IN the 1960s we went overboard with egotistical self-interest. Then in the 1980s, we overdosed on greed. One was Freud run amok; the other, Adam Smith. But we do not just need economic rehabilitation. Men and women do not live on bread alone. We need to give our daily acts transcendent meaning and moral significance.
Communitarianism balances excessive individualism and self-centred behaviour. It creates a middle road between total freedom and well-ordered liberty, between individual rights and the common good. We aim to restore civic virtues and encourage people to live up to their moral responsibilities.
Comniunitarians propose a third way that reminds us that we are all brothers and sisters, but that we can't wait for government to take care of us. No one should be able just to take entitlements from the state. We all must sacrifice, be responsible, do our share.
This communitarian thinking is not an American invention. It has roots in the ancient Greek writings, and the Old and New Testaments.
"Men, women, and children are members of many communities - families, neighbourhoods, innumerable social, religious, ethnic, work place, and professional associations," begins the Communitarian Platform.
"Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all of us belong."
The term "community" refers to a group of people who share affective bonds and a culture. Instead of one-on-one or a chain of individual relations, it requires a web of relations. These relations criss-cross and reinforce one another. They bring together people who share a set of values, norms, and meanings, a common history and identity.
Such collectives have an identity, a purpose and an ability to act in unison. In effect, it is these communities that often drive history and set a context for individual action.
All, communities draw on members' commitments, energies, time and creature comforts. While these needs are certainly not anti-communal, extending the realm of individual autonomy generates forces that, if they reach high levels, undermine communal bonds and culture.
The result is a constant tug-of-war, pulling a group simultaneously toward community service, regulations, mobilisation, and toward individualisation, self-expression, and atomisation. These contending forces can be balanced like riding a bicycle. For every teeter in one direction or another - either towards anarchy and extreme individualism, or to the authoritarianism of extreme collectivism - the bicycle must be steadied.
Thus, in Albania, China, and even Japan, communitarians fight for more "space" for individual rights and expression and fewer community-imposed obligations. In the contemporary West, however, there is excessive individualism and the urgent need is to rebuild a sense of personal and social responsibility.
Communitarianism is taking its place in the political culture and deliberations of various nations. "I'm trying to establish a new settlement between citizens and government," explains Paddy Ashdown, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party.
All three major British parties are now reaching towards community. "There's something important and relevant at the heart of the general philosophy, that rights should be matched by responsibilities," adds Andrew Smith, the Labour Party's treasury spokesman.
Although communitarian ideas are nonpartisan and non-policy-oriented, a wide spectrum and growing number of political leaders are endorsing them. In France, former European Community president Jacques Delors speaks like a born-again communitarian. In Germany, politicians and intellectuals of opposing political parties agree on the need for more community. In the United States, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, as well as Republican Party leaders Lamar Alexander and Jack Kemp, have expressed strong communitarian sentiments. Communitarians like myself have not implanted these ideas in their heads they are visionary people who have seen the power of a compelling set of ideas whose time has come.
True, France and Britain have not yet reached the same levels of moral anarchy and the crumbling of social institutions as in the United States. But the trends in, Europe point in that direction. The rise in violent crime, illegitimacy, high levels of drug abuse, children who kill and show no remorse, and, of course, political corruption are all evidence.
The best time to shore up the moral and social institutions is not after they have collapsed but when they are cracking. Does anyone believe that they are not cracked in the United States these days, and that if present trends continue, they will crack in Europe?
CRlTICS mock to which community should an individual pledge his loyalty - the local, regional, or national? Others ask, if we strengthen one type of community, won't we weaken another? True, there is a danger of tribalism, of communities turning on one another. However the history of Germany shows that local communities can thrive within regional ones. Bavaria and the Rhineland, and areas of the former East Germany, combine regional identities with society-wide loyalties.
Communities nestled within more encompassing structures enjoy what I will call layered loyalties. Jacques Delors terms this "subsidiarity". Incomes are taxed, and contributions in kind or "sweat equity" are demanded. Members' occupations are defined as legitimate, for example nursing - versus abhorrent, such as drug-dealing. In this sense, communities oppose excessive withdrawal into self and self-centred projects.
However. members of the same community often have different needs from the community definition of the common good. For example, there is no legitimate role left for gay people in communities which expect all members to marry and produce children.
Layered Royalties will create conflicts. When two values compete for the allegiance of different layers within one community, loyalty to the overarching community needs to take precedence over loyalty to the immediate community.
So far, this is largely a vision. But numerous "communities of communities" have evolved in the United States, Germany, and Italy.
"This is only a beginning," concludes the Communitarian Platform. "It is but a point in dialogue, part of an ongoing process of deliberation. It should not be viewed as a series of final conclusions but ideas for additional discussion."
But the direction is clear. "If more and more people come forward and join together to form active communities that seek to reinvigorate the moral and social order, we will be able to deal better with many of our communities' problems while reducing our reliance on governmental regulation, controls, and force.
We will have a greater opportunity to work out shared public policy based on broad consensus and shared moral and legal traditions. And we will have many more ways to make our society a place in which individual rights are vigilantly maintained, while the seedbeds of civic virtue are patiently nurtured."