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Community Lost?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Ian Maitland
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Abstract:

This paper examines recent communitarian writing about the market. Much of this work explains the loss of community in our times as a result of the expansion of the market and market values. As the market has invaded other domains, such as family and neighborhood, relationships there have become infected by the instability and transience that characterize market relations. Central to this critique of the market is the view that the market is unable to sustain lasting commitments. This paper tests this hypothesis by examining the fate of the family—the paradigmatic case of commitment—in three separate historical periods when market or commercial values were especially dominant. It then extends the analysis to two other component institutions of community—voluntary and charitable activities. Finally, it examines institutions where so-called market values should presumably hold unchallenged sway, namely in the work place and the marketplace. The paper finds that communitarian values appear to thrive in market society. Instead of being a juggernaut the market may be an endangered species.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 655 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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References

Notes

1 Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), pp. 46–7.

2 Bender, p. 51.

3 Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 100.

4 Colin Crouch, “Market failure; Fred Hirsch and the case for social democracy,” in Adrian Ellis & Krishan Kumar (eds.), Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies (London: Tavistock, 1983), p. 192.

5 Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City (New York: Basic, 1995), p. 266.

6 Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent; America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 329.

7 Ibid., p. 3.

8 Barry Schwartz, The Costs of Living (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 49.

9 In addition to the works already cited, these include Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

10 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, pp. 88–89.

11 Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, p. 8.

12 ”The ethical limitations of the market,” Economics & Philosophy, vol. 6 (1990), pp. 182, 183, 186.

13 Habits of the Heart, p. 130.

14 Ibid., p. 139.

15 Wolfe, Whose Keeper?, pp. 96–7.

16 Ibid., p. 2.

17 Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, pp. 95–6.

18 Schwartz, Costs of Living, p. 46.

19 Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, p. 21.

20 Habits of the Heart, p. 147.

21 Michael Walzer quoted in Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, p. 21.

22 Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, p. 96.

23 Cited in Ibid., pp. 119–20.

24 Bellah et al., Good Society, p. 85.

25 Wolfe, Whose Keeper?, p. 81.

26 Schwartz, Costs of Living, pp. 36, 40

27 Ehrenhalt, Lost City, preface.

28 Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, p. 96.

29 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: The Modern Library: Distributed by McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1981).

30 Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

31 Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (New York: Basic, 1985).

32 Robert E. Lane, The Market Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). I also rely on other work by Lane. See infra at footnotes 87 & 88.

33 Wolfe, Whose Keeper?, p. 76.

34 Revolt of the Elites, p. 95.

35 Habits of the Heart, p. 89.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 90.

38 Ibid.

39 Good Society, p. 93.

40 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 213, 183.

41 Ibid., p. 489.

42 Ibid., p. 494.

43 Ibid., pp. 480, 483.

44 Ibid., p. 482.

45 Ibid., p. 481.

46 Ibid., pp. 481–3.

47 Habits of the Heart, pp. 85, 90. Since writing this essay, I have come across Bruce Frohnen’s “Does Robert Bellah care about history?” The Intercollegiate Review, vol. 32 (1997), 19–26. Frohnen charges that Bellah’s “frequent references to Tocqueville . . . stand Tocqueville’s analysis of American individualism on its head” (p. 20).

48 Democracy in America, p. 183.

49 Ibid., p. 520.

50 Himmelfarb, De-Moralization of Society, pp. 53, 77.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., p. 77.

53 Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 14.

54 Ibid., pp. 5–6, 13.

55 Ibid., p. 11.

56 Ibid.

57 Habits of the Heart, p. 24.

58 Democracy in America, p. 102.

59 Ibid., p. 403.

60 Habits of the Heart, p. 167.

61 Whose Keeper, pp. 60–1.

62 Ibid., p. 62.

63 Ibid., p. 61.

64 Ibid., p. 65.

65 Ibid., p. 21.

66 De-Moralization of Society, p. 143. As Kenneth Arrow pointed out in his critique of Richard Titmuss’s book The Gift Relationship, “Formal philanthropy has always been a prominent element of all economic systems and shows no signs of diminution. . . . The contribution of personal services . . . for voluntary cooperative efforts of one kind or another remains a prominent feature of social life, even—or perhaps especially—in the United States, a country Titmuss holds up as the very model of a society atomized by excessive reliance on the dictates of the marketplace.” Kenneth J. Arrow, “Gifts and Exchanges,” in Edmund S. Phelps, ed., Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory (New York: Russell Sage, 1975), pp. 14–15.

67 Whose Keeper?, p. 89.

68 Ibid., p. 87.

69 Ibid., p. 90.

70 Ibid., p. 89

71 Ibid., p. 93.

72 This section recapitulates some of the points I have made in my “Virtuous markets; The market as school of the virtues,” Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 7 (1997), pp. 17–31.

73 Whose Keeper?, p. 58.

74 Thus Bellah says that freedom of choice means “freedom from the demands of others.” Habits of the Heart, p. 24.

75 Schwartz says that “loyalty is not in the corporate lexicon” but in the same breath he charges corporations with “single-minded pursuit of short-term profit.” But, to the extent that managers pursue profit at all, they are being loyal to their stockholders. The references are to Costs of Living, p. 46.

76 Robert E. Lane, The Market Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 219.

77 Ibid., p. 7 and chapter 17.

78 Ibid., p. 216.

79 Ibid., p. 544.

80 Ibid., p. 542.

81 Ibid., p. 510.

82 Ibid., p. 323

83 Ibid., p. 542.

84 Ibid., p. 405.

85 Ibid., p. 102.

86 Ibid., p. 268.

87 In his response to critics in PEGS Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 3, p. 26 (Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society). Similarly, Francis Fukuyama claims that social trust is greater in the United States and Japan than it is in China and Germany. See his Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).

88 Robert E. Lane, “Market choice and human choice,” in John W. Chapman & J. Roland Pennock, Markets and Justice (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 235.

89 Lane, “Market choice,” pp. 236–7.

90 Market Experience, p. 94.

91 Ibid., p. 102.

92 Ibid., p. 30.

93 Ibid., p. 269.

94 Ibid., p. 543.

95 Lane, “Market choice,” p. 239.

96 Albert O. Hirschman’s essay, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), examines how the Enlightenment sought to enlist the interests of men to check their passions.

97 For an explanation of Britain’s economic decline along these lines, see Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).