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PARTISAN REVIEW
nessee court decision to exempt Fundamentalist Christian children from
reading books that their parents found offensive. The court held that the
parents had "drawn a line" based on their religious beliefs, and that the court
could not
call
this line "unreasonable." Gutmann's principle of nonrepression
suggests that the court erred: the children will not be exposed at home to
alternative viewpoints, and the state cannot require the parents to teach such
viewpoints. Hence, the public schools provide the only occasion to expose
students to a range of different beliefs, a necessary process if they are going
to deliberate rationally about alternative ways oflife. In disputing the court's
ruling, Gutmann reiterates her substantive conception of the good: the
"content of public schooling
cannot be neutral
among competing conceptions of
the good life"; rather, democratic education must "prepare future citizens for
participating intelligently in the political processes that shape their society."
Other public policies based on the I
&
We position, for instance, are the
market (should it be regulated at all?); the balance between AIDS patients'
rights (to privacy) and obligation to community (to disclose sexual contacts);
"mandatory" seat belts; due process for disruptive students in high schools;
and the balance between the First Amendment and national security.
II. In
Focus:
Which Community?
While the basic issues of the CLP-communitarian debate so far
discussed involve the theoretical orientation that the I
&
We provides and
seeks to develop and amplify, there still is the matter of clarifying the focus,
to which no answer seems readily apparent. This philosophical dialogue, it
seems, would benefit significantly if the participants would, when using the
term "community," indicate which community they mean. Sandel, for exam–
ple, alludes to "a common vocabulary of discourse and a background of
im–
plicit practices and understandings." By this criterion, a football game, an un–
dergraduate study group, and an annual lumberjacking convention all would
qualify. Instead, communitarian notions ofcommunity ought to be explored in
terms of scope (hundreds or millions of people; small groups or mass soci–
ety); substance or "content" (moral, political, religious, or cultural entity);
patterns of "dominance" (how the community expresses its values, interests,
commitments, and ends).
Scope.
When focussing on concrete political issues, writers most often
refer to a small "local" community - a town, city, or county. Sandel, for ex–
ample, espouses "laws regulating plant closings, to protect ... communities
from the disruptive effects ofcapital mobility and sudden industrial change,"
and suggests that communitarians would be "more likely than liberals to allow
a town to ban pornographic bookstores, on the grounds that pornography
offends its way of life and the values that sustain it." Gutmann considers "the
explicit concern for preventing the disruption oflocal communities...." Else–
where, Sandel calls for the revitalization of community, local and national.
