Bill Clinton has his book on his White House desk. Tony Blair swears by him. Serious journalists are writing pages and pages based on his ideas: the man of the moment is Amitai Etzioni. On the same day Blair launched his new clause The Times sponsored a central London locture by this would-be guru of new Labour. SIMON DOYLE was there for Socialist Outlook. WHENEVER a society enters decline, people look for a way out. The first place they look is not to the future but to the past. This is the crux of Amitai Etzioni's message - a return to a time when we all shared common values and these values gave society a stability the whole community could share.
It is another "golden age" philosophy. It is based on a mythical time of social peace and harmony that is supposed to have existed in 1950s America. It seeks to recreate this Nirvana in a modern setting.
The communitarianism that Blair and sections of the political classes are discussing originates in US colleges. Formally it is an intellectual response to the liberal theories of justice, government and social conduct promoted by the philosopher John Rawls.
Its basic case is that people are social beings first and foremost. They cannot be individuals except in a social setting. We stand in society, and cannot do otherwise.
As a political philosophy this dates back to the first theorists -Aristotle spoke of something similar when he said that "man is a political animal".
Fashion
But communitarianism has exploded on to the sceme for more reason than it is just another fashionable ideology for academics. All ideas have a reason for their popularity. This is no exception.
It is gaining support because it seems to offer a way out of social and moral decline. The streets of most US cities are not pleasant places to be. Crime and social decay is everywhere. This ideology claims to offer a solution.
Etzioni poses his message very simply. People should live freely in society taking responsibility for themselves and for their families. The state should not get involved unless the community cannot solve the problem, and the community should not get involved unless the family cannot resolve the difficulty.
His is a simple hierarchy of responsibility relying on the family as the basic unit of a society welded together by shared values. These values should embody a balance between rights and duties. What we have to do is get the balance right.
Etzioni appeared at the Times lecture more as a missionary proselytizer than an academic. In the audience was David Blunkett, dozens of middle ranking academics and most of the columnists from the major newspapers.
He was trying to convince us of his political programme, not win us to a high minded theory.
He argued we need three precepts to set our civic house in order.
First, we must address ourselves to moral issues. Society needs a moral "glue" to keep it all together. Only by establishing a set of institutions founded on this morality can we promote our "noble selves" over our base natural urges. These "mediating structures" are needed also to protect the family from the powers of government.
Secondly, we must pay much more attention to human needs. High on the list of needs is for people to know where they stand in a moral community - what is right and what is wrong.
Thirdly, the point of balance of rights and responsibilities has to be appropriately shifted. In the US there is too much emphasis on rights. Peoples' responsibilities to their communities are being forgotten.
Completely absent from Etzioni's politics is any conception of social structure. His is a world where the realities of class and gender don't operate.
Idealised
Instead of examining the detail of division, inequality and the operation of social forces he gives us an idealised picture of moral consensus. There is no recognition of culture, of economics, of ethnicity, of sexuality, of most of the things that shape our lives.
In contrast to the rather complicated reality we have to live through the communitarians as sert a shared core of values that bind us together. Little attempt is made to question where these values come from, or whose interests they serve. Indeed no attempt is made to challenge them at all. We're told they're necessary - that's all.
In this sense communitarianism accommodates to whatever iș the "commonsense" of the moment. This is no way to analyse the world.
Commonsense is a place where different ideas compete for dominance. It was once commonsense that "witches" should be burned alive. Sexism and racism are "core" values of our society. This does not make them acceptable, necessary or desirable.
Behind the vagaries of the modern communitarian message lies a set of deeply reactionary assumptions. In their hands so called "consensus" politics becomes a veil behind which to hide the realities of modern capitalism and the inequalities on which it rests.
There is no "common good" to defend because all capitalist societies are deeply divided. It is an ideology of passivity in the face of the offensive.