast, conservatives are unwilling to sacrifice ordered liberty at the altar of community. A conservative properly insists that individuals be left free to define for themselves what conduct shall be deemed trustworthy or honorable, rather than being forced to comply with, say, Geoffrey Stone's definition of what makes for a good community.
