Repetition

The two main goals sought by liberal society are individual freedom and self-rule

(Taylor, 1995), which represent the two ingredients of liberal democracies, i.e. liberalism and democracy. The two may seem to be in a harmonious relation in the modern context, but they are indeed in a constant dialectical interplay (Bobbio, 1990). Two camps can be identified in Western democracies as to how these goals can be identified. One camp puts the emphasis on individual freedoms and the limitation of the state power, which is called by some negative freedom. For this camp the realm that lies outside politics, i.e. public sphere and the market, are the main bulwarks of freedom. The other camp is concerned more with self-rule, where collective decisions are made to shape the conditions of our lives. In this camp, public sphere not only limits the power of the state. It also can contribute to the development of common debate and exchange, which informs collective decisions. This is a tension between the primacy of the individual and the primacy of the group, as manifested in many layers of debate.

On the surface, the new debates around community building may be related to the social and political contexts of the past two decades. The 1980s saw a resurgence of individualism, as reflected in the famous remarks of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—There is no such thing as society: there are only individuals. The results of such extreme individualism, however, have included increased social polarization and fragmentation. In response, the 1990s witnessed an emergence of communitarianism, hence the need to (re)build neighbourhoods and communities. After all, Etzioni (1995) identifies a number of political leaders in the Western countries to be among the supporters of communitarian ideas. The communitarians argue that ‘the pendulum has swung too far towards the individualistic pole, and it is time to hurry its return’ (Etzioni, 1995:26). Too much has been said about the rights of individuals. Now it is time to talk about the responsibilities of individuals to the community. The community has been lost and needs to be rebuilt, ‘not only because community life is a major source of satisfaction of our deeper personal needs, but because the social pressures community brings to bear are a mainstay of our moral values’ (Etzioni, 1995:40). This tension, however, goes back further in time.

The Enlightenment period promoted a notion of radical autonomy for individuals, which has remained a central feature of the Western civilization ever since. With its emphasis on individuals, it looked at nature and society as merely the potential means to the satisfaction of human desires. Nature and society were to be reorganized through scientific social engineering to bring about happiness to individuals. In this sense, the Enlightenment had a utilitarian ethical outlook and an atomistic social philosophy. The generations that followed the French Revolution, however, found the notion of absolute freedom for individuals to be without content. As against this emphasis on the instrumental significance of society and nature, Hegel stressed the importance of Sittlichkeit (some times translated as ‘ethical life’), in which individuals have moral obligations to the ongoing community of which they are a part. It is, he argued, in a community rather than in a vacuum that morality finds its completion. The freedom and fulfilment of individuals can be achieved within a community, rather than in an undifferentiated context (Taylor, 1979).

Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit is a major landmark in a long historical line of social and political thought known as organicism (or holism) (Bobbio, 1990). In its development, he

6.5 Organicism describes close-knit communities, where individuals are related to each other through natural will and united through ties of blood and history (Tainan, Taiwan)

drew upon the discussions about the ancient Greek polis, where the public life of the city was thought to be the essence and meaning of individuals’ lives. According to Aristotle (1992), the polis ‘exists by nature’ (p. 59) and ‘has a natural priority over the household and over any individual among us’ (p. 60). He thus laid out the foundation of organicism:

‘For the whole must be prior to the part. Separate hand or foot from the whole body, and they will no longer be hand or foot except in name’ (Aristotle, 1992:60). Rather than being autonomous, individuals are interdependent, cooperating to further their joint collective life, which is embodied in the corporate structure of the city-state.

In contrast to this ancient organicism, the emerging individualism of the Enlightenment era was a thoroughly modern notion (Bobbio, 1990). An influential articulation of this tension between individualism and holism in society was developed by Ferdinand Tönnies at the end of the nineteenth century, in his two contrasting ideal types of Gemeinschaft ‘community’ and Gesellschaft ‘society’ (Tonnies, 1957). The Gemeinschaft described the traditional communities which were rooted in particular places, where individuals were related to each other through natural will and united through ties of blood and history (Figure 6.5). This was distinguishable from the Gesellschaft, the modern societies in which trade and science created groups of

individuals who are only related to each other through rational will to achieve certain ends. Gemeinschaft, therefore, refers to the organic union of individuals, based on the

‘assumption of perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition’ (Tönnies, 1957:37). Gesellschaft, on the other hand, refers to the voluntary association of individuals for particular purposes, or in his words, ‘the artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings’ (Tönnies, 1957:64). Although in both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft individuals live together peacefully, the resemblance between these two situations is superficial. Their difference lies in that in the Gemeinschaft individuals

‘remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in the Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors’ (Tönnies, 1957:65).

Some elements in the ideas of the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be traced back deep into the historical past and as such their various manifestations are seen as variations on an eternal theme (Sorokin, 1957). The formulations of holism in the modern period, as developed for example by Hegel and Tönnies among others, often had some roots in romanticism and drew upon an idealized past (whether the Greek polis or the medieval community) in which strong social bonds tied individuals together and social norms and values had primacy over individual gains. Less, however, has been said about how these communities were sites of economic, political and sexual exploitation, marked by high infant mortality, low life expectancy, child labour etc. The extreme manifestations of holism came to the fore in the twentieth century in the shape of fascism and communism, in which millions of individuals died or suffered in the name of collective ideals.

This controversy between individualism and holism has remained a central concern of social philosophy to this day. Although this dualism may be analytically unconvincing for some, it plays a powerful normative role. Its normative dimension in political philosophy has been the controversy between communitarianism and liberalism. While liberals see the society as a collection of individuals, a Gesellschaft, communitarians promote the importance of the society, to which the rights of individuals should be subordinated. The extreme opposition to holism can be found in libertarians, who often support free market economics, oppose any state intervention in society, and are sometimes associated with social Darwinism, advocating the survival of the fittest (Narveson, 1995). Bobbio (1990) identifies two distinct forms of individualism: liberal and democratic. Liberal individualism ‘amputates the individual from the organic body, makes him live—at least for much of his life outside the maternal womb, plunges him into the unknown and perilous world of the struggle for survival’. Democratic individualism, on the other hand, joins the individual ‘together once more with others like himself, so that society can be built up again from their union, no longer as an organic whole but as an association of free individuals’ (p. 43).

Whether interpreted as social fragmentation (Honneth, 1995) or as mobility of individuals (Willetts, 1998), the emergence of individualism lies at the heart of the changes and pathologies of modern societies. What was new in the new individualism was the ability (and the pressure) to evaluate critically and to transform the social ties in which the individuals were embedded. The result was on the one hand a disruption of communities and social ties, on the other the liberation, or uprootedness, of individuals.

From the start this was a socio-spatial phenomenon, manifest in the growth of large cities.

From early on, individualism found a comfortable home in the cities and was expressed in crowding, anonymity and social segregation. From early on, such anonymity and segregation caused fear and anxiety about how to maintain social order and promote social integration. Creation of communities has been a main form of practising holism, by promoting togetherness and the development of new social ties, which would maintain a potentially explosive or disintegrating social fabric. Utopian thinking of the past two centuries and the practical steps urban planning and design has taken to create local distinction, physical proximity and intersubjective interaction in public spaces can be seen as part of a long line of holism, where the main preoccupation has been with a promotion of social integration in the face of what seemed to be the atomization of the society. This holism, however, has often been prescribed for the lower income groups, while the more affluent have expected to live as free individuals.

This is a point that Bobbio (1990:89) raises as depending on the position of the judge.

Liberty is defined to have negative and positive forms. Liberals prefer as little intervention as possible by the state, while democrats are keen to promote self rule for all citizens. Judgements that are made between these two definitions of liberty, which reflect the tension between liberalism and democracy, depend on the historical circumstances but, more importantly, on the position of the judge in social space. Those who are well placed in social space usually prefer the negative definition and those who are lower in the social scale the positive definition.