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community as an end in itself He espouses "strong" democracy, a politics of
universal participation, in which "all of the people govern themselves in at
least some public matters at least some of the time." Barber's conception of
community involves not as much the substance of a particular cluster of
"shared understandings" as the process of political participation. He envisions
the nation as a town hall, and it is through the activity of direct participation
that Barber fashions his community and the individuals within it. Public activ–
ity is elevated from a means to a community goal: "To participate
is
to cre–
ate a community that governs itself, and to create a self-governing commu–
nity is to participate."
The Responsive Community.
Perhaps the central issue of these various
interpretations of the substance of community is how the community ex–
presses, affirms - versus imposes - its common values, ends, and interests. A
three-part classification is helpful here. First, values may be imposed by the
state, which makes for a coercive community. Alternatively, values may be
imposed by a "tight," nonpluralistic community, lacking moral alternatives - a
Salem-like community, whose punitive force is largely psychological (fear,
humiliation, isolation, degradation). Finally, values may be affirmed (here, we
avoid
imposed)
by what is called a "responsive community," a noncoercive
community that appeals to the "nobler" part of the self, and one that in turn
the selffinds compelling.
One important source of the reluctance to accord full moral standing to
the community is the view that any and all community voices are coercive.
Nineteen-sixties radicals referred to economic and psychological "coercion,"
for instance, arguing that there was no basic difference between a police state
(Stalinist Russia) and a capitalist society that forced farmhands (and many
other workers) to labor at demeaningjobs for low pay, and subjected its citi–
zens to media and junk-culture "rape." Libertarians often take a similar posi–
tion, by simply not recognizing a difference between the state and the com–
munity; both are viewed as "making" people behave in the name of the col–
lectivity, without regard to differences in means. Libertarians assume that
both intrude unduly on decisions that autonomous individuals (conceived as
independent of community) are to make. CLP, Elshtain explains, see the in–
dividual as free not only from state coercion but from "a public morality he
may not share," and free as well from the intrusions of his neighbors into his
"private affairs." She adds:
Civil libertarians cannot get beyond a picture of isolated individuals,
bound up in their "freedom from," going through the world
en garde
against possible constraints from concerned and potentially
"repressive" communities.
