The Reconstruction of Community Meaning
by Gar Alperovitz
Copyright 1996 Institute for Labor and Mental Health
Tikkun (May/June 1996) Vol. 11, No. 3: 13-16, 19.

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Since the onset of this presidential campaign season, journalists, pollsters, politicians, and scholars have spent considerable energies plumbing the depths of America's discontent. Countless surveys, newspaper series, journal articles - as well as the tepid response of the Republican primary voters to "all of the above" except the demagogic Pat Buchanan - all point up the corrosive consequences of a society that atomizes individuals and makes millions fearful for their economic security: the flowering of a politics of fear, anger, and scapegoating. Many Americans have begun to recognize that, in practice, capitalism undermines the basis of community integration and wholeness. Given America's national political stalemate - and, too, the continuing decay of local economies - could there ever be a viable strategy of community renewal that might establish new institutional relationships which in turn (however agonizingly, slowly, and painfully) might ultimately alter the content and meaning of longer-term politics?

One way to gain perspective on America's deepening crisis is through the insights of Martin Buber, a philosopher whose most relevant work on the key issues dates from the late 1940s. Buber is most widely known as the author of I and Thou, first published in German in 1923, a treatise that explored the existential and religious importance of true dialogue. A central facet of Buber's larger body of writings, however, was the unyielding contention that restoring meaning to human relations had very specific economic and institutional preconditions. Indeed, he advocated nothing less than a total, root-and-branch political-economic rebuilding of society.

Writing shortly after World War II, Buber came to the conclusion that the world faced "the greatest crisis humanity has ever known." It was not simply the Holocaust, nor the war. What was in question was "nothing less than man's existence in the world."

Buber's religiously informed judgment was built around three secular axes: an analysis of the source of the modern crisis; a specification of the structural requirements of "community"; and a proposed strategic path of change in a world where both reform and revolution appeared stymied.

He began with a problem that is currently receiving widespread attention in political-economic theory and analysis: the breakdown of community. What bothered Buber most was something akin to (but far more fundamental than) Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam's concern in his now-famous 1995 article, "Bowling Alone" what he and others loosely call the decline in "social capital." Putnam thinks that television may be the main cause of the growing isolation of so many Americans - and of a breakdown of civic associations and participation in community affairs. Buber's critique was historical and systemic. Even as he excoriated the tyrannical centralized socialism he called "Moscow," Buber also judged capitalist society "as a society" to be "inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day ..." In Paths in Utopia, he observed: "Under capitalist economy and the state peculiar to it, the constitution of society has been continually hollowed out, so that the modern individualizing process finished up as a process of atomization."

Putnam's proposed solutions to the dilemma of declining social capital have been very general. He urges that we as a society discuss the issue in the hope that this will lead to a renewal of "civic engagement" and participation in community affairs. Writing in a recent issue of The American Prospect, he warns that unless "America experiences a dramatic upward boost in civic engagement ... in the next few years, Americans in 2010 will join, trust, and vote even less than we do today."

Putnam's call for engagement - and for asking the key questions "together, not alone" - can hardly be faulted, though this public debate can at best be a prelude to solving the problem. Other analysts, like Putnam's Harvard colleague Michael J. Sandel, have pressed similar themes. Sandel, in his recent book, Democracy's Discontent, also argues that hope for a democratic politics requires a revitalization of civic life in the nation's communities. Recalling the Jeffersonian tradition of a politics concerned with the institutional structure of economic life, he urges a "revived republican philosophy" which, unlike postwar Keynesianism, would reconnect politics with "attending to the character of citizens." Sandel hopes that ultimately a civic revival can reclaim the vision of "a political economy of citizenship" once present in late-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth-century challenges to corporate power.

At one level, Buber's argument seems to presage these contemporary calls for civic renewal. Like both Putnam and Sandel, for instance, he judged that "the structure of a society is to be understood by its social content or community-content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent it is built up of genuine societies...." Yet Buber viewed a renewal of "civic associations" and "republican philosophy" as totally inadequate to the challenge confronting modern political-economic systems.

The central question for Buber was how to rebuild the social and, above all, economic institutions needed to restore, sustain, and nurture stable and cooperative human relationships. A nation could be a "community," he held, only "to the degree that it is a community of communities...." His radically decentralist socialist-communitarian vision stressed what he termed the "Full Cooperative" - i.e., consumer and worker cooperatives operating together in the same locality in such a manner as to alter the local culture. He also urged the importance of rural agricultural kibbutz cooperatives in Israel, and he speculated about urban analogues which emphasized cooperative land development.

Only if the day-to-day experience of individuals involved real equality and a sense of common ownership of the whole in the specific institutional settings in which they worked and lived did Buber believe it would be possible to build a different ethic - and upon this, a larger national politics and supporting policy framework.

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