The purpose of this research is to examine the communitarian paradigm that emerges from the collection of essays contained in Rights and the Common Good, edited by Etzioni. The plan of the research will be to set forth the paradigm of civil society emergent in the ideas of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then to discuss and present a comparative critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of communitarianism as a response to the classical societal conceptualizations.
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 master-slave relationships and evil in government: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole" (Rousseau 343; emphasis in original). There is a paradox, "that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means only that he will be forced to be free" (Rousseau, S...