Abstract
This chapter analyses endogamous communitarianism as the flipside of unlimited individualism. The need for community that reappears in the global age has two roots: on one hand it is the response to the erosion of the social bond produced by unlimited individualism; on the other, it results from the defence of identity by groups and collective formations involved in “struggles for recognition”. Therefore, although the need for community in itself appears legitimate, since it responds to the erosion of the social bond and dynamics of exclusion, it becomes pathological when it takes on regressive and destructive forms based on the Us/Them contrast and gives rise to the conflicts (in particular ethnic and religious) and fundamentalisms pervading the planet. Endogamous communitarianism equates to the formation of what are described in this chapter as immunitarian communities: since the defence of internal cohesion transforms into external hostility and violence. Unlimited individualism and endogamous communitarianism appear as the opposite and specular polarities of a gap with Self-obsession on one side, and Us-obsession on the other: a divarication that results in a ‘loss of the world’.
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Notes
- 1.
See Marramao, Passaggio a Occidente.
- 2.
See also Aldo Bonomi, Il trionfo della moltitudine. Forme e conflitti della società che viene (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996).
- 3.
See Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Originally published as Essais sur l’individualisme: une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983).
- 4.
See Axel Honneth, “Communauté,” in Dictionnaire d’éthique et de morale, ed. Monique Canto Sperber (Paris: Puf, 1996): 270–4.
- 5.
Without doubt these aspects are present in Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. José Harris (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), originally published as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie (1887; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). However, his ideas are often excessively put down to a sort of naturalistic romantic nostalgia wholly in favour of the Gemeinschaft. On the contrary, as Honneth also underlines in his “Communauté”, Tönnies’s goal was in fact to propose a possible balance between the two forms of social integration and to explore the possibilities of creating communities suited to industrial society (such as associations and trade unions).
- 6.
‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ are both forms of the ‘Sozial’, see Honneth, “Communauté”.
- 7.
Francesco Fistetti, Comunità (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 135ff.
- 8.
See Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964). Originally published as De la division du travail social. Étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieurs (Paris: Alcan, 1893).
- 9.
Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 40ff. Originally published as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922).
- 10.
Fistetti, Comunità, 138. On the expression Gemeinschaftshandeln (community action) see Weber, Economy and Society. Note, however, that here I have preferred the translation ‘community action’ over the more common ‘social action’ (see Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2, chap. IX, 938) so as not to cause confusion in this context. On these topics see also Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 157–59 and 185–91, originally published as “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922).
- 11.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995), originally published as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1912); see Honneth, “Communauté”, 273.
- 12.
As already said in note 5 in this chapter.
- 13.
The vision of the community as a dimension constituting the social is given an interesting formulation in John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), which allows us to dislodge community from the idea of a concrete and localized ‘place’, to instead propose a meaning of community as ‘conjoint and interacting behavior’ (p. 314), the sense of belonging to a common reality, the creation of spaces where individuals can recognize themselves and pinpoint common purposes and goals in order to constitute an active public: the necessary ingredients in order for a democratic society to actually work. For references to Dewey, see Honneth, ‘Communauté’; Costa, Cittadinanza e comunità; Fistetti, Comunità, 161.
- 14.
Honneth, “Communauté”, 272. Although I find Honneth’s definition of ‘society’ reductive, I nevertheless use it in this context to underline the contrast between community and society. For a more fitting, that is, less restrictive and less simplistic definition of the concept of ‘society’, see Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), 80, originally published as Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, vol. V in Gesammelte Schriften (1924; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980–1985): ‘What here leads to the tendency to abolish artificiality and interpersonal distance – the impersonal in an explicit sense – constitutes the stimulus and inner being, the ethos of community. In opposition to this tendency, a societal life order seeks to construct its relations impersonally. It nourishes everything that leads from intimacy to distance, from being without restraint to being with restraint, from the concrete individual to the general abstraction.’
- 15.
See the critical diagnosis by Plessner, The Limits of Community.
- 16.
Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois, “Sacred Sociology and the Relationships Between ‘Society’, ‘Organism’, and ‘Being’,” in The College of Sociology (1937–39) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 82, originally published as “La sociologie sacrée et les rapports entre “société”, “organisme”, “être”,” in Le Collège de sociologie, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979): ‘It is not the first time, for that matter, that I will manifest a predilection for what I have just described as elective community. […] I like to make a clear distinction between the principle of elective community and the principle of the traditional community to which I, in fact, belong but from which I insist on dissociating myself. At the same time I like to contrast it just as clearly with the principles of individualism that result in democratic atomization.’
- 17.
In itself the Collège is a community; meant, however, as a ‘moral’ or ‘elective’ community, whose members are linked not only by the free choice to belong to it, thus setting them apart from the traditional Gemeinschaft, but also by the awareness of representing a transgressive experience with respect to the existent order (whether it be democratic or totalitarian).
- 18.
See also the critique of communism.
- 19.
See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Originally published as La communauté desoeuvrée (Paris: Bourgois, 1986).
- 20.
Which obviously does not rule out the fact that being-in-common can take on different forms, including that of the small community.
- 21.
At the sociological level, with reference to the USA, see Robert D. Putnam, The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
- 22.
See Rawls, Theory of Justice.
- 23.
See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Taylor, Sources of the Self; and Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- 24.
See Alessandro Ferrara, ed., Comunitarismo e liberalismo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992); Ferrara, “Comunità,” Rassegna italiana di sociologia, XXXVII, no. 4 (1996).
- 25.
See also Amitai Etzioni of whose works I shall mention just The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), and community as a vital dimension of democracy which refers, as already hinted, to Dewey and the American tradition.
- 26.
See André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), originally published as Misères du présent: richesse du possible (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997). Quite rightly underlining the importance of Gorz’s reflection on this topic is Valentina Pazé, Il concetto di comunità nella filosofia politica contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002).
- 27.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 118.
- 28.
Economic rationality, says Gorz in Critique of Economic Reason: ‘is characterized precisely by the desire to economize, that is, to use the factors of production as efficiently as possible’, 2–3; and Part II in general (‘Critique of Economic Reason’).
- 29.
Ibid., 168.
- 30.
‘The only form such exchange can take on within the sphere of autonomous activities is the form of the reciprocal gift. I give this to you without asking for anything in return; you accept this gift gladly and seek to give me something in your turn. […] It is a matter of setting up a relationship of generosity in which each person regards the other unconditionally as an absolute end.’ Ibid, 167, also see 153–69.
- 31.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–1987). Originally published as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).
- 32.
Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 107; see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 304–5: ‘capitalist modernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there at the expense of moral-political and aesthetic-practical rationality, and […] this produces disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld’ (my italics).
- 33.
On the critique of Habermas’s concept of ‘lifeworld’, see Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 173ff.
- 34.
This depends on the fact that Gorz’s goal is not just to reproduce society but to ‘conceive it on a new base and with new perspectives’, ibid., 174.
- 35.
Ibid., 175.
- 36.
Ibid., 179.
- 37.
Ibid., 140–41: ‘[…] commodity relations cannot exist between members of a family or a community – or that community will be dissolved; nor can affection, tenderness and sympathy be bought or sold except when they are reduced to mere simulacra.’
- 38.
Ibid., 159–60.
- 39.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 117–26.
- 40.
Ibid., 118.
- 41.
Ibid., 120–21.
- 42.
Ibid., 124: ‘The practice of dialogue becomes possible in the end only if each community rises above the values constitutive of its identity, stands back from that identity and interprets it in relative terms as one identity among others – that is to say, understands it as “difference”.’
- 43.
For Gorz this common space is the space of the ‘political’: ‘The political is the specific space in which to work out the conflictual tension between the opposing poles of community and society; or, to put it in Habermasian terms, the space to work out the tension between life-world and system’. Reclaiming Work, 125.
- 44.
See Alain Caillé, Critique de la raison utilitaire. Manifeste du MAUSS (Paris: La Découverte, 1989); Caillé, Anthropologie philosophique du don. Le tiers paradigme (Paris: La Découverte, 1998); Jacques T. Godbout, The World of the Gift (Montreal: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1998), originally published as L’esprit du don (Paris: La Découverte, 1992).
- 45.
In addition to the texts quoted above, see also Alain Caillé, Trenta tesi per la sinistra, ed. Carlo Grassi (Rome: Donzelli, 1997), 35.
- 46.
Godbout, World of the Gift, and Alain Caillé, La démission des clercs. La crise des sciences sociale et l’oubli du politique (Paris: La Découverte/Mauss, 1994), 242, own translation.
- 47.
Caillé, La démission des clercs, 242, own translation.
- 48.
That the need for community is directly proportionate to the crisis in the formal and institutional structures of society had already been sensed by Arnold Gehlen some decades ago: ‘So long as man is caught in the combination of several overlapping and yet coordinated institutions,’ says Gehlen, ‘no vacuum, nor deficit is generated in social need […]. Nevertheless, if the institutions are shaken, eroded, unsettled, […] what results are those withdrawal symptoms which appear as a positive need for “community” […]. The very strong emotional cast of this requirement for “community” betrays the “idle running” (Leerlauf) of a social instinct. In archaic or primitive societies, or in well-integrated high cultures, a similar postulate never appears’. (Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur (Wiesbaden: Verlag GmbH, 1986), 54–55, own translation).
- 49.
‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.’ (Simone Weil, The Need for Roots. Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London: Routledge, 2002), 43, originally published as L’enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).)
- 50.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
- 51.
See Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences, 45ff.
- 52.
Bauman, Community, afterword, 144: ‘We miss community because we miss security, a quality crucial to a happy life, but one which the world we inhabit is ever less able to offer and ever more reluctant to promise.’
- 53.
Giacomo Marramao (Passaggio a Occidente) points out that it is a need for symbolic identification that cannot be resolved within citizenship; above all, we need to add, now that the very idea of citizenship is entering a crisis in correspondence to the crisis of politics in its state form.
- 54.
On the hot/cold contrast see e.g. Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason.
- 55.
One could speak of fleeing from the ‘non-places’ that Marc Augé speaks of to the ‘local’, see Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), originally published as Non-lieux (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
- 56.
See Bauman, Community, 65ff.
- 57.
See Bauman, In Search of Politics, 46–47.
- 58.
Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage Publications, 1996). Originally published as Le temps des tribus. Le déclin de l’individualisme dans la societé de masse (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1991).
- 59.
Ibid., 16.
- 60.
Ibid., 75.
- 61.
Ibid., 81.
- 62.
Indeed he defines the formist sociology that he puts forward as ‘a way of thinking that records forms and existing configurations without in any way criticizing or judging them’, ibid., 86.
- 63.
Here suffice it to cite the phenomenon, now widespread, of Second Life! On these topics see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Tomás Maldonado, Critica della ragione informatica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997).
- 64.
See the definition by Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Frontier, 1993), 28: ‘Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace’. See Formenti, Incantati dalla rete, 278.
- 65.
See Fabio Berti, Per una sociologia della comunità (Milan: Angeli, 2005).
- 66.
See Semerari, Individualismo e comunità, chap. 3.
- 67.
See Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), on the various examples in this sense; see also Erika Lombardi and Grazia Naletto, eds., Comunità partecipate. Guida alle buone pratiche locali (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2006).
- 68.
Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 179–81. Originally published as Critique de la modernité (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1992).
- 69.
Ibid., 180.
- 70.
Ibid., 182–83.
- 71.
‘New information technologies are integrating the world in global networks of instrumentality. Computer-mediated communication begets a vast array of virtual communities. Yet the distinctive social and political trend of the 1990s was the construction of social action and politics around primary identities, either ascribed, rooted in history and geography, or newly built in an anxious search for meaning and spirituality. The first historical steps of informational societies seem to characterize them by the pre-eminence of identity as their organizing principle.’ (Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 21–22).
- 72.
Ibid., 22.
- 73.
Ibid., 24.
- 74.
‘Legitimizing identity generates a civil society, that is, a set of organizations and institutions, as well as a series of structured and organized social actors, which reproduce, albeit sometimes in a conflictive manner, the identity that rationalizes the sources of structural domination.’ (Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 8).
- 75.
Ibid., 420: The sources of the ‘legitimizing identities,’ says Castells, ‘are drained away’ since ‘[t]he institutions and organizations of civil society that were constructed around the democratic state, and around the social contract between capital and labor, have become, by and large, empty shells, decreasingly able to relate to people’s lives and values in most societies.’
- 76.
Ibid., 8.
- 77.
Ibid., 9.
- 78.
Ibid., 421.
- 79.
In the sense proposed by Touraine, Critique of Modernity, in particular, Part III, chap. 1.
- 80.
Castells, The Power of Identity, 422. Castells goes so far as to assert that today it is only from resistance identities, meant indifferently in their multiple expressions, that project identities can arise, given the emptying of civil society and the crisis of the ‘legitimizing identities’: see ibid.
- 81.
That for Castells ‘project’ does not equate with ‘emancipatory’ appears clear. See for example p. 427 where Castells stresses that project identities can include both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prophets: ‘I deliberately choose to mix the genres in my examples to indicate that there are “good” and “bad” prophets, depending on individual preferences, including my own. But they are all prophets in the sense that they declare the path, affirm the values, and act as symbol senders.’
- 82.
For example ibid., 8: ‘[…] no identity has, per se, progressive or regressive value outside its historical context’.
- 83.
See Manuel Castells, Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 84.
See for example Castells, The Power of Identity, 69.
- 85.
See Clifford Geertz, Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 227.
- 86.
Ibid., quote taken from the introduction to the Italian edition (own translation).
- 87.
Ibid., 246.
- 88.
Ibid., 237ff.
- 89.
Ibid., 176.
- 90.
Ibid., 245–46.
- 91.
Clifford Geertz, “Primordial Loyalties and Standing Entities: Anthropological Reflections on the Politics of Identity,” conference held at the Collegium Budapest, Budapest, December 13 1993, http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/GeertzTexts/Primordial_loyalties.htm.
- 92.
‘Situations like that of the Ukraine, where […] language unites and religion divides, Algeria where religion unites and culture divides, China, where race unites and region divides, or Switzerland, where history unites and language divides, can be dealt with more precisely within such a frame.’ (Ibid.).
- 93.
Geertz, Available Light, 255 and 227. See also 257–59 for his critique of liberalism.
- 94.
One just has to cite Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
- 95.
See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
- 96.
See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995), originally published as Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992); Honneth, “Integrity and Disrespect. Principles of Conception of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory, 20, no. 2 (1992): 187–201, original title Anerkennung und Mißachtung. Ein formales Konzept der Sittlichkeit.
- 97.
Honneth, ‘Integrity and Disrespect’, 189.
- 98.
See Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Christian Lazzeri and Alain Caillé, “Recognition Today: Theoretical, Ethical and Political Stakes of the Concept,” Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006), originally published as “La reconnaissance aujourd’hui. Enjeux théoretiques, éthiques et politiques du concept,” Revue du MAUSS 23, no.1 (2004); Franco Crespi, Identità e riconoscimento nella sociologia contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004); Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), originally published as Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Editions Stock, 2004).
- 99.
See Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). Despite proposing to put the two different normative viewpoints of redistribution and recognition into a single frame, Nancy Fraser nevertheless essentially considers recognition as an aspect of justice theory. Her proposal of a perspectival dualism revolves around the idea of the equality of participation. Justice requires such a set-up of fundamental institutions that all members of society can interact at an equal level. This requires that at least two conditions are met: on one hand the fair distribution of material resources, and on the other institutionalized cultural models that express equal respect for the participants and guarantee equal opportunities to obtain social esteem.
- 100.
Alessandro Pizzorno, “Come pensare il conflitto,” in Le radici della politica assoluta e altri saggi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993). I must point out that Pizzorno adds a third form of conflict to these two, that is, ‘ideological conflict’, 198.
- 101.
Ibid., 195–97, own translation.
- 102.
‘It is true,’ Pizzorno explains, ‘that I, Fleming, or Slovenian, can leave it up to the others to conquer the recognition of political independence for all Slovenians, or the recognition of their language as the official state language or other rights for all Flemings. But this institutional recognition does not concern my own individual identity. Can I feel this recognition to be really my own, be proud of it, if I haven’t had a hand in it?’, ibid., 196, own translation.
- 103.
See the following paragraph.
- 104.
See Marramao, Passaggio a Occidente. This does not mean, Marramao points out, that the conflict of interests disappears, but that the identity moment becomes dominant and it tends to encapsulate the utilitarian moment too.
- 105.
See Bonomi, Il trionfo della moltitudine, who speaks of ‘antagonistic syncretism’: ‘Conflict is no longer one and devastating, but it has dissolved into one thousand trickles of resistance’, 77, own translation.
- 106.
It needs to be pointed out that the global perspective is mainly absent in recognition theorists, and only partially implicit in Taylor himself.
- 107.
Carlo Galli underlines the distinction between the descriptive and normative meanings of the concept of multiculturalism in Galli ed., Multiculturalismo. Ideologie e sfide (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006); see also Maria Laura Lanzillo, Il multiculturalismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005); and Anna E. Galeotti, Multiculturalismo. Filosofia politica e conflitto identitario (Naples: Liguori, 1999).
- 108.
See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950). Originally published as Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1908; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983).
- 109.
See Part III, Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.
- 110.
See Melucci, “Multiculturalismo,” in Parole chiave.
- 111.
On the processes of building cultural differences today, see Michel Wieviorka, La différence (Paris: Balland, 2001).
- 112.
See Taylor, Multiculturalism; Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
- 113.
See Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 107–48, originally published as Kampf un Anerkennung in Demokratischen Rechtstaat (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
- 114.
‘[…] the democratic elaboration of a system of rights has to incorporate not only general political goals but also the collective goals that are articulated in struggles for recognition.’ (Habermas, Struggles for Recognition, 124).
- 115.
Here I propose the concept of ‘immunity’ in a wider and more generic meaning, as taken from the reflection of Esposito, in particular in his Communitas.
- 116.
On this topic see also Aldo Bonomi, La comunità maledetta. Viaggio nella coscienza di luogo (Turin: Ed. di Comunità, 2002).
- 117.
Habermas, Struggles for Recognition, 118.
- 118.
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Taylor, 66–67.
- 119.
For a critique of multiculturalism, see Lanzillo, ll multiculturalismo.
- 120.
See Lazzeri and Caillé, ‘Recognition Today’.
- 121.
See Melucci, Multiculturalismo, 154; Melucci, Challenging Codes. Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 122.
Ugo Fabietti, L’identità etnica. Storia e critica di un concetto equivoco (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995), 134. See also Jean-Loup Amselle and Elikia M’Bokolo, eds., Au coeur de l’ethnie. Ethnie, tribalisme et Etat en Afrique (Paris: Karthalha, 1985–2005).
- 123.
See Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 124.
See ibid., 7, and Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 95.
- 125.
See Mario Diani, Lo sviluppo dei movimenti etnico nazionali in Occidente: 1960–1990, in Gian Enrico Rusconi, Nazione, etnia, cittadinanza in Italia e in Europa (Brescia: La Scuola, 1993); Dimitri D’Andrea, “Le ragioni dell’etnicità tra globalizzazione e declino della politica,” in Identità e conflitti, ed. Furio Cerutti and Dimitri D’Andrea (Milan: Angeli, 2000).
- 126.
D’Andrea, ‘Le ragioni dell’etnicità’, 92–95.
- 127.
Unlike Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) who stresses ‘high culture’ as the only source of nationalism.
- 128.
Castells, The Power of Identity, 30ff.
- 129.
Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging. Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 9.
- 130.
For a broad analysis of religious fundamentalisms, see Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), originally published as La revanche de Dieu (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
- 131.
Castells, The Power of Identity, 13ff.
- 132.
On the distinction between myths of origin and foundational narratives within the political myth, see Furio Cerutti, “Identità e politica,” in Identità e politica, ed. Cerutti (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996).
- 133.
Rodolfo Ragionieri evokes the myth of community in connection to religious fundamentalisms in “Identità religiose, identità politica, conflitti,” in Identità e conflitti, ed. Furio Cerutti and D’Andrea.
- 134.
The expression is by Castells, The Power of Identity.
- 135.
While underlining the necessity for a balance between wall-identities and mirror-identities (‘produced above all by collectively operated individualization of values, of normative principles, of lifeforms and lifestyles, within which a group recognizes itself’), Cerutti upholds that this balance is broken when one of the two aspects prevails over the other, in particular: ‘the political identities defined for the most part by codes of separation and juxtaposition directed towards whatever is considered external are a special kind of identity, characterized by the enclosing wall that becomes the only mirror in which members of a group can recognize themselves.’ “Political Identity and Conflict: A Comparison of Definitions,” in Identities and Conflicts. The Mediterranean, ed Furio Cerutti and Rodolfo Ragionieri (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 15–16. Originally published as “Identità politiche e conflitti,” in Identità e conflitti, ed. Furio Cerutti and D’Andrea.
- 136.
Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 7.
- 137.
Farhad Khosrokhavar, “Le quasi-individu: de la néo-communauté à la nécro-communauté,” in Penser le sujet, ed. François Dubet and Michel Wieviorka (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
- 138.
Sennett, The Corrosion of Character.
- 139.
On this see also Cerutti, “Political Identity and Conflict”.
- 140.
While proposing a distinction between ‘constitutive community’ and elective community, Gorz does not save the communitarians (more Sandel than Walzer) from radical criticism: Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 123: ‘Sandel’s position (and that of de Benoist) leads quite simply to regarding it as legitimate for each community to close off its own sovereign space and recognize that the others have the right – and even the duty – to do the same. Communities would then co-exist alongside and external to one another, each defending its “politically correct” position and each accepting that the others do the same in their own specific spaces. This equates, ultimately, with a politics of “ethnic cleansing”.’
- 141.
Ibid., 120.
- 142.
Ibid., 120–21.
- 143.
This aspect is underlined in particular in Crespi, Identità e riconoscimento.
- 144.
See Thomas Scheff, “Emotions and Identity: A Theory of Ethnic Nationalism,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 281 according to whom, for example, nationalism arises ‘out of a sense of alienation, on the one hand, and resentment against unfair exclusion, whether political, economic, or social.’ On resentment as the base of terrorism, see also Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 12.
- 145.
Although I consent, with Bauman’s relative reservations to the legitimation of an indiscriminate right to difference, I do not agree with him (as should be clear from what I have said thus far) when he radically criticizes all forms of recognition based on self-realization and cultural identity to only approve those struggles falling within the picture of distributive justice, see Bauman, Community, chap. 6.
- 146.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 123. It is in this context that Gorz attacks the communitarians themselves (in particular Sandel) and their proposal of the constitutive community.
- 147.
Bauman, In Search of Politics, 20.
- 148.
See Part II.
- 149.
See Part I, Chap. 2.
- 150.
See Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.
- 151.
See Beck, Risk Society.
- 152.
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 213. Originally published as Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984).
- 153.
Bauman, In Search of Politics, 14.
- 154.
Paul Virilio, City of Panic (New York: Berg, 2005). Originally published as Ville panique. Ailleurs commence ici (Paris: Galilée, 2003).
- 155.
Bauman, In Search of Politics, 49.
- 156.
See Bauman, Community, chap. 8.
- 157.
See ibid., chap. 2.
- 158.
I will come back to this in Part III, Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.
- 159.
This does not mean that Touraine proposes a return to early modernity. While dissociating himself both from modernism and postmodernism, Touraine tries to ‘save the idea of modernity from both the conquering and brutal form it has been given by the West, and the crisis that has been affecting it for more than a century’, and proposes to ‘redefine modernity as a tense relationship between Reason and Subject, rationalization and subjectivation, the spirit of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation, between science and freedom’, starting from the assumption that ‘without Reason, the Subject is trapped in to an obsession with identity; without the Subject, Reason becomes an instrument of might.’ (Touraine, Critique of Modernity, 5–6).
- 160.
Ibid., 178; see in general ibid., chap. 5, 177ff.
- 161.
Ibid., 185.
- 162.
Ibid., 181.
- 163.
Castells, The Power of Identity; Castells, The Rise of Network Society.
- 164.
See Part III.
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Pulcini, E. (2013). Endogamous Communitarianism. In: Care of the World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4482-0_3
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