Normative political community : the necessary condition for justice

Abstract

In this dissertation, I develop a theory of political community through an analysis of human needs for fellowship on the one hand, and a synthesis of numerous critiques of the liberal state on the other. My thesis is that justice, defined as a social condition which promotes self-realization and fair, impartial treatment, is only possible in a society committed to a special sense of community based upon human needs for status, security, and the sharing of moral and intellectual commitments. The methodology of this study is two-fold. First, analytical philosophy is employed to reduce the basic justifications offered in defense of the liberal state to their essential components. In this way, they can be adequately challenged. Secondly, a synthesis of empirical studies of human needs for self-fulfillment in work and in local societies, both traditional and modern, is undertaken in order to construct an alternative of social intercourse. We find the liberal theory of the state, the basis for modern defenses of democracy to be wanting on several counts. First, by narrowing the parameters of human need to biological exigency and material want, it fosters possessive individualism by reducing society to an atomistic association of self-interested persons. Secondly, in assuming that man is rational and complete, liberalism fails to adequately confront the problem of alienation--a rampant condition in industrial societies, often caused by possessive individualism, which compels persons to abandon moral restraint and which thus makes agreement on common norms impossible. And third, liberalism ignores the fact that persons have always lived in natural associations which shape human values and perceptions and constrain human knowledge. Our development of an alternative conception of justice finds the following to be true. Persons do have needs for self-fulfillment in work, identity in society, and knowledge from the development of meaningful ways of life--all of which are dependent on a sense of community. Thus a theory of justice must be cognizant of the following concerns. First, every individual needs to organize his activities socially. This need becomes geared toward a sense of community when persons cultivate values. Second, there are many different types of communities, each of which correspond to distinct values: hedonistic, aesthetic, and moral, to mention but a few. Third, because self-realization as the highest level of human achievement requires justice in order to be brought about, it requires a special form of community which promotes judgmental and critical capacities rather than merely traditional attachments. This judgmental form of community, like the self-fulfilled person whose needs it advances, is developmental in nature. Traditional theories of community failed to recognize this fact precisely because they were premised on the belief that community is an organic social order needed by persons for social harmony. In such traditional views, persons are seen as essentially childlike and dependent on order, hierarchy, and unity. Fourth, all contemporary societies can be classified by the type of communal order they promote and by their level of moral development. Traditional societies in dire poverty are characterized as amoral-familial social orders and are described as lacking any sense of moral community. The proto-community, a traditional society in a stable phase of development, promotes an aesthetic notion of community analogous to that of the contemporary ethnic group. Pluralist-atomized society, the economically developed order prevailing in Western nations, is founded upon liberal-individualistic principles. Being atomistic, it fosters alienation which may lead to a crypto community--a totalitarian order which attempts to recapture a vision of community perceived as lost in the process of modernization. Finally, the near-community fuses traditional attachments with those of a critical, judgmental community, thus leading to the possibility of self-fulfillment. The normative community, which does not now exist, requires a world government and transcendence of the nation-state. Fifth, the normative community as the necessary condition for justice is religiously based. It accepts the existence of a supernatural force from whom all good and right stems which obliges personsto treat each other as moral equals--even those unable to intuit or otherwise discover their natural obligations. Because it is religiously based, it is able to appeal to human conscience in disobeying conventional laws while still rejecting violence and terror in its condemnations of injustice.