Today, the search is on to reinvent community for a modern age, true to core-values of fairness, co-operation and responsibility, but applied to the world as it is not the world as it was.
Tony Blair, 'Battle for Britain', The Guardian, 29 January 1996.
[W]hat do we mean by the concept of 'community'? Who's in? Who's out?
Bill Clinton, 'Turning Ideas into Action: A Conversation Among Five World Leaders on the Third Way', The New Democrat, vol. 11, no. 3, May/June 1999, p. 14.
The renewed concern with community amongst politicians and governments proclaiming a so-called 'Third Way in politics' has been greeted by some as a long overdue recovery of the ethical in political thought and practice. A number of commentators have sought to position the Third Way as a sophisticated reworking of Anglo-American left/liberal politics through the incorporation of other, long-neglected ethical and political traditions which might be categorized as communitarian. On such interpretations, the Third Way offers a revival of alternative, non-statist streams of socialist thought and practice finally able to breathe after being smothered under the weight of marxist thought and the now discredited statism with which it came to be identified. Links have also been drawn between the Third Way's advocacy of an enhanced role for community in government and communitarian streams within Christian socialist traditions. Others emphasize the commonality of themes with Catholic social thought.1
In the Australian context, for example, the secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, Race Mathews, has sought to steer the Third Way towards a fuller engagement with the more practical expressions of these religious communitarian traditions, in the form of the co-operative and mutualist movements and their contemporary expressions, seen most strikingly in the Mondragon Co-operative in the Basque region of Spain.2 Similarly, Tony Blair's personal commitment to communitarian politics has been attributed to the influence of his university mentor, Australian Anglican Priest Peter Thompson, who introduced him to the communitarian ideas of the Scottish philosopher and theologian John Macmurray.3
Overlapping with these assessments, other commentators have suggested that the Third Way's communitarianism is derived from the ethical socialism associated with European social democracy.4 Although varying from country to country and undergoing something of a reversal during the 1980s towards an Anglo-American model of market-centred governance, the European social democratic model is typically characterised as a combination of prudent economic management, high taxation, generous social spending and progressive social policies, underscored by a heightened ethic of communal solidarity.5
Against these kinds of interpretations this article argues that attempts to understand the communitarian politics of the Third Way by reference to older, more established ethical traditions are misplaced. Indeed, I want to argue that the conception of community advanced by the proponents of the Third Way marks a radical break with communitarian traditions of the past and their conceptions of community. In short, the communitarian politics of the Third Way are predicated, not on an attempt to reclaim older forms of community, or reviving the ethical frameworks with which these were intertwined, but rather, on an uncritical acceptance of a well-worn narrative of freedom through technological progress. Although varying in degrees of sophistication and detail, the 'technological utopianism' of the Third Way pegs the renaissance of community to the proliferation of new technologies, particularly telecommunications and information technologies. Community is claimed to offer the 'optimal', even natural setting for economic, political and social organization in a pluralistic, globalized information society.
In contrast to older communitarian traditions in which 'the community' was advanced as an alternative, and in opposition to the commodity form and its social logic, proponents of the Third Way have sought to reinvent community through the structures and logic of the market itself. More specifically, they claim that community can be rethought in the form of the networks of information and economic exchange that underlie late capitalism. Community here does not refer primarily to a particular geographical setting or the reproduction of particular patterns of social life. As we shall see, they are wary of notions of community that give primacy to place and tradition. Rather, community breaks free of the lineaments of place and tradition within which it could previously be assumed to be embedded, and is conceived in the more abstract and open form of the 'network'. The idea of community advanced by proponents of the Third Way is that of a web of more or less spontaneously generated social relationships that are imbued with a certain ethical character, yet remain open and mobile. In the same way that the computer-based telecommunications networks hold out the fantasy of 'friction-free capitalism' to the cyber-capitalists, the network holds out the promise of 'friction-free community'.6
It is said that this conception of community offers a model of social solidarity suited to the needs of diverse, plural societies that avoids the negative, potentially oppressive aspects of older forms of community rooted in place and governed by the authority of tradition. Against this view I will argue that as a general model of social life, the network, in the form advanced by the Third Way, is fraught with contradiction. The core problem with the idea of the community-as-network is that it offers a one-dimensional account of social life that is insufficiently embedded in the basic temporal and spatial ontological categories of social being: place and tradition.7 While the social relations of community appear to be central to the Third Way and its strategies of government, they are also imagined as free of any stable social context, the very social contexts within which they might be generated. The core of the Third Way may be seen to be hollow.
This is not to reject the network form per se, but it is to question the adequacy of the network, understood as radically autonomous from other forms of social life, as a model for social relations in general. The inadequacy of the Third Way's conception of community can be seen in the punitive social authoritarianism that has accompanied the 'new politics'. This is not simply an aberration or an excess of political expediency. It is traceable to the basic inadequacies of the Third Way conception of the community-as-network. To avoid degenerating into punitive social authoritarianism, the network needs to be reframed in terms of its embeddedness within the basic socio-ontological categories of life.
This article begins by problematizing attempts that seek to position the Third Way as rooted in older, more established communitarian traditions.
Ending Community as We Know It
Ironically, while proponents of the Third Way have sought to position their communitarian politics as continuous with older ethical traditions, they have distanced themselves from, even disowned, more traditional conceptions of community. For example, they have been quick to anticipate any suggestion that their emphasis on community in government is underpinned by an uncritical and nostalgia-ridden view of community as a place of moral virtue. Communities, they claim, can be socially authoritarian, giving priority to collective interests while neglecting the rights of individuals. They can also foster and sanction xenophobia and the oppression of difference, be it sexual, racial, or ethnic, in the name of defending tradition and preserving social cohesion.
The US communitarian writer Amitai Etzioni, whose work has influenced the Clinton New Democrats' formulation of the Third Way, claims that '[c]ommunities are not automatically or necessarily places of virtue'.
Many traditional communities that were homogenous, if not monolithic, were authoritarian and oppressive. And a community may lock into a set of values that one may find abhorrent, say an Afrikaaner village that legitimates an ideology of lynching.8
By contrast, Etzioni's 'new communitarianism' is claimed to offer a 'balance between social forces and the person, between community and autonomy, between the common good and liberty, between individual rights and social responsibilities'.9
By emphasizing personal autonomy and individual interests, proponents of the Third Way have, moreover, sought to avoid a simplistic opposition that pits the collective interests of community against individual rights, in which the reassertion of community is portrayed as a 'cure' to the emergence of a more individualistic and selfish society.10 McKenzie Wark and Anthony Giddens, for example, reject the claim that modern societies are more individualistic than in the past, at least in so far as this is taken to mean that people are now more selfish and indifferent to the needs of others. The popular perception that modern societies are marked by rampant individualism, they claim, is an illusion created by the waning of traditional forms of authority and the emergence of a more highly educated society. Both of these factors, according to Giddens and Wark, have permitted a greater choice - and therefore a greater diversity - of lifestyle and belief, thus creating the appearance that social cohesion is giving way to social atomization.
For Wark, communities are now 'communities of choice' enacted through networks of voluntary association. While he concedes that such communities are often less stable than the 'compulsory communities' of the past, he argues that they are preferable for that reason. In Wark's caricature, the compulsory communities of the past were built upon 'obedience to cultural authorities' and 'sameness'. Similarly, Giddens argues that the present era is not one of 'moral decay' wrought by rampant individualism, but one of 'moral transition' in which '[s]ocial cohesion can't be guaranteed by the top-down action of the state or by appeal to tradition'.11
Rather than a misguided attempt to reinstate older forms of community, based upon the authority of tradition, the Third Way, in Giddens' formulation, is an attempt to create 'new means of producing ... [social] solidarity' in the present.12 Echoing Giddens' sentiments, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary in Britain's New Labour government, claims that '[r]ather than harking back to idealised villages and warm terraced cottages' the Third Way is working 'towards a community of mutual care and a balance of rights and responsibilities'.13
Reinventing Community
While the proponents of the Third Way undoubtedly draw some inspiration and legitimation from older, more established communitarian traditions, such as Christian and ethical socialism, their own version of communitarian politics is derived from quite a different set of assumptions and ideas. Put in rough terms, the communitarian politics of the Third Way is predicated not on the revival of a specific ethical tradition or political philosophy, but on the claims of certain streams of social theory. As Finlayson notes with regard to the British context, although the same can be said of the Third Way generally,
New Liberalism, theories of citizenship, [conventional] communitarianism and Christian morality may all be parts of the New Labour package; but they do not take priority. The moral claims of socialism and social democracy have been watered down until they become very general claims about taking responsibility for ourselves and each other: social-ism. In their place, the third way derives its justification from a claim to access a certain kind of truth about the present.14
In particular, the communitarian politics of the Third Way can be shown to rest upon a specific account of the structural transformations of contemporary societies that are a result of certain technological developments. A common narrative within such analyses is the potential of new technologies, particularly computer-based telecommunications, to fragment the structure of mass society, creating the conditions for the decentralization of power to lower levels of social organization.
This is most evident in technological determinist accounts offered by proponents of the Third Way which draw a direct link between the proliferation of new technologies, particularly telecommunications technologies, and the re-emergence of community as the key to social integration. Such accounts are underpinned by arguments about the shift from mass industrial to post-industrial communal society.
On these accounts, mass industrial societies were built upon and reflected the structures of 'Fordist' industrial manufacturing: a mass, homogenous society characterized by a few, easily distinguishable social groupings with more or less clearly identifiable interests. The waning of industrial production and the emergence of a new economy based around telecommunications media has, by contrast, seen the fragmentation of the taken-for-granted social, psychological, economic and political structures that gave a recognizable form to industrial society.
Such analyses permeate the Third Way. The New Progressive Declaration, for example, drafted in 1996 by the Progressive Foundation, a Third Way think-tank with close ties to the Clinton 'New Democrats', characterizes government in the post-war period as based upon a model of 'industrial democracy'. Public goods such as economic well-being, health, education, and social security were, according to the Declaration, underwritten by a tripartite 'social compact' involving the institutions of labour, business and the state. All of these institutions, it is argued, were essentially similar in form, modelled after Fordist principles of production, combining centralized, top-down hierarchical control structures with standardized 'outputs'.
In the settings of post-industrial society, however, such structures and practices are deemed ill-suited and counterproductive to combating the problems they were established to address.15 Technological change, the emergence of a consumer culture and the widespread availability of information have rendered political solutions based on large standardized social programs, delivered by bureaucratic institutions, inflexible, paternalistic, unresponsive, and, ultimately, ineffective.16 The Declaration thus calls for a new model of governance that takes into account people's increased knowledge, desire for choice and access to alternative sources of information; one that replaces 'top-down bureaucratic government with a new model for bottom-up self-governance'.17 Both Tony Blair and the Australian Labor MP Mark Latham echo the claims made by the Progressive Foundation.18
Space does not allow for an extended discussion and critique of the literature and the broader framework from which such analyses derive. It should be noted, however, that such ideas are substantially prefigured in the work of the 'post-industrial utopians'. Boris Frankel has identified this stream of post-industrial analysis with the 'Atari Democrats'.19 Atari Democrats include 'those politicians and theorists who combine technocratic solutions with the rhetoric of small-is-beautiful'.
In their self-image and public relations projections, they often distinguish themselves from traditional big business and big labour; they are the 'democratic vanguard' of the new information society. Rejecting the aggressive campaigns of the Moral Majority or the confrontationism of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the 'Atari Democrats' present the 'human face' of new technology, and stress the need for educated citizen initiatives, tolerance, consensus and personal awareness - while they leave largely unchallenged most of the existing practices of the corporate sector.20
For these writers, the capacity of new communications technologies to draw productive activity back within the orbit of local settings will spark a renaissance of community. In the words of Alvin Toffler, the possibility of tele-commuting will create a 'home-centred society' of 'electronic cottages'.21 Information technology and community are thus claimed to have a mutual affinity, upon which a socially and economically progressive politics can be founded. The social bonds of community are claimed to offer a natural, even evolutionary site of social integration and political organization more appropriate to post-industrial, high-tech society.
Even though the influence of the Atari Democrats is rarely, if ever, acknowledged by advocates of the Third Way, their own communitarian politics are predicated on essentially the same arguments as this high-tech communitarianism. Echoing Toffler's views about the emergence of the 'electronic cottage', for example, Etzioni claims that the prospects for a communitarian politics are enhanced by the proliferation of so-called 'postmodern technology' in the workplace, since these enable individuals to reclaim and reconnect with the communities of which they are members.
More people are again able to work at home or nearby, and a high concentration of labor is less and less necessary, in contrast with the industrial age. People can use their computers and modems at home to do a good part of the office work, from processing insurance claims to trading worldwide in commodities, stocks, and bonds. Architects can design buildings and engineers monitor faraway power networks from their places of residence.22
Taking a more specific focus on the political and governmental implications of new technologies, Geoff Mulgan, the founder and former director of the influential British think-tank Demos, and member of Tony Blair's Downing Street policy unit, argues that new communication technologies like the Internet have meant that the 'scale of effective organisation has shrunk - to that of the school, the neighbourhood, the group'. Whereas in the past, government was orientated towards mass provision organized through standardized rules that compelled individuals to act in particular ways, Mulgan argues that the emergence of more highly educated and diverse publics has created a new role for government in drawing connections between a multiplicity of actors. Accordingly, this involves a new approach to government that draws upon the capacities of individuals to act autonomously in the satisfaction of their needs.
This is where community comes in. It is a deliberately different word from society. It may refer to neighbourhoods or workplaces, but to be meaningful it must imply membership in a human-scale collective: a scale at which it is possible to encounter people face to face.23
A somewhat more detailed and sophisticated alternative to this rather crude high-tech communitarianism is offered by Anthony Giddens. In Giddens' formulation, the significance of the proliferation of information and communications technologies lies in the way in which these have transformed the basic temporal and spatial categories within which social life is set; namely place and tradition. Two key expressions of this consequence of this technologically mediated 'compression' of space and time transformation can, according to Giddens, be seen in the phenomenon of globalization and the retreat of the authority of tradition as a guide to social life. Rather than diminishing the prospects for a community-based politics, Giddens claims that these phenomena hold out prospects for a renewal of a community-centred politics. Each will be dealt with in turn.
Although the product of a complex array of political and economic factors, and having an enormous variety of expressions and consequences, for Giddens globalization refers at base to 'the transformation of time and space in our lives'.24 The proliferation of information and communications technologies that are driving processes of globalization in their current form, mean that the decisions and choices of geographically and temporally dispersed actors have far-reaching implications and consequences, both intended and unintended. In Giddens' terms, processes of globalization 'compress' the relations between the local and the global, such that events at a local level have global ramifications and vice versa.
As a consequence of this compression of space and time, globalization 'creates a strong impetus and logic to the downward devolution of power'.25 This logic, Giddens claims, is illustrated by successful campaigns waged by local and regional groups to achieve political change, whether nationalist groups achieving greater autonomy, as in the case of Scotland, or the successful campaign waged by environmental groups to stop Shell sinking its Brent Spar oil drilling platform at sea.26 The downwards pressures exerted by processes of globalization present new opportunities for small-scale social actors to effect change at higher levels of political organization. 'The advance of globalization', he says, 'makes a community focus both necessary and possible, because of the downward pressure it exerts'.27
To steer processes of globalization in this direction, Giddens advocates the devolution of power and authority to layers of social organization below that of the nation-state in order to draw individuals into a more intimate relationship to the decision-making processes that affect their lives.28 This, he suggests, might be achieved through '"experiments with democracy" - local direct democracy, electronic referenda, citizens' juries and other possibilities'.29
Such measures are possible and likely to meet with success, according to Giddens, because they tap into another expression of the transformation of space and time: the emergence of a 'post-traditional' or 'reflexive' social order. For Giddens, contemporary societies are post-traditional, not in the sense that tradition is absent but, as we saw above with regard to the question of individualism, that its role as a guide to how one might live has been weakened. The driving force behind the weakening of traditional forms of authority can, according to Giddens, be linked to the changed form of knowledge in a society where space and time have been fundamentally transformed.
Unlike traditional knowledges whose validity rested upon, and was therefore circumscribed by the places and times within which they were developed and enacted, social life today is in Giddens' analysis increasingly structured and governed by the pronouncements of experts and specialist knowledges; what Giddens refers to collectively as 'expert systems'. Expert systems are bodies of knowledge composed of abstract, 'impersonal principles'. Because of their abstract character, the validity and practicality of claims of expert systems is independent of any particular spatial or temporal context. They can thus be 'lifted out' of the contexts of place and tradition, to take on a more general character.30
The social consequence of this transformation of space and time is that modern life is increasingly based upon 'reflexive' practices: individuals make life choices not on the basis of how things were done in the past, but in the light of new information. 'The reflexivity of modern social life', Giddens asserts,
consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.31
Those aspects of life which in the past could either be taken for granted or otherwise negotiated and governed by tradition, now have to be actively chosen (and re-chosen), decided upon (and re-decided upon) and, increasingly, justified (and re-justified) by reference to the opinions and findings of experts and expert systems. Social life is thus remade as an arena of radical choice. Expert systems tend to undermine both traditional and modern forms of social organization, including traditional forms of authority and modern, bureaucratic organization; the legitimacy of both is increasingly called into question in the era of reflexive modernity as individuals desire and are able to take a more active role in fashioning their own lives.32
While this means that social life is experienced as less stable than it might have been in the past, Giddens claims that the emergence of a reflexive social order enhances the prospects for the emergence of new forms of social solidarity in an era of globalization. 'An increasingly reflexive society', he claims, 'is also one marked by high levels of self-organization'.33 The downwards pressure of globalization, and what might be thought of as the upwards pressure of a reflexive social order, thus combine to create the conditions for the re-emergence of community.
At this juncture, it should be noted that Giddens' analysis rests on some rather optimistic assumptions about the willingness and capacity of individuals and governments to steer globalization and the transformation of space and time in the way he wants. This optimism belies a certain taken-for-granted attitude about the role of time and space in the formation of social being. On Giddens' account, time and space, and their socio-ontological correlates of place and tradition, have been utterly transformed, meaning that social solidarity needs to be rethought and pursued through new avenues. At the same time, however, the underlying cultural, social, economic and psychological impulses that led people in the past to engage in solidaristic forms of social action are assumed to be unchanged and unchanging. What is unconsidered here is the possibility that the kinds of transformations to which Giddens refers have much deeper implications and consequences than he is able to see. This is to raise the possibility that the transformations of space and time have reconstituted social being in ways that, if not countered in a more thorough-going manner than Giddens proposes, offer little hope for the reinvention of social solidarity.34 These issues will be examined in more detail in the last section of this article.
For the moment, I want to emphasize two main points that arise from drawing out the broader framework of the Third Way's communitarian politics. The first is simply to underline the way in which proponents of the Third Way break with the communitarian traditions with which they often claim to be continuous. Whereas other communitarian traditions, particularly those rooted in Christian socialist traditions and Catholic social thought, saw community outside of and in opposition to the relations of the market and its social logic, the technological utopians of the Third Way leave unchallenged the underlying assumptions and social logic of the market.
The second consequence, which flows directly from the first, is that community is to be re-imagined and re-invented through the structures and relations of the information economy, underwritten by telecommunications networks. Proponents of the Third Way in fact stand the older communitarian traditions on their head: community no longer stands outside of the market, functioning as a yoke on its socially destructive excesses, but rather it is reconceived in terms of the structures of the contemporary market. Just as technological changes have transformed the production process, reorganizing it in terms of complex webs of capital flows and relationships between small-scale enterprises and individual entrepreneurs, each specializing in parts of the production process, advocates of the Third Way argue that community can be reconceived in the form of the 'network'.
Labor MP Mark Latham, for example, claims that '[n]etworks are the natural mode of organisation for an information society', citing as evidence 'the success of communitarian politics as a way of developing networks of moral dialogue and consensus'.35 Giddens, similarly, emphasizes the importance of 'trust networks' as 'integral to the knowledge economy'.36 Etzioni argues that the 'new communitarians' define community in terms of 'webs of social relations that encompass shared meanings and above all shared values'.37
More generally, Third Way analyses emphasize the role of community in generating networks of 'social capital'. Advanced by the US sociologist James Coleman, and popularized by writers such as Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam, the concept of 'social capital' has had a central role in the attempts of Third Way advocates to articulate a modern concept of community. The concept itself refers simply to networks of informal relationships that bind social actors together, thereby making social life a possibility.38 Societies rich in social capital tend, therefore, to be characterized by dense and extensive networks of freely formed relationships of mutual obligation and civic engagement, underscored by a heightened ethic of social reciprocity.
The implications of understanding community in terms of the network are explored in the next sections.
'Community' as a network of moral sentiments39
By premising their understanding of community on the form of the network, proponents of the Third Way privilege the relational dimensions of social interconnection over what might be thought of as the embedded aspects of communal life. In other words, community is not understood in terms of a temporally and spatially embedded social formation, but in a radically open way in which the relationships that compose social life are granted a greater significance than the 'ground' within which those relationships are embedded and given a specific character, such as the particularities of place or the reproduction of particular patterns of social life. For example, the emphasis on social capital gives priority to the relationships through which community is constituted, as distinct from the particular settings within which those relationships are embedded and the attributes of individual social actors. In Coleman's words, 'social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors. It is not lodged either in the actors themselves or in physical implements of production'.40
Disembedded from the ground of place and tradition, the social relationships of the community-as-network are characterized by highly mobile and reversible relationships. The morphology of the network thus neatly coalesces with the general wariness that advocates of the Third Way have towards traditional conceptions of community that emphasize social harmony and cohesion. The mobility and reversibility of the relationships within the network - the ability to move between different points and withdraw from them more or less at will - wards against community becoming oppressive. If a particular community begins to exert an excessive degree of control or pressure over its members, individuals have the capacity to withdraw from it.41
The kind of social formation and political ideal that is therefore suggested by the network is one that is at once open, flexible and plural. The network or 'webs' of social relations according to which community is conceived have no stable or clearly defined boundaries.42 With the figure of the network, one is able to conceptualize community in a way that is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a plurality of ethnicities, cultures and sub-cultures, lifestyles and beliefs, as well as subjectivities and identities. The rights of each will be protected in respect to all others by participants equal access to the network.
This openness can be extended to encompass different social formations and practices that are distinct from and typically depicted as in tension - if not outright opposition - with one another. This is hinted at by the notion of social capital, in so far as this carries with it the idea of economic capital, even if its theorists are quick to point out that networks of social capital are distinct from those of the market. This, we are told, is so in at least two respects. Firstly, the benefits derived from social capital are public goods and are therefore held in common. In order to be sustained, they tend to require higher levels of commitment and reciprocity, by contrast to the 'shallower' relationships of the market.43 Secondly, the fruits of social capital, such as heightened feelings of trust, are not subject to the law of diminishing returns. Unlike physical or economic capital, social capital is said to generate more social capital. In other words, trusting others encourages them to reciprocate that trust, thereby increasing the general willingness of individuals to trust one another.44
In a more general sense, however, and notwithstanding these differences, the joining of 'social' and 'capital' points to a social formation that is continuous with the kinds of relationships typically found in the market. Just as relations of exchange within the market involve a process of commodity abstraction - whereby an object is stripped of the particular qualities that give it its use value, and is reconstituted in the more abstract form of the commodity - the notion of social capital points to a parallel process. It suggests that the social relationships and virtues of life enacted in communities bound by place and tradition can be imagined in a more abstract and open form, that floats free of the particularities of place and tradition.45
As such the idea of community advanced by proponents of the Third Way shares the general character of the commodity form. And yet, the new relations of community, set free from the constraints of place and tradition, are still imagined by advocates of the Third Way to be infused with a certain ethical character. As Nikolas Rose notes, community
is not primarily a geographical space, a sociological space or a space of services, although it may attach itself to any or all such spatializations. It is a moral field binding persons into durable relations. It is a space of emotional relationships, through which individual identities are constructed through their bonds to micro-cultures of values and meanings.46
It is claimed that these relationships can be harnessed in order to develop 'holistic' approaches to the government of multifaceted social problems; a shift away from 'fragmented, silo-based government'47 to a more general approach in which 'inclusion within the community' is advanced as a generalized approach to government. The new communitarians of the Third Way thus claim to lessen the policing role of the state by strengthening the 'moral voice' of community.48
Conceived of in terms of a network of social capital, the Third Way's account of community seems to offer a model of the social that reconciles otherwise incompatible forms of life and to offer a new approach to government that ordinarily would be beset with contradictions. The market, community, and polity, enacted across different levels of social integration - from face-to-face relationships within the settings of local neighbourhoods to more 'extended forms of the social' such as virtual communities or the exchange relations of the global market - are flattened within the more encompassing form of the network. Re-conceived in the more abstract form of the network, long-standing oppositions between different forms of social life appear to dissolve.49 Appearing to offer an inclusive model of social life, the proponents of the Third Way have it both ways: a pluralistic and open conception of community which preserves and protects the desire for individual autonomy which does not constitute a threat to the social itself. In this scenario, new forms of social governance will permit multifaceted approaches to complex social problems that escape dogmatic prescriptions.
The Contradictions of the Network Community
Against such rosy analyses, I would like to suggest that the Third Way's attempt to reframe community in terms of the network is one-dimensional. The core problem with this conception of community is that it is insufficiently grounded in the basic socio-ontological categories within which social being is formed - that is, place and tradition. Although proponents of the Third Way seek a renaissance of the social and ethical bonds of community, they assume that this can be realised through a social form - the network - that radically bypasses the embedded social contexts which generate such ethical bonds.
My argument is not that the social form of the network is in itself a problem. Indeed, in anthropological and sociological studies the idea of the network has been used to describe and theorize face-to-face social relations in urban, rural and even tribal contexts.50 Moreover, the successful functioning of any social network requires, as many associated with Arena have noted, a shared ethic of co-operation amongst its participants, even if the form of co-operation may not go far beyond agreeing to certain general norms of conduct. I am arguing that the Third Way wrongly assumes that ethical relationships can simply be carried over to the network form in the absence of the deeper settings which sustain them. In fact the whole network model is much more ambiguous than the proponents of the Third Way would have us believe.
Amongst the Arena group of writers, Geoff Sharp has done much to draw out the ambiguity of the network as a social form in his work on intellectual practice. Through the spatially and temporally extended social relations made possible first by writing and later by print and other media of social interchange, intellectual practice is carried on via a network form of social relations. In one way this requires a basic level of co-operation, in so far as intellectuals adhere to certain norms of practice (for example, truth-telling, citation, common standards of peer review). Yet, in so far as the social relations of the network break free from the basic socio-ontological settings of social life, they give rise to radically autonomous forms of subjectivity. It is because of this quality of the network that intellectuals are able to 'stand outside' of the particular social contexts and reflect on those social contexts in a more general way. 51
As Sharp and others associated with Arena have noted, this capacity to stand outside of one's immediate social reality has been set historically, and to that extent constrained, within more basic modes of social life. The spatially and temporally extended social relations of the network have, in other words, been the exception, not the rule.52 Their conditions of possibility lay first and foremost in the formation of the person as a social being in the mutual presence of particular others, and through them, the social Other as a general frame of ethical being.53 The core problem with the idea of the Third Way's conception of the network lies in the way it assumes the network to be independent of other forms of social relationship - that social relations of presence, as the foundation of ethical being, can be dispensed with.
The basic problem at issue here can be drawn out more clearly by contrasting the Third Way's vision of community with the various communitarian traditions with which it claims continuity. Most, if not all of the latter shared at least two important characteristics: an encompassing ethical framework, whether religious or secular, as in Catholicism or socialism, elaborated in social contexts in which the dominant mode of social integration was face-to-face social interaction.54 This is neither accidental nor coincidental. In both religious and secular traditions, the presence of the Other, framed by a shared experience of place and tradition, played an integral role in the formation of persons as social and communal beings.
On the network, by contrast, place and tradition can be by-passed. The relations of (network) community thus seem independent of social context. Proponents of the Third Way either take for granted the embedded contexts within which self-other relationships are embedded, or assume these are no longer relevant to the way in which community is enacted today. As Anthony Giddens has argued quite bluntly: 'In the sense of an embedded affinity to place, "community" has indeed largely been destroyed'. His only qualification to this sweeping generalization is that 'one could quarrel about how far this process has gone in specific contexts'.55 As we have seen, rather than attempting to reclaim the embedded contexts within which community is set, Giddens and others imagine that the absence of these dimensions of community are unimportant. Many welcome the dissolution of communities of place and tradition as inherently regressive and authoritarian.
The apparent indifference of the Third Way to place and tradition for the formation of social being points to something of a contradiction in Third Way thinking. On the one hand it seeks the restoration of the ethical in politics, yet it appears indifferent to the social contexts in which the ethical bonds of community develop. Although the generation of social capital is central to Third Way strategies of government, the new communitarians endorse a form of community which does away with the contexts within which 'social capital' is formed.
This is to point to the argument put forward by Arena writers that the social form of the network is one in which the presence of the other is in principle dispensed with. Community on the network model is an oxymoron, for at base it is no more than a series of spontaneous fleeting encounters between a collection of mobile others.
In fact, the network model tends itself to undermine the basic processes by which 'social capital' might be generated. This can be illustrated in reference to the notion of trust. For proponents of the Third Way, the creation of 'high trust relationships' is often advanced as central to their strategies of government. It is seen as an effective way of reinvigorating social solidarity while at the same time reducing the social and economic costs that stem from social division. Expanding the pool of social trust has thus become something of a mantra for Third Way politicians and their advisers.56 While this is undoubtedly a laudable objective, what trust might actually mean outside of the relatively stable and more concrete settings in which individuals are constituted as social and moral beings is unclear. High trust relationships, in the model of the network community, are conjured out of thin air. It is as if the impulse to trust another resides in the biological make-up of the person, rather than in relationships embedded in definite social relations.
This is not simply an academic disagreement. It has a practical bearing on the adequacy of Third Way strategies aimed at combating deep-seated social ills. The attempt to address a range of complex, interrelated social problems such as unemployment, poverty, and physical and mental health through 'inclusion within the community' is unlikely to have the desired effects where community is conceived as a network. In fact the network presents no opposition to the social logic which produces social exclusion. Indeed, the idea of the network can be seen as an expression of the very cultural forces that produce the problems Third Way thinking seeks to address.
Social exclusion is not accident or aberration of contemporary capitalism. On the contrary, it is inherent to its logic. As Slavoj Zizek notes: 'Today's "exceptions" (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the late-capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of how the logic of late capitalism works'.57 More precisely, the 'symptom' social exclusion is a product of a broader cultural shift, a key development of which is the displacement of manual labour by intellectual labour in the processes of social integration. The creation of 'the excluded' can be seen as a direct outcome of the reconstitution of social life in a more abstract form in which intellectual practice reframes the fundamental categories of social life. As John Hinkson argues,
[W]here societies and economies are re-organized around 'mental labour' and high-technology there is a reduced need for a balance of bodily and mental activity in the act of production and there is a radically reduced need for physical labour and certain kinds of labour outside of the cyber-machine. Exclusion emerges as a consequence of this shift in cultural forces - where intellectual practices move into the foreground of social structures.58
The social form of the network is an expression of the same shift of cultural forces. In other words, the social form of the network is underwritten by the temporally and spatially extended social relations characteristic of intellectual practice and the commodity form via which social life breaks free of the limits imposed by tradition and place to assume a more abstract, open character.
As such, the re-conception of community in terms of the network does not mark a break with the underlying structures and forces driving social exclusion, but rather is continuous with them. Perversely, the same processes and structures that produce the forms of exclusion evident in late capitalist societies are now called upon to solve to the problems they are implicated in. This signals the incapacity of politicians and governments to conceive of social and economic life outside of the dominant logic of cultural change today - namely the reconstitution of social life in a more abstract form, underpinned by the fusion of intellectual practice and the commodity form.
In something of a paradox, the radically open social form of the network can be seen to have its own form of closure. We find a thoroughgoing commitment to the dominant forms of economic and social development. All that seems possible is the intensification of that cultural logic which sees social life reconfigured in ways consistent with the commodity form.
This closure comes with a certain degree of moral and social authoritarianism, a pervasive characteristic of Third Way politics noted by a number of commentators.59 The authoritarian elements within the Third Way's account of community cannot simply be explained away as a lamentable but isolated aberration resulting from a temporary excess of political expedience. On the contrary, the social authoritarianism of the Third Way can be seen to be a product of the contradictions of the network itself.
In other words, the deployment of disciplinarian and authoritarian techniques is a response to the network community itself, in which the formation of social being is undermined by a cultural logic that radically disturbs the fundamental socio-ontological settings of life and moral formation. The proponents of the Third Way re-conceive the social as a mobile arena of risk in which the person will be forced to reconstitute themselves as an infinitely flexible, malleable, and mobile subject.
One of the more 'benign' expressions of this is the idea of 'life-long learning', advocated by New Labour in the UK and Mark Latham in Australia. The underlying premise of life-long learning is a conception of human being that admits of no limits, social or biological, to the capacity of the person to acquire new skills. The person is conceived as a site of constant and inexhaustible revolution, continually shaping and reshaping their attitudes and desires in ways deemed useful to the community.60 Where the person is unable or unwilling to enter into this permanent revolution of the soul, more straightforward disciplinarian and authoritarian responses are deployed, as seen in 'welfare to work'. Through welfare to work, the attitudes and desires of those no longer permitted any choice as to how they might live are to be shaped and channelled. Reciprocal obligation to the community will be forcibly elicited from them.
While older forms of community are rejected as mired in an oppressive authoritarianism of tradition and the parochialism of place, in attempting to by-pass these, proponents of the Third Way undermine the very sources of social solidarity, thereby necessitating their own draconian disciplinary measures.
Conclusion
If the communitarian politics of the Third Way is to avoid such socially authoritarianism, it will need to take heed of the basic socio-ontological settings in which social being has historically been embedded. This is not to uncritically advocate a return to older forms of social solidarity. Such a return is as impracticable as it is undesirable. One can agree, up to a point, with the reservations proponents of the Third Way have towards older forms of community. Moreover, the radical transformations in social life that both the Third Way and Arena identify produce new social realities that must be addressed.
But it is imperative that we take issue with the technological utopianism of the Third Way, and the uncritical endorsement of radically abstract and open social forms as an overriding social and political ideal. In short, the relations of community need to rethought in more complex ways that go beyond the endorsement of the open relationships of the network as an unquestioned good. In a similar vein Simon Cooper has recently argued for a more subtle approach to the question of citizenship in a globalized setting:
While it is clear that we need to go beyond the kinds of closure that underwrote modern social integration, it is another question entirely whether we need to regard this form as wholly negative ... A commitment to openness, especially an openness generated by the processes of globalization in its current mode, does not necessarily entail a commitment to the social other, nor to more democratic social forms.61
In rethinking community and the network, in ways that go beyond one-dimensional accounts of openness and mobility as the primary social and political ideal, we need to think how community can be re-embedded within other forms of sociality. This is to recognise the ambiguous nature of the network. While it permits social actors to break free from particular social contexts and to experience a heightened sense of personal autonomy, the very possibility of the network is dependent upon the willingness of the agents to work in a co-operative manner, adhering to some shared ethical frame.62 In more concrete terms, it is to advocate forms of social life that might frame and thereby delimit the kinds of spatially and temporally extended relations of the network. The network form of community needs to be rethought in a manner that attaches importance to place and tradition as fundamental to the formation of social being, imposing agreed limits to the autonomy of individuals. This is not to reject the kinds of abstract sociality that the network carries. It is rather to see it as but one mode of social life in tension and therefore limited by others.
Bibliography
1. The perspective that informs this article is drawn substantially from the work of a number of writers associated with Arena. I am indebted especially to Geoff Sharp, Alison Caddick, Simon Cooper, John Hinkson and Paul James for their help, comments and suggestions in working through many of the ideas presented in this article.
2. Mathews has however, expressed some disappointment that Third Way politicians and governments, specifically Britain's New Labour government, have failed to engage more fully with the ideas of distributism, the enthusiasm for 'stakeholding' forms of governance fading from view once in government. See R. Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stake-Holder Society, Annandale, Pluto Press, 1999, pp. 245-47.
3. See P. Thompson, 'The Third Way: Its Historical Roots', paper presented at the Mutualism: A Third Way for Australia conference, Melbourne, 19-20 November 1999, J. Rentoul, Tony Blair, London, Little, Brown and Company, 1995, T. Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, Boulder, Westview Press, 1996.
4. T. Blair, Socialism, London, The Fabian Society, 1994, p. 2. Anthony Giddens has argued that New Labour's approach to welfare reform, particularly the welfare to work program, owes more to the influence of the Scandinavian model than US approaches. Quoted in Tony Blair's '"Third Way" Compared to Nordic Welfare State', Eagle Street: Newsletter of the Finnish Institute in London, September 1998. URL:http://www.finnish-institute.org.uk/articles/es_10/thirdway.htm Consulted 2 March, 2000. See also S. Driver and L. Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998, p. 21-3.
5. Driver and Martell, p. 50. See also W. Hutton, The State We're In, revised edition, London, Vintage, 1996, and David Goldblatt (eds.), The Stakeholding Society: Writings on Politics and Economics, Cornwall, Polity Press, 1999.
6. Bill Gates quoted in S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London, Verso, 1997, p. 156.
7. In ordinary usage, the notion of ontology is used in connection with metaphysics to specify a philosophical or theoretical inquiry that seeks to transcend historical, social and cultural contingency to disclose/discover universal and timeless principles of Being. In this article, the term is used in a much more modest, even mundane sense, to specify basic categories within which social life has historically been set. This conception of ontology is drawn from Paul James. James defines ontology as 'the forms of culturally grounded conditions, historically constituted in the structures (recurrent practices) of human inter-relations... [T]he concept does not fall back upon a sense of the "human essence" except in so far as the changing nature of being human is always taken to be historically constituted'. In the present context, place and tradition can be thought of as ontological categories in that both have, in long-run cultural-historical terms, been integral to how community has been structured and experienced. Importantly, no claim is being made about these categories as having a transcendental status. See P. James, Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community, London, Sage Publications, 1996, p. xii. See also P. James, 'Reconstituting Work: Towards an Alternative Ethic of Social Reproduction', Arena Journal, no. 10, 1998.
8. A. Etzioni, 'Introduction: A Matter of Balance, Right and Responsibilities', in Etzioni (ed.), The Essential Communitarian Reader, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, p. xiv. McKenzie Wark expresses similar reservations within the Third Way debate in Australia, observing that community 'is something of a "motherhood" term in Australian political culture, conjuring up images of a small town life where everybody knows everybody and there's always someone to lend a helping hand', thereby obscuring the less flattering aspects of communal life, such as racism, spousal abuse and homophobia. See M. Wark, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace: The Light on the Hill in a Postmodern World, Smithfield: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 269.
9. Etzioni, p. x.
10. It should be noted that there is some difference between the arguments of writers such as Etzioni and Giddens. Etzioni sees the emphasis on community as necessary to restore a balance between collective interests and rising individualism and selfishness, whereas Giddens rejects this view. Nevertheless, neither is willing to uncritically endorse collective interests to the extent that they are prioritized over individual rights.
11. A. Giddens, The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy, London, Polity Press, 1998, pp. 36-7.
12. Giddens, p. 37, Wark, pp. 270, 310 and 337.
13. J. Straw, 'Building Social Cohesion, Order and Inclusion in a Market Economy', paper presented at the From Principles to Policies: Mapping Out the Third Way conference, 3 July 1998. URL:http://www.netnexus.org/events/july98/talks/thirdway. Consulted 23 April, 1999.
14. A. Finlayson, 'Third Way Theory', Political Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3 1999, pp. 271-2.
15. The Progressive Foundation, 'The New Progressive Declaration: A Political Philosophy for the Information Age', Washington, The Progressive Foundation, 1996, URL:http://www.dlcppi.org/adobe/declare.pdf. Consulted 22 September 1999. pp. 2-3.
16. The Progressive Foundation, p. 5.
17. The Progressive Foundation, p.10.
18. Latham, for example argues that existing structures of government are based upon the Fordist model of mass production reminiscent of the 'Industrial Age': 'This was the era of massification and standardisation - big industrial corporations, big government departments and big interest groups. The Information Age is turning these principles on their head. It is an era of disaggregation and demassification, hence the stunning growth of small businesses and niche markets.
This trend in the new economy is now seeping into social governance. It is placing a premium on the relationships between people: the importance of collaboration in the marketplace; the significance of social capital in civil society'. M. Latham, 'Civil Society, Markets and Governments' paper presented at the Mutualism - A Third Way for Australia conference, Melbourne, Australia, 19-20 November 1999. URL:http://www.thirdway-aust.com/index2.html. Consulted 7 February 2000. See also, T. Blair, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century.
19. B. Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, p. 6.
20. B. Frankel, p. 7.
21. A. Toffler, The Third Wave, London, Pan, 1980, pp. 214-15.
22. A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, New York, Crown Publishers, 1993, p. 121.
23. G. Mulgan, Connexity: How to Live in a Connected World, London, Chatto and Windus, 1997, p. 230.
24. Giddens, pp. 30-31.
25. Giddens, p. 72.
26. Giddens, pp. 31-32 and 49-50.
27. Giddens, p. 79.
28. A. Giddens, The Third Way and Its Critics, London, Polity Press, 2000, p. 61
29. Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, p. 75.
30. As Giddens asserts: 'Expert systems decontextualize as an intrinsic consequence of the impersonal and contingent character of their rules of knowledge-acquisition; as decentred systems, 'open' to whosoever has the time, resources and talent to grasp them, they can be located anywhere. Place is not in any sense a quality relevant to their validity; and places themselves ... take on a different significance from traditional locales'. A. Giddens, 'Living in a Post-Traditional Society', in A. Giddens, S. Lash and U. Beck (eds), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, p. 85.
31. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Oxford, Polity Press, 1990, pp. 38.
32. Giddens, 'Living in a Post-Traditional Society', p. 85.
33. Giddens, The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy, p. 80.
34. For a comprehensive critical assessment of the kinds of shortcomings that I am alluding to here, see J. Hinkson, 'Third Way Politics and Social Theory: Anthony Giddens' Critique of Globalization', Arena Journal, no. 13, 1999.
35. Latham, 'Civil Society, Markets and Governments', URL:http://www.thirdway-aust.com/index2.html. Consulted 7 February, 2000.
36. Giddens, The Third Way and its Critics, p. 78. See also pp. 79-83.
37. Etzioni, 'Introduction: A Matter of Balance, Right and Responsibilities', pp. x-xiii.
38. Coleman advances the idea of social capital as a way of conceiving social action as a corrective to two broad streams of thinking about social action - one which focuses on the social context of action, and 'sees the actor as socialized and action as governed by social norms, rules, and obligations' and another that sees social actions as driven by self-interest and the pursuit of 'maximizing utility'. The notion of social capital is intended to provide a coherent framework for understanding elements of both these accounts. Social action is deemed rational or goal oriented, in the same way that the idea of maximal utility suggests, but it is so within a social context, which it in turn reproduces. As Coleman argues: 'This is part of a theoretical strategy that involves use of the paradigm of rational action [which is inherent in the notion of utility maximisation] but without the assumption of atomistic elements stripped of social relationships'. J. S. Coleman, 'Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital', American Journal of Sociology, no. 94, Supplement, 1988, S95 and S118. See also F. Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, New York, The Free Press, 1995 and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, New York, The Free Press, 1999; R. D. Putnam, R. Lenoardi and R. Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1993.
39. My comments here are informed by Judith Brett's critical analysis of the network. See J. Brett, 'On the Network', Arena Magazine, February-March 1994, p. 2-3.
40. Coleman, S98. See also S100-S101.
41. See Etzioni, 'Introduction: A Matter of Balance, Right and Responsibilities', p. xiv and Mulgan, Connexity: How to Live in a Connected World, p. 229.
42. Brett, 'On the Network', p. 2.
43. According to Coleman, this creates its own problems. Because the benefits of social capital are shared, they do not confer an exclusive advantage on those who generate them. Since those who generate social capital recoup only a small part of the efforts and costs expended in generating social capital, Coleman claims that there are reduced incentives to contribute to its creation - 'a fact that leads to underinvestment in social capital'. Coleman, S119.
44. Latham, Civilising Global Capital: New Thinking for Australian Labor, p. 268.
45. For a broader discussion of the notion of 'constitutive abstraction' see G. Sharp, 'Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice', Arena, no. 70, 1985.
46. N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 172.
47. P. 6, 'Problem-Solving Government', in I. Hargreaves and I. Christie (eds), Tomorrow's Politics: The Third Way and Beyond, London, Demos, 1998, p. 60.
48. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, New York, Crown Publishers, 1993, p. 44. This claim is belied by the punitive law and order policies implemented by the New Labour government and the Clinton Administration. For examples, see N. Cohen, Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and Preposterous, London, Verso, 1999.
49. The term of 'extended forms of the social' refers here to forms of social interchange that are extended in space and time, including the simplest forms of extension such as writing, to more historically recent forms such as the Internet. The notion of levels of social integration here refers to the basic point that social life is constituted through the intersection of these different forms of social relations, from face-to-face relations to extended social relations. For a fuller discussion and elaboration of these ideas see G. Sharp, 'Extended Forms of the Social: Technological Mediation and Self-Formation', Arena Journal, no. 1, 1993, and G. Sharp, 'Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice', Arena, no. 70, 1985.
50. See for example E. Bott, Family and Social Network, London, Tavistock Publications, 1971 (1957), pp. 313-330.
51. See G. Sharp, 'Intellectuals in Transition', Arena, no. 65, 1983, particularly pp. 89-91 and 'Intellectual Interchange and Social Practice', Arena, no. 99/100, 1992, particularly pp. 190-197.
52. G. Sharp, 'Intellectual Interchange and Social Practice' and 'Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice'.
53. J. Hinkson, 'Subjectivity and Neo-Liberal Economy', Arena Journal, no. 11, 1998, especially, pp. 137-139.
54. See the examples in Mathews.
55. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Oxford, Polity Press, 1990, p. 117.
56. See for example M. Latham, Civilising Global Capital: New Thinking for Australian Labor, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1998, pp. 259-312.
57. S. Zizek, p. 127. For a similar argument see also, Z. Bauman, 'The Work Ethic and Prospects for the New Poor', Arena Journal, no. 9, 1997.
58. J. Hinskon, 'Third Way Politics and Social Theory', Arena Journal, no. 13, 1999, p. 110.
59. See R. Dahrendorf, 'The Third Way and Liberty: An Authoritarian Streak in Europe's New Center', Foreign Affairs, vol. 78, no. 5, 1999; N. Cohen, Cruel Britannia; L. Elliott and D. Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity, London, Verso, 1999; J. Pilger, Distant Voices, London, Vintage, 1994.
60. This assessment of life-long learning is borrowed from Guy Rundle. G. Rundle 'The Next Cultural Revolution?', speech presented at the Unchain My Mind Forum, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne, 27 July 2000.
61. S. Cooper, 'The Limits of Openness: A Comment on Alastair Davidson and Michael Arnold', Arena Journal, no. 14 1999/2000, p. 136.
62. For a broader discussion of this ambiguous nature of the network, see G. Sharp, 'Intellectuals in Transition', Arena, no. 65, 1983, particularly pp. 91-93.
