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Communitarianism, Liberal Individualism W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1995 Communitarianism, Liberal Individualism, and the Myth of Antecedence: A Democratic Perspective on the Citizenship Debate between Liberal Individualists and Communitarians Paulette Ann Parker College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Parker, Paulette Ann, "Communitarianism, Liberal Individualism, and the Myth of Antecedence: A Democratic Perspective on the Citizenship Debate between Liberal Individualists and Communitarians" (1995). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625990. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-mvjk-4928 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COMMUNITARIANISM, LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE MYTH OF ANTECEDENCE: A DEMOCRATIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE CITIZENSHIP DEBATE BETWEEN LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISTS AND COMMUNITARIANS A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Government The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Paulette Ann Parker 1 9 9 5 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts J\. VajV-zA Paulette Ann Parker Approved, July 1995 ^Joel D. Schwartz Roger Smith >-<? c - &—' awrence C . Becker Department of Philosophy ii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated with love and gratitude to two of my best teachers, my parents, Charles and Vera Payor iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................... v ABSTRACT.................................................. vi INTRODUCTION............................................. 2 CHAPTER I. THE SELF AND CITIZEN OF COMMUNITARIANISM 18 CHAPTER II. THE SELF AND CITIZEN OF LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM............................ 64 CHAPTER III. THE SELF AND CITIZEN OF HERMENEUTIC DEMOCRACY AS A MEAN...................... 112 CONCLUSION................................................143 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................. 150 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Joel Schwartz for the patient advice and constructive criticism he has offered at each stage of this undertaking. Professor Schwartzfs insights and evaluations have proven invaluable in bringing into focus the central issues of a diverse body of readings, thereby creating the groundwork for broad analyses and formulation of a manageable argument. I am also indebted to Professors Roger Smith and Lawrence Becker for so willingly taking their time to serve as readers. v ABSTRACT This paper outlines a "hermeneutic theory of democracy" and uses it to analyze the debate between liberal individualists and communitarians regarding citizenship. The hermeneutic approach offers fresh insight into each of these perspectives and facilitates substantive communication between them by drawing out implications of the emphasis they both place on democratic processes. Hermeneutic theory conceives of democracy as a two-sided process. The first half of the hermeneutic circle sees the shared understandings and culture of the community as constitutive of the individual. The second half sees individuals, in all their diversity, as constitutive of the matrix of shared understandings and culture. It is argued that the communitarian view of citizenship and democracy, by insisting that the community is (or ought to be) antecedent to the individual, emphasizes the first half of the hermeneutic circle, while the liberal individualist perspective, which stresses that the individual is (or ought to be) antecedent to the community, emphasize the second half. This paper, then, calls attention to the foundational imbalances in liberal individualism and communitarianism which in turn produce truncated models of the citizen, the community, and democratic processes. In liberal individualism and communitarianism we find reified segments of democratic processes rather than functioning components and an animated whole. By contrast, the identity of the hermeneutic self is not fully autonomous or entirely socially-constituted, but rather an integrated combination of individuated and communal factors. Accordingly, in the hermeneutic model, neither the individual nor the community is considered epistemologically antecedent to the other. In hermeneutic democracy, the interdependent functioning of both halves of the hermeneutic circle constitutes the cycle of democratic processes. The paper concludes that the hermeneutic model serves two purposes. First, it provides a discrete, moderate theory of citizenship and democracy capable of communicating on common ground with both liberal individualists and communitarians. Second, by avoiding the unwarranted constraints of antecedence, it offers a balanced alternative theory of citizenship in the often implacable debate between liberal individualists and communitarians. COMMUNITARIANISM, LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE MYTH OF ANTECEDENCE: A DEMOCRATIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE CITIZENSHIP DEBATE BETWEEN LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISTS AND COMMUNITARIANS Introduction The issue of citizenship, with the various theoretical and practical questions it raises, is a primary forum for the debate between liberal individualists and communitarians. The project undertaken in this essay is to assess the controversy between liberal individualists and communitarians on the topic of citizenship through the lens of what I will call hermeneutic democracy. My thesis is that this approach offers fresh insight into both perspectives and facilitates substantive communication between them by drawing out implications of the emphasis they each place on significant facets of democratic processes. For liberal individualists, the individual is antecedent to and constitutive of the community. Conversely, for communitarians, community is antecedent to and constitutive of the individual. We shall see that contrasting views on the nature and constitution of the self are at the root of these differences. Since each perspective uses a model of the self to construct the prototype of a citizen, the trajectories set by differences at this level result in vastly disparate standpoints. Liberal individualists postulate autonomous individuals entering 2 3 society from the state of nature. Communitarian tenets are grounded in the framework of socially-constituted humans as members of communities. Upon analysis, however, it will become evident that communitarians and liberal individualists rely on an assumption of democracy in depictions of the citizen and the relationship between the citizen and the polity. Moreover, in both cases, the benefits afforded by the inclusion of democracy are indispensable although generally unacknowledged. In order to establish a vantage point from which we may examine the communitarian and liberal individualist views of citizenship and the aspects of democracy which they embrace, it is essential to delineate hermeneutic democracy as a discrete model. Hermeneutic theory conceives of democracy as a two-sided process, where the first half sees shared understandings and culture as constituting the individual, and the second half sees individuals, in all their diversity, as constituting the matrix of shared culture and understandings. In the first half of the hermeneutical circle, citizens share membership in a polity, partake of a common socio­ political culture, and are collectively impacted at various times by a slate of salient communal issues. These areas of commonality are the infrastructure for communicative interaction. Public discourse and policy formulation within the context of community are the initial half of the 4 processes which comprise the circle of hermeneutic democracy. This portion of the hermeneutic circle reflects the impact of community on the identity of the self, and the activity of the socially-constituted aspects of the self. The second half of the circle is the activity of citizens as individual deliberators engaged in the appraisal of communal norms and consensus. The dialectics of community life augment individual and collective self-understandings, including enhancing the capacity for individual and collective self-evaluation. The ongoing reexamination of the community by its citizens is a reflection of the impact of individuals on the community, and the activity of the individuated, autonomous facets of the self. This half of the hermeneutic circle sustains the vitality of political processes and upholds the status of citizenship by averting the influence of unexamined assumptions and outmoded precedents. While we anticipate that some voices will be more influential than others, incorporation of the dynamics of critical self-appraisal ensures that deprivileged viewpoints and marginalized interests will continue to find their expression. In the model of hermeneutic democracy, the two interrelated facets of democratic functioning are the two halves which make up the whole. Whereas the hermeneutic model is characterized by an ongoing cycle of immanent processes, communitarians and liberal individualists each 5 portray a fragmented half, rendered inert as a result of
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