195COMMUNITY, MODERNITY, LEGITIMATIONHuman Studies 23: 195–201, 2000.© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Community, Modernity, Legitimation

B. MARTINDepartment of Philosophy, DePaul University, 802 West Belden Avenue, Chicago, IL60614, USA

A person has his or her own reason for reading a book – or would hope to,class assignments and review sessions aside. Of course, one of my reasonsfor reading Reason, History, and Politics is my admiration for David Ingramand his work, which has been a key example for a slightly younger sub-generation of social theorists. In other words, Ingram’s work has played asignificant role in shaping a social theory that is willing to draw from manydiverse sources, without getting hung up on green cards or other work permits.Thus, many of us are now working with both continental and analytic figureswithout being “analytic” or “continental” philosophers. (There are somefigures – Aristotle, Kant, Marx – who remind us that getting the school orcategory right is not a task very relevant to engaged social critique. However,it might be noted that those who slavishly follow either camp generally holdus to be tainted by our association with the other, especially in matters ofemployment and other professional appointments.) Ingram’s recent work isperhaps also not so “continental” in that his primary interest is in problems orquestions rather than figures.

Clearly, Ingram’s central question – and perhaps the central issue for ourtime and our species – has to do with what we may (or may not) continue todraw from political modernity and its philosophical discourse, the wholeconstellation of concepts such as rights, democracy, legitimation, andautonomy. Here, of course, there is one figure who looms over the discussion,namely Jürgen Habermas; Ingram has played the role of intellectual leadershipin the effort to shape a post-Habermasian social theory, which has sometimesresulted in the more radical work of saving Habermas from himself.

At the same time, Ingram has thrown a bit of a bomb into this discussion,by aligning himself with a kind of communitarian critique of liberalism. In amore narrowly intellectual, or perhaps more broadly political vein, it is aroundthe question of community that my own reasons for rereading Reason, History,and Politics center. My aim in the rest of this discussion, therefore, is to raisea series of questions regarding the theory of community, taking stock ofIngram’s work insofar as it contributes to generating the foundations of a viablecommunitarianism, one that deals seriously with problems of institutions,legality, and legitimacy.

196 B. MARTIN

My main concern, and it is a somewhat large one, has precisely to do withwhat Ingram might mean by “the communitarian grounds of legitimation in themodem age” (as he has it in his subtitle). Early in the book, and as part of framingissues of governmental legitimacy and public deliberation, he sets himself thetask of providing “an alternative account of public reason on communitarian– or more precisely, communicative – grounds.” The problem is one of“disentangling the liberal ideal of democratic consensus from distortions wroughtby capitalism” (p. 7). Already something of a red flag is raised, one that remainsin view for the remainder of the book. In reality, there are two basic issues herethat are intertwined in Ingram’s scheme. On the one hand, we are presented withwhat, by now, is a fairly old problem: how to carry forward on the side of thelegacy of political modernity, namely democracy, while jettisoning the otherside, namely capitalism. This has been the framing issue for social democracyat least since John Stuart Mill and Eduard Bernstein, and it remains the animatingspirit of Habermas’s work and of those working out of a broadly Habermasianframework. On the other hand, Ingram has brought an additional term to thisdiscussion, or perhaps two related terms: community and communitarianism.

Here I do have some worries, for it turns out that, in Ingram’s detailedinvestigations, almost everyone who has contributed in some way to theunderstanding of a public reason that is communicative (or, at least, recognizedas fundamentally social), as opposed to subjective, is now also understood tobe in some sense a “communitarian.” Concomitantly, the reigning conceptionof community in Reason, History, and Politics is what Ingram calls“democratic community.” Thus, a rather large cast of characters, from Hegelto Marx to Rorty, Lyotard, Arendt, Nancy, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, andothers, all seem to be inclined toward both communitaranism and democraticcommunity. In this case, I have to wonder exactly what work the term“community” is doing here for, it seems to me, if Rorty and Lyotard arecommunitarians, we would be hard pressed to find anyone who is not.

In other words, my one major criticism of the book is that I do not see thatIngram has really closed the gap between what it might mean to hold acommunicative notion of reason (or, at the least, as in the case of Derrida, tobe critical of a merely subjective notion) and what it means to foreground thevalue of community. It seems to me that the latter idea comes in a little tooquickly and without sufficient justification. This too-quick move has importantpolitical ramifications in that, if what is meant by “democratic community”is something like social democracy, then it perhaps would be best to leaveaside questions of community and communitarianism (which most socialdemocrats do not identify with in any case).

However, I want to just as quickly acknowledge that Ingram has raised atleast two very important issues of any viable and systematic philosophy ofcommunity. It may be that “communitarian grounds” do not by themselvesyield either communitarianism or community. There is a gap there that remains

197COMMUNITY, MODERNITY, LEGITIMATION

to be bridged, though, I hasten to add, this is actually a good thing. Ifcommunity were simply (or “directly”) in the nature of reason itself, then itwould be hard to find any ethical-political component to the human effort toactually build community. (This problem is similar to the one Kant frames inthe case of the attempt to generate a moral calculus.) The detailed examinationof communicative reason and the critique of subjective reason that Ingramundertakes, however, does indeed show us that community – and not just thewar of all against all or the war of class against class – is a possibility. Thegap that remains would require not only investigations that are beyond thepurview of this examination of public reason, but also organized, practicalefforts on the part of people who are in rebellion against the aforementioneddistortions of capitalism.

(In Ingram’s “grounding” of the possibility of communitarianism, too, Iam reminded of Rousseau’s claim that “the golden age is in us,” as well asLenin’s exultation that “communism springs from every pore,” except thatIngram provides us with a way of thinking about these things without resortingto biologism or other essentialisms.)

What is at least as important is the way that Ingram has framed the issue oflegitimacy for any viable communitarian philosophy. Communitarian thinking,it should be noted, tends to resist that question, setting itself up as a kind ofhermeneutic circle for which there is no outside. In his discussion of Gadamerin chapters three and four – which concern Anglo-American and Frenchcommunitarianisms, respectively – Ingram demonstrates not only theconservative cast of this approach, but also the way that it fails to be properlycommunitarian in that it is, finally, a form of subjective reason writ large –one that leads toward either “uncritical acceptance of and conformity to theprevailing ethos (tradition), or uncritical acceptance of a resolute Führer whoplaces his own will above all ethics and tradition” (p. 160.) Indeed, in thisformulation and its accompanying argument, Ingram has contributed animportant chapter to the understanding of fascism as a kind of falsecommunitarianism (one that is in fact subjective reason run wild) that can existonly on the basis of capitalist distortions (fundamentally as an expression ofsuch distortions) and that presents itself as a false (though undoubtedlyattractive) answer to these distortions. By contrast, we find ourselves askingwhat a properly “communitarian” or “communicative” community might be,and Ingram’s arguments regarding legitimacy show us that this must in factbe a post-traditional community, one that recognizes that it must both takeaccount of humanity’s passage through political modernity as well as answerto the innovations of this modernity that still seem quite defensible.

There is something rather intractable about the “hermeneutic circle”conception of community, however, something that Ingram comes closest toin his discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida in the chapter onFrench communitarianism and in the final chapter.

198 B. MARTIN

Much of my own work is concerned with the question of community, asyou might have surmised. My first book, Matrix and Line, is not unlike Reason,History, and Politics in that it takes a largely “analytic,” or perhaps we shouldsay “discursive,” view of the subject. More recently I have attempted to fillout my perspective with some empirical and sociological investigations intoactual communitarian movements. Now, this is a dimension of Ingram’s workas well, perhaps most seen in his discussion of legal structure and in theFederalism controversy in the early years of the American republic. Indeed, Iam most appreciative of the way that he demonstrates the tension between, ashe puts it, the “libertarian and democratic communitarian strands of liberalthought” as this was manifest even in the Founding convention at Philadelphia(p. 37.) Taking place in the shadow of Shay’s rebellion, “which liberated scoresof debtors from prison and prevented foreclosures on land by the hated bankingand commercial interests,” the “debates prior to the ratification of theConstitution centered around the competing conceptions of public reason andcontractual inviolability” (p. 38.) Ingram argues that, despite the “democraticcommunitarian vision contained in the New Deal legislation” – which, ofcourse, has been progressively dismantled since the late 1970s – “theFederalists’ libertarian vision continues to dominate American constitutionalinterpretation” and therefore basic social institutions (p. 39.)

Two names that do not play a role in the story Ingram tells do seem to mequite important. Arguably (and not especially controversially), the idea ofprivate property as the highest good of the American system seems to havebecome thoroughly ensconced by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency,1829–1837. And, the communitarian current in American revolutionarypolitical thought most likely had its strongest expression in the case of ThomasJefferson. (Undoubtedly, figures such as Ethan Allen of Vermont were alsoimportant.) This current was thoroughly submerged by the 1830s, and hasmade only a marginal appearance ever since.

(In that light, we might ask whether the New Deal came to compromisethe rule of private property or to save it. An important difference betweenIngram’s position and mine is that he seems to hold to the former view – evencalling the New Deal a “revolution,” – while I hold the latter. In that light, aswell, I am inclined to think of so-called “democratic socialism” as in fact“democratic imperialism,” that is, a democratic welfare-state system thatfundamentally depends on a pax americana.)

However, there have indeed been marginal and marginalized appearancesof communitarianism, quite often associated with (what scholars call) newreligious movements, outstanding examples of which are the Shakers, theOneida community, and the Latter-day Saints (Mormons.) (A classic text onthis question is Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the UnitedStates [1966].) My own empirical and sociological investigations intocommunity have largely centered on this latter group. Founded in the midst

199COMMUNITY, MODERNITY, LEGITIMATION

of Jacksonian America, and largely consisting in ruined farmers, out-of-workartisans, and fleeing proletarians from the northeastern U.S. as well as the veryEngland described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class inManchester, this group explicitly set itself against what Joseph Smith called theemerging rule of bankers, lawyers, and businessmen. The Mormons founded aseries of city-states, self-reliant rural economies, and ultimately, their ownnation-state – all of which were violently and militarily attacked by the existingorder. It is around this issue of setting against and apart, and thus, of alternativesocial institutions, that I want to return to the question of legitimacy.

Orson Scott Card, one of the major science fiction writers of recent decadesas well as a Latter-day Saint, argues that “You cannot understand a communityif you do not live as a committed member of it” (p. 177.) This may seem likea hermetically-enclosed notion of community, and I suppose that, left to itself,it is. But Card goes on to discuss how, despite the fact that a community suchas the Latter-day Saints may appear monolithic from the outside, “from theinside we see how hard it is to make a coherent community out of the myriadpurposes and opinions and concerns and need of the Saints” (p. 177.) Crucially,Card takes up the interconnected issues of faith – “Communities, after all, existonly as they are believed in by the members of the community – they arecreatures of faith” (p. 177), and participation:

The very fact of your committed participation in the community changesit to some degree; the very fact of your committed participation also changesyou. Only in the synthesis of self and community does the individual acquireany power [to] change the Church; only in that synthesis does the Churchacquire any power to change the individual. (emphasis added, pp. 177–178)

I have quoted Card at length because it seem to me that he sets out some ofthe conditions under which we would consider a community to be a‘legitimate’ social institution. (Incidentally, in what he says there is also animplicit argument about the relationship of grace and works, on which pointthe Mormons differ significantly with mainstream Protestantism.)

And yet, none of this makes the issue of legitimacy any less slippery. Insome sense, this is a question of to whom or what the community – or someother kind of social formation that we would not characterize with the termcommunity – has to answer. Card argues that the community need not answerto anyone who is not a committed member of the community, which wouldseem to indicate that, as far as the community and its legitimacy is concerned,there is no “outside” to the hermeneutic circle. One might argue that this showsthat the question of legitimacy cannot really be answered. As much as thismay grate against the ears of modem, secular, liberal theorists (through perhapsnot as much against the “we liberals” invoked by Richard Rorty), surely thereis something to be said for the idea that post-foundationalist social theorycannot simply appeal to supposedly universalist notions of legitimacy.

200 B. MARTIN

The difficult thing is to let go of false foundationalisms and universalismswithout falling into mere utilitarianism or letting go of the possibility of ethicalcommitment. This is where Ingram’s discussions of Nancy and Derrida areespecially important. What Nancy calls the “unworking” community(communaute desoeuvree) is not one where identity is the binding element,but instead where “what is shared is . . . but the sharing itself and, consequently,the nonidentity of everything, of each with itself and with others, and of thenonidentity of the work with itself, and finally of literature with itself’ (quotedin Ingram, p. 162; it should be noted that Nancy makes these comments inthe context of a discussion of “literary communism,” especially in relation toBataille and Sartre – and more might be said regarding Ingram’s brief mentionof Sartre on p. 60.) The reference to literature, which cannot be discussed atlength here, makes sense within a Derridean reading of the question of context;as Ingram spells this out:

The weaving of (con)text is never finished. Consequently, insofar as itsidentity is necessarily interpellated by the other – continually interruptedand fractured into as many meanings as there are singular contexts – thecommunal text can never achieve the status of universal law, or constitution,but must remain illegitimate and without foundation. (p. 162)

Despite the fact that, as Nancy argues, “community lacks the unity of an opus”(an essential aspect of this approach has to do with a critique of the aestheticpolitics of Heidegger), and therefore “cannot be an object of either an ethicsor politics of community,” still, such an ethics and politics is “prescribed” (pp.162–163.)

To make a very long story short, Ingram follows the possibility of such aprescription through Derrida’s arguments regarding asymmetry, singularity,and friendship, and, in his final chapter, the “ungraspable revolutionary instantthat belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in which the foundationsof a new law nevertheless plays on something from an anterior law that itextends, radicalizes, deforms, metaphorizes, metonymizes . . .” (Derrida,quoted in Ingram, p. 343.) I might add that Derrida himself has expressedskepticism regarding the very idea of a “community,” so any adaptation ofhis ideas regarding friendship, dangerous supplements, contextuality, etc., tothis idea may not be on solid ground – but then, it seems to follow from Nancy’sarguments that any post-foundationalist, post-identitarian, or post-traditionalnotion of community has to live with this lack of ground.

Which returns us, finally, precisely to Ingram’s search for “communitariangrounds.” Interestingly, immediately following his discussion of Derrida’sarguments regarding asymmetry and friendship, Ingram appeals to argumentsfrom Habermas and Thomas McCarthy regarding “the symmetrical dimensionof responsibility [that] underlies the democratic, communitarian ethicsdeveloped by Habermas” (p. 165.) He goes on to say, “But it is one thing to

201COMMUNITY, MODERNITY, LEGITIMATION

say that social relations are structured by reciprocal expectations based onlegitimate norms (or laws), another to legitimate them philosophically” (pp.165–166.) Are we to conclude, then, that philosophical legitimation may notbe obtainable? My understanding is that Nancy proceeds precisely on the basisof this unobtainability. Finally, then, my sense is that Ingram does not acceptthis unobtainability; he hopes for the community that can be legitimated insuch a way that it does not break with our already broken modem age. Workingat great and thoroughly systematic detail through such hope, I think he finds“communitarian grounds” not for community, per se, but instead for therevitalization of political modernity.

Allow me to close by emphasizing that I have only traced out one thread –though a central one – of this rich text.

References

Card, O.S. (1993). A Storyteller in Zion. Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft.Ingram, D. (1995). Reason, History, and Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of

Legitimization in the Modem Age. Albany: State University of New York Press.

202 B. MARTIN