Bainbridge on "The Communitarian Connundrum"

Here's our own Steve Bainbridge, commenting on communitarianism:

. . . 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.