Communitarian Paradigm

Hobbes's conception of organized society rests on the idea of opposing "interests to passions" or using absolute sovereign power for "social control" of the state of war, the logical social consequence of such natural passions: "While there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice" (238). Accordingly, people engage in "mutual transferring of right" to a commonwealth ruled by an absolute monarch, "one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author (Hobbes 247).

Rousseau's conception of the state of nature contains no morality, but unlike Hobbes he does not deduce from the absence of good the presence of evil (Rousseau, Discourse 333). Rather, mankind's natural predisposition to pity is transformed into the evils of master-slave social structure. Thus, man is born free "and everywhere he is in chains" (Rousseau, Social 338). By means of a so-called social compact, Rousseau solves the problems of mas

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does not expect to be obliged to hear others. The communitarian view is that rights entail responsibility as a matter of social principle. Etzioni argues for an "intermediate" position of rights and responsibilities, which seems very reasonable, very much a matter of common sense and where social intercourse from the personal to the institutional level is a matter of mutual acknowledgment of time, space, patience, and a few kind words. However, as Etzioni and other contributors to the volume indicate, the difficulty of instilling communitarian values--even those that seem unobjectionable aspects of common sense--is a general reluctance of individuals to relinquish anything that might be characterized as rights (what Locke might term Life, Liberty, and Estate) on one hand and to refrain from acknowledging as legitimate anything that might be perceived as a claim against the individual on the other. An attitude on the part of individuals that evades acknowledgment of responsibility for the shape of their civil society is not without cost, for institutional responses to problems of community can develop a life of their own. This point is made most strongly by Lasch, who notes says that civil society as conceived by traditional polit
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Approximate Word count = 3192
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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