Plural Community

Description

Paul Mueller:

"The plural community, seems the most attractive to classical liberals—though also to many conservatives. It shares the ecological community’s deep suspicion and dislike of centralized political power and sovereignty. It advocates voluntary associations and intermediate institutions both to preserve tradition and to protect individual liberty. Yet the kind of liberty pluralists concern themselves with is very different from how advocates of the political community, like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau conceived of liberty.

These philosophers have a radical unmoored view of individual freedom. They don’t like the idea that the church can have moral authority to prescribe or constrain people’s behavior. Nor do they like that families and local communities can shun or censor certain choices. Real freedom, for these philosophers, involves the state cutting down and demolishing all the various pockets of censure, disapproval, or moral suasion—leaving the individual “free.” Many libertarians find themselves wandering down this path. The pluralist community offers something else. Pluralists argue that communities ought to be relatively free from coercion. They also argue that most of these communities should be voluntary forms of association. The voluntary part separates a modern classical liberal pluralist from, say, a reactionary medieval pluralist who saw society as composed of many unchosen communities which were hard to leave.

Burke championed the pluralist society for conserving tradition and institutions that protected and formed individuals. Tocqueville, on the other hand, championed pluralism and the multitude of voluntary associations for being a bulwark against the encroaching tyranny of centralized political government. Though having different ideals in mind, conservative pluralists and classical liberal pluralists share a great deal in common. In fact, their shared view of community forms the core of the fusionist project of Frank Meyer and others in the mid twentieth century.

The fraying of the Fusionist project occurred, in part, because increasing numbers of libertarians (Rothbard, Rand, etc.) sought a political or revolutionary form of community and freedom, even as more conservatives drifted towards Religious, Political, or even Militaristic visions of society. The application to Catholic Integralists and Christian Nationalists in our time should be obvious.

Pluralism is not without its tensions. Capitalism, mobility of labor, creative destruction, and innovation have all eroded many forms of traditional community: extended and immediate family structures, neighborhood cohesion, and a variety of other associations. It’s hard to say whether state policies—particularly the welfare state—or capitalist market forces have had the most corrosive effect on social capital and association."

(https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/how-do-communities-form-exploring-social-philosophers-5920234)