6. Communitarianism

Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka

This chapter examines communitarianism and its central assumptions. It first considers two strands of communitarian thought: one camp argues that community should be seen as the source of principles of justice, whereas the other camp insists that community should play a greater role in the content of principles of justice. The chapter then explores the communitarian claim that the liberal ‘politics of rights’ should be abandoned for, or at least supplemented by, a ‘politics of the common good’. It also analyses the communitarian conception of the embedded self; two liberal accommodations of communitarianism, the so-called political liberalism and liberal nationalism; the communitarians’ ‘social thesis’, focusing on Charles Taylor’s belief that liberal neutrality cannot sustain the social conditions for the exercise of autonomy; and the connection between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The chapter concludes with an overview of the politics of communitarianism.

2017 ◽  
Vol 72. (3.) ◽  
pp. 385-385
Author(s):  
Josip Jelenić

The author reflects on the phenomenon in contemporary society called the culture of egoism which has become the ideology of modern man. This ideology always excludes the other, the one who is different, because it is concerned with one–way egotistical activities based on domination. The result is division in society causing permanent conflict and ending, as a rule, in self–destruction. Instead of a culture of egoism, always ideology–based, a culture of solidarity is recommended as the way in which to live and work for one’s personal and also the common good. Here solidarity is understood and accepted as a basic value which evolves into a principle and a mandatory course of action. After all, it is solidarity, and not egoism, which is the expression of the social nature of the human being.


Author(s):  
Mary L. Hirschfeld

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Maria Ledstam

This article engages with how religion and economy relate to each other in faith-based businesses. It also elaborates on a recurrent idea in theological literature that reflections on different visions of time can advance theological analyses of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. More specifically, this article brings results from an ethnographic study of two faith-based businesses into conversation with the ethicist Luke Bretherton’s presentation of different understandings of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. Using Theodore Schatzki’s theory of timespace, the article examines how time and space are constituted in two small faith-based businesses that are part of the two networks Business as Mission (evangelical) and Economy of Communion (catholic) and how the different timespaces affect the religious-economic configurations in the two cases and with what moral implications. The overall findings suggest that the timespace in the Catholic business was characterized by struggling caused by a tension between certain ideals on how religion and economy should relate to each other on the one hand and how the practice evolved on the other hand. Furthermore, the timespace in the evangelical business was characterized by confidence, caused by the business having a rather distinct and achievable goal when it came to how they wanted to be different and how religion should relate to economy. There are, however, nuances and important resemblances between the cases that cannot be explained by the businesses’ confessional and theological affiliations. Rather, there seems to be something about the phenomenon of tension-filled and confident faith-based businesses that causes a drive in the practices towards the common good. After mapping the results of the empirical study, I discuss some contributions that I argue this study brings to Bretherton’s presentation of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism.


English Today ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reinier Salverda

A description and discussion of the vast linguistic diversity in the capital of the United Kingdom.LONDON today is an enormous Tower of Babel, where in addition to the common language, English, many other languages are spoken. On Tuesday 13 March 2001, as part of the Lunch Hour Lecture Series at University College London, Professor Reinier Salverda discussed the linguistic diversity of contemporary London, presenting recent data on the other languages spoken there, as well as focussing on the social aspects of this linguistic diversity, in particular issues of language policy and language management. The following is a slightly adapted version of that presentation.


Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Biet

AbstractTheatre and law are not so different. Generally, researchers work on the art of theatre, the rhetoric of the actors, or the dramaturgy built from law cases or from the questions that the law does not completely resolve. Trials, tragedies, even comedies are close: everybody can see the interpenetration of them on stage and in the courts. We know that, and we know that the dramas are made with/from/of law, we know that the art the actors are developing is not so far from the art of the lawyers, and conversely. In this paper, I would like to have a look at the action of the audience, at the session itself and at the way the spectators are here to evaluate and judge not only the dramatic action, not only the art of the actors, not only the text of the author, but also the other spectators, and themselves too. In particular, I will focus on the “common judgment” of the audience and on its judicial, aesthetic and social relationship. The spectators have been undisciplined, noisy, unruled, during such a long period that theatre still retains some prints of this behaviour, even if nowadays, the social and aesthetic rule is to be silent. But uncertainty, inattention, distraction, contradiction, heterogeneity are the notions which characterise the session, and the judgments of the spectators still depend on them. So, what was and what is the voice of the audience? And with what sort of voice do spectators give their judgments?


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio García

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la construcción, sustentabilidad y usos del capital social comunitario en un movimiento social argentino que plantea la horizontalidad y la autonomía como valores fundamentales de organización social. A través del análisis de la dinámica de tres tipos de capital social —unión, puente, y nexo—, se observa que el movimiento en cuestión consigue crear rápidamente capital social comunitario y una identidad común diferenciadora. Sin embargo, el capital social rápidamente construido no logra sustentarse en el tiempo, debido a la incapacidad de sus integrantes en generar mecanismos descentralizados y eficientes de monitoreo mutuo, responsabilidad compartida y penalización moral que protejan el bien común y refuercen la identidad comunitaria a través de redes sociales densas.   ABSTRACTThe objective of this article is to analyze the construction, sustainability and uses of community social capital in a social movement in Argentina that identifies horizontality and autonomy as fundamental values of social organization. By analyzing the dynamics of three types of social capital —bonding, bridging and linking— we can observe that the movement studied here is able to rapidly create community social capital and  differentiating common identity. Nevertheless, the social capital rapidly constructed is not sustained over time, because the movement’s members are unable to generate decentralized, efficient mechanisms for mutual monitoring, shared responsibility and moral penalization that will protect the common good and strengthen community identity through dense social networks.


1910 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alfred Faulkner

There are two facts to be borne in mind in regard to Luther's whole attitude to social and economic questions. The first is that ordinarily this was a territory to be confined to experts, in which ministers should not meddle. He believed that a special knowledge was necessary to deal with some of these matters, and that they had better be left to those to whom Providence had assigned them, whether the jurists, those clever in worldly knowledge, or the authorities. The other fact is that the Church after all has social duties, and that Church and clergy must fight flagrant abuses and try to bring in the Kingdom of God on earth. The Church must use the Word of God against sin and sinners, and so by spiritual ministries help the needs of the time. The authorities on their part shall proceed by strict justice against evil doers. But there is another fact here which it is necessary to mention to get Luther's whole attitude, viz., that the State's function is not simply to administer justice, but to secure the general weal. They shall do the very best they can for their subjects, says Luther. “The authorities shall serve their subjects and use their office not petulantly [nicht zu Mutwillen] but for the advancement of the common good, and especially for the poor.” The princes shall give laws which shall limit as far as possible social misery and national dangers. They should listen to the proposals of the Church to this end, and on the ground of wise counsels of churchmen, do away with old laws and make new ones.


2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kraynak

Abstract“Social justice” is a powerful idea today, but its origins and meaning are unclear. One of the first to use the term was Antonio Rosmini, author of The Constitution under Social Justice (1848) and other works of moral philosophy. I argue that Rosmini arrived at his idea of social justice by developing Thomistic natural law theory into a novel view of the common good that balances two principles: (1) the equal rights and dignity of persons as ends-in-themselves, a version of “personalism” influenced by Kant and Christianity; and (2) unequal rewards for those who contribute most to society, a version of Aristotelian “proportionalism” based on the social nature of man. I conclude by comparing Rosmini's idea of social justice to John Rawls's “theory of justice” and Catholic social teaching.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Bartosz Mika

This text can be defined as an attempt to look at the question of the common good through sociological glasses. The author suggests that many of the issues subsumed under  the term “the common good” have already been elucidated and described in detail on the basis of classical and contemporary sociology. If it is assumed that the common good can be understood triply, as (1) a postulate of the social good, (2) materially, as an object of collective ownership, and (3) as an effect of the individual’s life in society, then it must be admitted that, at least in the third case, reference to the collected achievements of sociology is necessary in order to describe the common good properly.


Author(s):  
Xi Zhao ◽  
Xianqiang Lian ◽  
Yan Liu ◽  
Liyan Zhou ◽  
Bian Wu ◽  
...  

Social behaviors do not only exist in higher organisms but are also present in microbes that interact for the common good. Here, we report that budding yeast cells interact with their neighboring cells after exposure to DNA damage. Yeast cells irradiated with DNA-damaging ultraviolet light secrete signal peptides that can increase the survival of yeast cells exposed to DNA-damaging stress. The secreted peptide is derived from glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), and it induced cell death of a fraction of yeast cells in the group. The data suggest that the GAPDH-derived peptide serves in budding yeast’s social interaction in response to DNA-damaging stress. Importance Many studies have shown that microorganisms, including bacteria and yeast, display increased tolerance to stress after exposure to the same stressor. However, the mechanism remains unknown. In this manuscript, we report a striking finding that S. cerevisiae cells respond to DNA damage by secreting a peptide that facilitates resistance to DNA-damaging stress. Although it has been shown that GAPDH possesses many key functions in cells aside from its well-established role in glycolysis, this study demonstrated that GAPDH is also involved in the social behaviors response to DNA-damaging stress. The study opens the gate to an interesting research field about microbial social activity for adaptation to a harsh environment.


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