What is Communitarianism?

[Occhidiangela]

Occhi,

I'm not talking about the impossiblity of any way but rightism and leftism, and to the extent that this is "damn foolishness", you're certainly not arguing against any position I hold. I'm taking about THE third way, the managerialist, wishy-washy creed of Clinton, Blair, and their ilk.

Since I wasn't referring to that, back there, not sure why you brought it up. Not a Clinton fan, ya see.

They just take the existing political right and the political left, extract bits from both, make weak tea out of it, and sell it to the people with a hearty dose of artificial sweetener.

Is finding common ground so bad, where it can be found? Must it all be polemics?

Distributism I'd never heard of before you mentioned it, so I have little to go on. Reading through the wikipedia article, it sounds vaguely similar to the kinds of guild socialism Bertrand Russell advocated. The idea of any particular family structure being "fundamental" is not one I like, and it probably speaks to the catholic origins of the doctrine, which also does not endear it to me. I have lots of sympathy for cooperative ventures, but I think the inherent instability of that way of operating a business makes it more of a tool for specific cases than a general model for the organization of an economy.

Incidentally, it also sounds like the opposite of the "third way" that I was talking about.

-Jester

I had not offered it as an alternative, what I raised it for was in relation to the topic of this thread, the concept of the community (communitarianism or whatever) as an allegedly legitimate social construct.

Not sure why you don't ascribe to family, tribe, clan, it's the fundamental social unit for most of recorded history. It is what the concept of nation aggregates up from. Having something in common is a requirement for social cohesion. Nations doesn't scale up perfectly, of course, but rather seem to me to be the limits of scale on the social/political level at all. That may smack of Wilsonianism, may not, but it seems to me what the evidence of history and contemporary experience shows. How any group self defines as a nation is, of course, variable.

No cookie cutters.

As to Distributism, I too find the imbedded Catholic/Papist foundation troublling. Also, the the Mondragon experiment's local/clannish foundation considered, I am pretty sure it would, even in successful practice, reach the scalability limit and not be able to go any further.

What I wanted to relate it to is the issue of common cultural assumptions.

Distributism relies on them, IMO heavily, and even too heavily for it to be applicable in other than limited cases.

The OP concept, in contrast, wishes create some such assumptions "ex nihilo," and then proclaim their virtue in absence of any evidence of success in either a temporal, or scaled, frames of reference.

Occhi