Beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self

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Beyond Individualism

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Beyond Individualism Reconstituting the Liberal Self

JACK CRITTENDEN

New York

Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1992

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crittenden, Jack. Beyond individualism : reconstituting the liberal self / Jack Crittenden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-507330-4 1. Liberalism. 2. Individualism. 3. Community. I. Title. JC571.C698 1992 320.5'12—dc20 91-34360

13579 8642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To my loving wife, Pat, And my great friend Ken: Both always knew I could do it; Neither thought I had to.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing this book was the only time I've ever enjoyed going into debt. The complete list of people from whom I have borrowed "capital" is too long to recount here. Several, however, deserve direct acknowledgment, which I do below. To all of my creditors, mentioned and not, I owe debts I can never repay. I hope they would all

agree that I have invested wisely with what I've borrowed. This book began to take shape, however inchoate, in conversations with my friend, and colleague at EARTthHWATCH, George McCully. It was he who also gav me a clear picture of the promises and perils of a life of scholarship, as well as kept up my flagging spirits as I undertook serious research. The venue for that research was Oxford University. While there I benefited from the teaching of Steven Lukes, Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, and John Gray. Rom Harre and Helen Weinreich-Haste, of the University of Bath, both helped with the psychology. To all of them I owe thanks for reading and encouraging my work. Thanks also to my D. Phil, examiners, Alan Ryan and Graeme Duncan, for a careful reading and a good grilling, and to Mimi Bick and Stephen Macedo, two members of our informal Oxford reading group. Thanks also to my Oxford compatriot Keith Grint who went wide of his own field to read the dissertation not once, but twice. I am especially indebted to my dissertation supervisor, David Miller. It was David more than anyone else who guided the work and who saved me on innumerable occasions from falling into traps of my own making, undetected by my own myopia. I reworked and expanded the dissertation into book form while teaching at Arizona State University. Here I have benefited from conversations with my colleague Rich Dagger, whose own work on community and autonomy gave and continue to give me plenty to think about. Rich read the entire manuscript and made helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Ruth Jones and Warren Miller, who as chair and acting chair, respectively, protected me from unwanted committee assignments and who generally created an atmosphere conducive to the research. Oxford University Press has been accommodating on virtually every front. My thanks go to Valerie Aubry and especially to Carole Solis-Cohen for paying careful attention and making the process remarkably smooth. Finally, I owe special thanks to five remarkable people. My sons Jordan, Todd, and Devin served throughout as constant distractions that mercifully kept me from overwork. Two other persons were instrumental to the entire, long process, but my debt to them extends well beyond this work. As a token return on their investment, I dedicate this book to them: to Pat Crittenden and Ken Wilber.


CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION, 3 I Behind Individualism 1. The Disposition of the Self, 13 Charles Taylor: The Disengaged Self Versus the Strong Evaluator, 14 Alasdair Maclntyre: Individualism Versus Narrative Unity, 21 Michael Sandel: The Unencumbered Self Versus the Socially Situated Self, 28 The Self as a Two-Track System, 34 2. The Theory of Compound Individuality, 38 Piaget's Cognitive Structures, 39 The Self-system: Process and Product, 42 Membership Versus Autonomy, 44 Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development, 52 Critiques of Kohlberg, 60 Liberal and Communitarian Selves Revisited, 63

II Beyond Individualism 3. Autonomous Selfhood: Individualism Versus Compound Individuality, 73 Defining Autonomy, 74 Individualism, 77 Contextualism and Compound Individuality, 82 Practicing Contextualism, 91 4. Political Participation: Self-development and Self-interest, 96 Participation as Cultivation of Character, 97 Mirroring: Habits of the Heart, 100 Empirical Support for Participation as Self-development, 104 Outcomes: Generating the Common Good, 108 Transforming Self-interests, 114 Rousseau's Self-interest Properly Understood, 117 Transcending Self-interest, 122 Why Obey? 124 5. Veneration of Community, 129 What Is Community? 130

Contents

x

Communitarians on Community, 135 Total Community, 137 Participation and Liberal Community, 142

III

Reconstituting the Liberal Self

6. Socrates in a Pluralistic Tradition, 149 Retrospective, 149 Modern or "New" Liberals, 154 A New Liberal Psychology, 160 The Bugbear of Relativism, 163 Liberal Virtues and the Good Life, 168 Liberal Politics, 172 Liberal Lessons from Communitarianism, 177

NOTES, 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY, 209 INDEX, 224



INTRODUCTION

Government, James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, "is the greatest of all reflections on human nature," and if we know what human nature is, then we can, as Edmund Burke suggested, adjust our politics to it. But political philosophers have held—for convenience, on principle, and fortuitously—various and conflicting conceptions of human nature. Current in political theory is a debate between philosophers holding such conflicting conceptions: liberals and communitarians. At issue is the image of human nature on which liberalism is built. From the communitarian perspective this image of, variously, the person, the individual, the agent, or the self, is faulty and dysfunctional. Humans are here conceived as monads protected by individual rights, with self-selected ends and interests, whose relationships and group memberships are entered voluntarily for the purpose of attaining these ends and advancing these interests, and whose standards for choice and judgment are rational and abstract and lie within. Each individual is therefore responsible both for what he does to others and for the life he creates. The generic term for all such descriptions, by liberals and communitarians alike, is individualism, Individualism is here and throughout this book synonymous with the term atomism, which Charles Taylor uses to convey much the same meaning. I shall use these two terms interchangeably. Therefore, the reader should be aware that in this book the term individualism is not synonymous with individuality, as in a simple contrast between the individual and the collectivity or in the sense of conveying that each of us has a unique personality. Rather, like atomism, individualism refers to the theory of society as constituted by individuals whose goal is to fulfill private ends, largely through relationships seen as instrumental, and whose principal characteristic is the possession of individual rights that have priority over societal needs.1 Perhaps it would be better simply to use the term atomism. But atomism is a less familiar term, less frequently used. In the political context just described, it is also a decidedly contemporary term. Thus lost to perspective is the history of the connection between liberalism and individualism.2 Many communitarians, of course, see this individualism as the heart of liberalism. They view the essential liberal self as having no constitutive identity whatsoever, no substance at all. Indeed, the ideal liberal self, in their view, is a totally unencumbered self, independent of any qualities or relationships or group affiliations that serve as boundaries or limits to and standards for identification. Liberty, then, is the liberal's goal and is the term that epitomizes liberalism, because liberals want no encumbrances, including reliance on other persons, when they choose values, beliefs, ends, and attachments. This makes the liberal self a kind of radically transcendent chooser, who operates according to purely abstract principles in ordering his life. 3

4

Introduction

This conception of the self is a target of all contemporary communitarians. There is, however, a question as to whether individualism is the self of liberalism and, if so, how much. There is, I think, enough individualism in liberalism and enough attention paid to the communitarian critique to suggest more than a passing resemblance between the liberal self and the unencumbered self.3 Although I shall have more to say on this subject throughout the text, this is not my principal focus. Rather than addressing that question directly or defending the liberal conception of the self, as has recently been done (see e.g., Gutmann, 1985; Kymlicka, 1988), I shall spend more time examining the nature of the communitarian alternative. My purpose in doing so is twofold: first, to point out in high relief where the communitarian conception itself is flawed and, second, to show how both this liberal conception and the communitarian conception are at best only half-truths. Thus I am not seeking to resolve the conflict between these two different conceptions of the self or to reconcile the liberal and communitarian positions. As I hope to show, such an attempted reconciliation is for liberals neither necessary nor a good idea. Instead, my goal is to transcend the debate by using the liberal and communitarian positions as a context for introducing a new and better theory of the self, one that has important political implications. This new theory of the self, this new view of human nature, is derived from recent work in developmental psychology. The theory consists of two parts, only the first of which I shall discuss immediately. The first part is a theory about selfdevelopment. Developmental psychology—and the theories therein based on empirical data—shows that humans develop through stages of selfhood that are qualitatively different. Each stage reflects an innate cognitive and linguistic structure. As successive innate structures unfold, each self-stage is replaced by a more "comprehensive" self that manifests this "new" and more advanced innate structure but also contains the qualities of the previous innate structures. These selfstages are, therefore, historically and existentially contingent, for they depend on the circumstances through which the innate structures unfold. All of this will be explained in detail in subsequent chapters. Developmental psychology, then, shows self-development to be a form of psychological movement through these various stages of the self. Because each unfolding innate structure incorporates the qualities of the preceding structures, as well as adds something not found at those earlier levels, each successive structure is a compound of those preceding it. Accordingly, I refer to this psychological theory as the theory of compound individuality. The significance of this theory and its approach to understanding the self—especially for liberalism and communitarianism—will be laid out in Chapter 2 and subsequent chapters, but it is important to note at this point that the theory permits us, to paraphrase Rousseau, to distinguish between the variety of human nature and the essentials of it. This distinction is also relevant to understanding how I view and present the idea, and the goal, of self-development. Political philosophers are skillful at inventing identity conundra and exotic examples whereby they speculate on the nature of selfhood. Yet few have looked at the empirical evidence on selfhood and self-development available in psychology. I use developmental psychology as the basis for a theory of the self that, as Hegel

Introduction

5

said, "negates but preserves" not only the conceptions of the self of individualism and communitarianism but also the images of "man" present in the most persistent theories of human nature.4 I do, therefore, what Steve Smith claimed is rarely done in applying theories of human nature to politics, namely, justifying a theory of human nature "by reference to empirical criteria" (Forbes & Smith, 1983, p. 2). This, I think, is worthwhile and appropriate. If theories or philosophies about human nature and about politics are interactive, then theories of psychology are interactive, or should be, with political theory. The theory of compound individuality presents the reader with a body of psychological literature and empirical data heretofore little explored in political theory. It is important to both psychology and political theory, however, that this be done. Although it is true that "without the conjunction of empirical knowledge and theoretical speculation, the enterprise [of political theory] is doomed," it is also true that psychologists can learn much from the endeavors of political theorists (Spitz, 1970, p. 425). The second part of this new theory of the self deals with another aspect of the term compound. In the theory of compound individuality, the self—reflecting the innate structures at the prior level as well as its own level—is a compound in the hierarchy of self-development. It is also true that at the developmental level where individuality arises—the level of self-development characterized by autonomy—the self can be a compound in a different sense. Here personal identity is constituted by both individual autonomy and constitutive relationships. The person is constituted by an independent self and by other selves. She is therefore a compound individual. It is to this level that the theory of compound individuality points; it is this compound self that is the reconstituted liberal self and is the self beyond individualism; and it is this self that is the focus of the book. The chapters are organized in the following way: In Chapter 1, I present the communitarian critique of the atomistic, or individualistic, version of the liberal self. I accept the communitarian critique of individualism (though not committing fully to the notion that the liberal self is truly atomistic) because it is powerful and because I want to work with, or through, the two most dominant notions of the self in contemporary political theory—the unencumbered self and the communitarian socially situated self. I also argue throughout the book that individualism is at base, and at least, a major theoretical construct of and problem for most liberal theories. In this first chapter, however, I concentrate on the critiques of three prominent communitarians: Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Michael Sandel. Already difficulties arise, for although Maclntyre and Sandel have expressed clear antiliberal sentiments, Charles Taylor directs his criticisms against aspects of modernity more than against liberalism. These criticisms, of course, implicate parts of liberalism, the political theory par excellence of modernity, and so I include Taylor here. I sort out in the section on Taylor what his position on liberalism seems to be. The arguments here against liberalism are discussed in conjunction with the communitarians' very different conception of human nature or self. This chapter is therefore largely exegetical, and it may seem to some that it fails to explore much new ground. But no one to my knowledge has undertaken such a focused examination of the socially situated self of the communitarians. The details of my discussion

6

Introduction

are necessary to establish two main points. First, I conclude that the endemic problems in the communitarian conception of the self prohibit that conception from being an acceptable alternative to individualism; the problems either condemn modern citizens to a restrictive community or recapitulate the very flaws that the communitarians find in the liberal self.5 Second, and perhaps more important, the discussion enables me to introduce the alternative model of the self that transcends the conceptions of the unencumbered and the socially situated selves. This model is the subject of Chapter 2. In this chapter I continue the argument that the liberal and communitarian selves are half-truths, each masquerading as the whole truth. Developmental psychology shows two distinct stages of self that pertain directly to the liberal-communitarian debate. One stage is a "membership" self, which roughly corresponds to the communitarian model, in which the self is largely defined by its social milieu. The other stage is the "autonomous" self, which corresponds to the liberal self. The autonomous self is seen to be an independent chooser, operating according to principles of rationality. This autonomous self supersedes the membership self. The fit between these stages of self and the liberal and communitarian models is not, however, exact. To try to see them as exact would be disastrous, as I explain in Chapter 2. But we still want to know how similar the liberal self is to the autonomous self, because it appears that this autonomous self is also the self of individualism, the atomistic self that is independent of its ends and relationships and that needs no other persons to make its decisions. This is the self that the communitarians criticize. If the communitarians have a point in their criticisms of liberal individualism, then is there some aspect of individualism or of autonomy that liberals ought to, and can, retain and defend? I think that there is, and I answer this question in Chapter 3. The communitarians, as discussed in Chapter 1, do seem to have a point, if not a strong argument. How attractive and realistic is a self without any necessary attributes, without any essential relationships with or attachments to others? People, argue the communitarians, are defined in part by their communities, by their communal attachments, norms, and standards. Yet the communitarian enterprise, as I point out, is to find the combination that provides both autonomy and constitutive community. But can one have autonomy if even part of one's life, even part of one's self-definition, is preordained by community values? And if one is autonomous, can that person be so without jettisoning those social aspects of life that make life meaningful and intimate? Can we be autonomous selves and also be constituted by our clan, tribe, social customs, or community? Autonomy requires us to be separate from such ties; indeed, it might even require us to be self-sufficient. Are we then at an impasse—attracted to two possible conceptions of the self that are mutually exclusive? We are not. One of the errors made by some liberal philosophers and also by some critics of liberalism is to assume that autonomy requires self-sufficiency and that this, especially when described as liberty, is the liberal goal. So I begin Chapter 3 with a definition of autonomy and go on to show that autonomy as self-sufficiency is required only by individualism, by atomists. There is, however, a stage of self beyond individualism, a stage that I have described as compound individuality. As

Introduction

7

mentioned, a person at this stage cannot define himself without referring to both his autonomy and certain of his relationships. This combination brings together the liberal emphasis on autonomy and the communitarian emphasis on constitutive attachments. Chapter 3 thus concludes with a discussion of the self as compound individuality. The self as compound individuality would seem to reconcile liberalism and communitarianism. But it does not, at least not as either of those "camps" exists today. In order to embrace compound individuality both camps would have to modify their current positions. Communitarians would have to surrender the idea of constitutive communities while preserving the idea of constitutive relationships. Liberals would have to surrender any vestige of autonomy as self-sufficiency. These ideas are discussed in Chapter 3 and are considered again in Chapters 5 and 6. The focus of the final three chapters of the book is the alternative perspective of compound individuality and why it constitutes a better way of being and living and thus constitutes a more attractive self. The question to pursue then becomes, How can societies, especially liberal democratic societies, move toward compound individuality? In chapter 4 I suggest that the answer lies in participation, especially— but not only—in political participation. Built into participation must be the principles of "contextualist thinking," which is a characteristic of compound individuals and another appropriation from developmental psychology. The essence of this participation must be dialogue: not only the probing of positions to air and scrutinize the arguments behind them but also the taking up of others' positions to explain and understand them. Such dialogue would lead to the creation on each issue of a pool of perspectives from which to draw a common decision or a compound common good. These new participatory structures, which I call the generative procedures or generative participation, would have two effects. First, they would require those who participate to transcend temporarily their own self-interests. I argue that this cannot be accomplished, as communitarians often contend, through exhortations to "think of the public interest." Rather, the mechanism for this temporary transcendence must be built into the procedures. This means that those who participate will agree to accept a decision not simply because they have participated in a fair procedure, which is true and often all that liberals argue, but also because they see that their own views, which have lost out, have been taken fully into account. Second, the requirement of "transcending self-interest" might have a positive effect on the individual. Participating in these contextualist procedures may create a sense of group solidarity. More important, because contextualism requires openness and an integrative approach, which will be explained in Chapters 3 and 4, it mimics the characteristics of compound individuality and may foster development to that new level of self. The effect, therefore, of generative participation would be both personal and political. Again, the call is not simply for greater participation and more dialogue in decision making. That would be commonplace. It is, instead, a call for active citizen participation that has not only private benefits—that is, enhances selfdevelopment—but also public benefits—that is, leads to decisions that have greater agreement among participants or even leads to a "common good" with which all

8

Introduction

can agree. The demand in liberal societies, therefore, is to foster in politics, in the workplace, and/or in professional, social, and educational settings those participatory procedures that provide these conditions. If participation of this sort can promote development beyond individualism to a self constituted by autonomy and attachments, can it also produce the kind of constitutive community that communitarians consider fundamental to a meaningful life and personal identity and that they also see as absent from liberalism? This question is considered in Chapter 5. First, I analyze what the term community means and ought to mean. The conclusion from this analysis is that constitutive community comes at a price too high even for communitarians. They escape this conclusion themselves by remaining vague about the nature of community. But if communitarians themselves cannot accept community, then what can they accept? What is it they want? They want, I believe, strong associations, which liberalism, by introducing generative participation into its myriad of associations, can provide. Beyond that, communitarians want a self constituted by relationships but not, as communitarians have claimed, constituted by community. If they want constitutive relationships, then compound individuality provides that as well as personal autonomy. Therein lies the fulfillment of the communitarian enterprise. Liberalism can offer this fulfillment. It can provide compound individuality through its openness to diversity of opinion and through a stronger emphasis on participation, a reconstituted participation. In short, liberalism can continue to honor personal autonomy while reconciling it with sociality. Indeed, liberals are not strangers to this seemingly communitarian enterprise, as it has been the liberal enterprise since the turn of the century. This I discuss in Chapter 6. Yet liberals have fared little better than the communitarians have in their endeavor, because liberals too have often tried for constitutive community and not constitutive relationships. Compound individuality is therefore the goal of liberals. It is, as I argue in this final chapter, the liberal self. Liberalism in this view is concerned centrally with self-development. The liberal self is a self beyond individualism, a self constituted by autonomy and relationships. It is also a democratic self, a self conditioned by and expressed through participatory decision making built on dialogue and contextual thinking. In this way liberalism helps us attain human capacities essential to our well-being, to our living good lives. These human capacities are those central to compound individuality, available only through this kind of liberalism. These capacities—and I say more about liberal values and virtues in Chapter 6—form the framework within which the liberal good life is pursued. But they do not determine in a comprehensive way the specific ends or nature of the good life. People could choose, for example, to live in a monastery or a bordello and, providing that they remain autonomous, could live as compound individuals. For as a political philosophy, liberalism is first committed not to any particular ways of life, religions, traditions, or communities but, rather, to procedures for the proper choosing of such ways of life and all they involve. Those procedures include both individual autonomy for making good choices and public modes of argument for scrutinizing those choices. Liberal citizens need what communitarian William Sullivan called a "public philosophy": a "coherent public political discourse adequate

Introduction

9

to the complexities of social and political life" (1982, p. 9). In our society, the "common consensus is always in some measure the achievement of an active process of discussion and persuasion among involved citizens" (W. Sullivan, 1982, p. 9). This is not only a democratic process but also a liberal democratic process. The chief concern of this book, therefore, is to move liberalism toward a reconstituted self by introducing a new and better conception of the self. This self transcends the unencumbered and socially situated models while preserving what is most appealing about each: personal autonomy on the one hand and constitutive relationships on the other. Concomitant with this concern is the need to explore (1) what autonomy entails; (2) how a form of politics using "generative procedures" can foster the development of or to this new self; (3) why constitutive relationships are not the same as and are more desirable than constitutive community; and, perhaps most significant, (4) how this new self—compound individuality—is the backbone, the true self, of liberalism. Only such a reconstituted self can do justice to the power and importance of the liberal tradition by rescuing it from the claims of libertarian individualism on the one side and the strength of communitarian criticisms on the other. Liberals should thank communitarians for the help they have offered in undermining any liberal reliance on individualism. Individualism, as I hope to demonstrate, is a concept fraught with difficulties. It is not the conception of self that liberalism ought or needs to use. Yet neither is the communitarian conception. The liberal self is the self beyond individualism, the self reconstituted as compound individuality. To reconstitute liberalism to reflect and foster this self requires institutional change. For such changes, both liberals and communitarians, having been straightened out on the nature of individualism, should undoubtedly plead.


I Behind Individualism


1 The Disposition of the Self Communitarian critiques first began during the Renaissance, when individuality became more of a "virtue" and less a vice. Since that time communitarians have lamented the collapse of community, those bonds of fellowship and solidarity that come from intimately sharing a way of life that both expresses and reinforces a common understanding or worldview. Yet today's communitarians differ from their predecessors, even those as recent as the 1950s.1 Then communitarians attacked modernity; today many attack liberalism. They do so for good reason: The contemporary critics may recognize the benefits of modernity—for example, greater longevity, reduced poverty—but they decry the liberal systems that spawn them. Those systems, they argue, are built on a dangerous illusion: a conception of the self that has either faulty foundations or no foundations at all. Communitarians see this modern liberal conception as fundamentally different from the conceptions of self of traditional societies. Originally the linchpin of seventeenth-century English political theory, the liberal conception centers on the assumption that every man is the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities and as such owes nothing to society for them. Such individualism was asserted to provide the justification for fundamental civil liberties, which were conceived as an individual's private property. Communitarians think this individualism the core of modern liberalism.2 The leitmotif of the communitarians is that individualism fragments and destroys deep, meaningful relationships by conceiving of men as socially independent atoms without obligations to society or to others, except if such obligations suit them. Relationships and community ties are thus entered into voluntarily. The communitarians unite around the opposite view: An individual's life cannot be defined or understood either prior to or apart from a definition of the community life each person is born into and whose rules and descriptions he lives by and shares with others. Thus the moral interests of individuals cannot be reduced to individual interests but must be deduced from communal interests. These communal interests can be criticized, but only from within. Each community is therefore sovereign in how it generates its interests and worldview. Consequently, the communitarians and the liberal individualists that they criticize manifest profound differences over questions about the nature of selfhood, the place of community in developing identity, and the meaning and significance of freedom and social obligation. At issue here are not merely two theories of selfhood but also, as Alasdair Maclntyre intimated, the specifications of two almost entirely 13

14

Behind Individualism

different ways of life (1981, p. 118). Thus, "it is not surprising," writes Charles Taylor, "that the two sides talk past each other" (1985c, p. 209). To understand more thoroughly why this is so, I shall examine the theories of the self of three prominent communitarian critics: Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Michael Sandel.

Charles Taylor: The Disengaged Self Versus the Strong Evaluator Recently the two sides were at least able to talk to each other. Charles Taylor and Ernest Gellner represented the two sides in a conversation on the costs of modernity broadcast by the BBC.3 Gellner offered this summary of the two divisive positions: There are two kinds of self. They are the premodern self, which is part of the cosmos, where the environment—social and natural—makes a kind of meaningful whole. This whole is described and articulated in the same terms [used] to describe the self, so that life is part of a continuum. . . . Then there is the modem self, which is not part of the cosmos but of what [Taylor] calls nature, where nature is an impersonal, orderly system in no way designed on the same principles as man himself ... in no way underwriting his aims and his values. Now the difference in our attitudes—Taylor's and mine—lies not in this description. It is that I think this modern, rather lonely, not underwritten, unlegitimated, isolated self is an inescapable price of the cognitive advances by which we live.

Taylor responded to this summary by acknowledging both its general accuracy and the nature of the disagreement between the two theorists. He then amplified his own position: While I agree that we cannot look backward to cosmological views [of the sixteenth century] I think there is a profound truth underlying that view, that the hunger [to belong to a larger cosmic order] is not all wrong. That is, that in order to understand ourselves we have to see ourselves as part of a larger order ... to understand ourselves expressively requires that we acknowledge that.

Especially interesting in this exchange, beyond the succinct summation of the two antithetical positions, is not the disagreement but the agreement between the two. Taylor and Gellner agree that these descriptions capture the essential features of the two conceptions of the self; both agree that the modern self has eclipsed the premodern self; and both agree that this modern self is unappealing.4 The basis of the disagreement rests, then, on Taylor's assertion that something like the premodern view is vital to our self-understanding. Aspects of the premodern self should be restored, for although modern man lives as though he does not need such a self, he cannot live well without it. Simply put, Taylor's position is that because selfhood is ineluctably a social product, people must form their identities around a commitment to community, to the social matrix that gives rise to individuality. If people do not base their identity and understanding on that foundation, then some force will provide such a foundation for them, which is evident today in the forces of religious fundamentalism and blind nationalism. People cannot do without community, whether reflective or imposed (see Taylor, 1985c, pp. 248-88).

The Disposition of the Self

15

Indeed, the story of the development of the modern self, according to Taylor, is the story of the distancing of the person from the community. It occurred in three phases (1985a). In the first phase the person is conceived of as "an interlocutor" who converses with others in the community in some "special" or public space. The standards and ends of the community, to which all accede, are established in these conversations, but the sources and ends themselves are derived from an objective cosmological or ontological order. Through the conversations of his culture about the demands of this order the person comes to know himself, the kind of person he is. In the second phase a person still knows himself in conversation and according to standards that exist outside himself and in the social order. Now, however, the social order and his place in it are derived from an objective order that is accessed not by looking without (or upward) but by looking within. This inward turn was emphasized by Augustine,5 and so the quintessential example of this is early Christianity. Here the conversations about the ecclesiastical and celestial order that generated the social standards could not only be dispersed and yet thought to be ecumenical, but they were also known through introspection—or what Taylor calls "reflexivity." The final phase, characteristic of modern individualism, is the "interiorization of personhood"6 and the conception of the person as a monad. Here a person's standards are not founded, as in traditional societies, on cosmology or social hierarchy but are now situated within man himself. That interiorization results from regarding the capacities that once flowed out of a public order as inherent in man's own nature. In Sources of the Self Taylor details this "internalizing move of modern humanism" (1989b, p. 94). He moves from Plato, for whom the illumination of the order of being was found externally in the realm of the Forms; through Augustine, the initiator of the use of "radical reflexivity,"7 which we use to return to God, who is external to us but whom we approach and come to know inwardly; and on to Descartes and then Locke, both of whom situated the moral standards and sources within us. With this last move teleology was rejected; the universe became a mere mechanism; the great chain of being was sundered; and the focus of our attention shifted from any public order to the contents of our minds as the source of our being and for the knowledge of what is real. Internalization was complete. This is our modern identity. Taylor refers to modern man as the "disengaged" self, the self-defining atomist able to objectify the world and to determine his own purposes or find them in his own desires. Human ends and the standards to judge them by are seen as "discoverable by objective scrutiny, or else as autonomously chosen" (1989b, p. 113). And it is Descartes more than any other philosopher who is responsible for this move to "disengage." In place of hierarchic ontology Descartes forcefully argued for intrapsychic ontology. What we are is what we think; one's essential being is therefore immaterial. To understand this requires disengaging from the material—our bodies—and identifying with the immaterial—our minds (Taylor, 1989b, chap. 8). So seeing the proper place of the body and the senses required a "disengaged perspective." "Where the Platonic soul realized its eternal nature by becoming absorbed in the supersensible, the Cartesian discovered and affirmed his immaterial

16


nature by objectifying the bodily" (Taylor, 1989b, p. 146). To objectify the body meant, and means, to separate it from subjectivity; mind, not matter, is our essential nature. Because mind is now separate from matter, it is also separate from the cosmos, as the universe of matter. "The cosmos is no longer seen as the embodiment of meaningful order which can define the good for us" (1989b, p. 149). No longer able to situate himself in or feel himself a part of a greater whole, modern man now justifies society in utilitarian, or instrumentalist, terms. Relationships and society in general are mechanisms valuable only as instruments in the quest for personal fulfillment. The person is "metaphysically independent of society" (Taylor, 1985c, p. 83). Here is the contribution of Locke. The ideal is now of a person "able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action" (1989b, p. 159). That requires taking a disengaged or instrumental stance both from nature and matter and also from one's own properties, desires, thoughts, and inclinations. When one disengages from these, then such attributes "can be worked on, doing away with some and strengthening others" (1989b, p. 159). Such a view of the person, says Taylor, has a twofold effect. First, it deprives the person of the capacity for deep self-understanding. One can come to know himself only "against a [communal] background, fitting into this [larger] whole. I must acknowledge my belonging before I can understand myself" (1985c, p. 257). This sense of belonging is precisely what modern society fails to provide. A society built on the theory of the disengaged self leaves its members "in confusion, self-delusion, in the dark" (1985c, p. 257), because the "roots of our identity [are] in community" (1987, p. 481), and there our standards and moral sources will be located in a public, though not to say a cosmological, order. Second, hidden from view in such a liberal interpretation of the person—liberal, because it is here that we find Locke's "punctual self," as Taylor calls it—is the essential fact that those capacities that make one a human being can be developed only within society, only, as Aristotle observed, through social and political intercourse. Man is constituted by the language and culture of his community. Without social conversation, which the disengaged self no longer needs, man loses the very capacities that make him a person. In Taylor's view, to be a person one must first be an agent. An agent "is a being with consciousness, where consciousness is seen as a power to frame representations of things." Agents also have "the wherewithal to reply when addressed, because they respond out of their own representation of the world and their situation" (1985b, p. 98). Yet these qualities do not constitute personhood. Responding and having an original point of view are something that all agents can do. Animals, says Taylor, have individual purposes and points of view. Rather, to be a person "requires some kind of reflexive awareness of the standards one is living by (or failing to live by.)" So a person is an agent "who has a sense of self, of his/her own life, who can evaluate it, and make choices about it. This is the basis of the respect we owe persons" (1985b, p. 103). To diminish someone's capacity to understand himself, to interfere with his evaluation and choice, is to deny the injunction to respect him as a person. But surely the modern liberal does not deny that injunction. Indeed, the evaluation and choice of one's own life plans, to say nothing of noninterference, are principal parts of liberal individualism.


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For Taylor, however, that kind of understanding does not go far enough; it is not the sort of choice and evaluation that he has in mind. "The essence of evaluation no longer consists in assessment in the light of fixed goals, but also and even more in the sensitivity to certain standards, those involved in the peculiarly human goals" that exist outside the individual. "The sense of self is the sense of where one stands in relation to these standards" (1985b, p. 105). But this evaluation the Lockean liberal, with his standards self-generated, cannot perform. The liberal can evaluate and act on those evaluations, but his reflection lacks "depth" (Taylor, 1976, p. 287). He can choose the best means to his ends—for example, which kind of career will bring him the most money—but he cannot evaluate the nature of the ends themselves or the relation of those ends to the kind of person he is. With all standards private and within, this self is without any method of evaluating his ends other than identifying what he prefers and how he can attain that. Thus although both the premodern and modern selves are capable of evaluation, the disengaged or punctual self can be only "a simple weigher of alternatives," a utilitarian or weak evaluator for whom problems, desires, and preferences are seen only in terms of the quality of satisfaction derived from a choice. A strong evaluator, on the other hand, utilizes a "vocabulary of worth"; that is, one evaluates desires in terms of their being nobler, higher, better, or whatever than others, according to a standard provided by an overall way of life or worldview. When one asks, Who am I? one finds that at the center of identity are "certain strong evaluations" inherent in oneself (Taylor, 1976, p. 34). These are qualities or ends that one values or that one believes must be valued "since they are so integrally a part of [him] that to disvalue them would be to reject" oneself. Stripped of these the person would not simply be plunged into psychic chaos, into the gloom of identity crisis, but would "lose the very possibility of being an agent who evaluates" (1976, p. 34). While still an agent, this self is no longer a person, for personhood hinges on "the ability to adhere to certain evaluations." That ability is "impossible outside the horizon of these essential evaluations" (1976, p. 35). When the ability is lost, we do not lose only our personal identities; we also lose our identity as persons. Thus strong evaluations are essential both as contents of identity and as a framework, an "indispensable horizon or foundation out of which we reflect and evaluate as persons." Without that framework I do not know who I am. I cannot know who I am. The disengaged self of liberalism, with no horizon of evaluation, is thus without both identity and boundary. That self is really no self but "is a kind of extensionless point, a pure leap into the void." Such a self is "another avatar of that recurrent figure which our civilization aspires to realize, the disembodied ego, the subject who can objectify all being, including his own, and choose in radical freedom" (Taylor, 1976, p. 35). The result of such a view, Taylor asserts, is dual alienation. We alienate ourselves from society by defining ourselves independent of and without obligations to it, and in that definition we deprive ourselves of the capacity to know or interpret ourselves in our richest sense. Taylor calls the attempts to determine what is really important in one's life "interpretations." The human animal "not only finds himself impelled from time to time to interpret himself and his goals, but [also finds] that he is always already in some interpretation." We are self-interpreting beings within a horizon of evalua-

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tions. As such, we are constantly open to new insights about who we are. "Within the limits of my capacity to change myself by fresh insight ... I am responsible in the full direct 'modern' sense for my evaluations" (1976, p. 75). The limits of that capacity, and thus of one's identity, are set by language and common discourse, the conversations of one's culture (1985a, p. 276). Yet no one, says Taylor, not even we moderns, can be without a horizon of evaluations. The problem with internalization of personhood and the disengaged perspective that is concomitant with it is that it leads us to forget that something within us still functions as a constitutive good, as a horizon, as a moral orientation. The premodern articulation of constitutive goods—what makes us the persons we are and makes life worthwhile and "good"—continues in us through "something analogous" (Taylor, 1989b, p. 95) to that articulation. Through disengagement, however, the recognition of and relation to this "something" may be lost, but it cannot be eradicated. Persons cannot be without a framework of strong evaluations. To make sense of their lives people will "relate their story to a greater pattern of history, as the realization of a good ... or that of the Progress of mankind, or the coming Revolution, or the building of a peaceful world, or the retrieval and continuance of our national culture" (1989b, p. 97). From a disengaged perspective, a person has difficulty recognizing the horizon or framework. So, for example, with standards internalized what are the sources of morality? There are two, according to Taylor. First is that the moral horizon lies within the agent's own powers of rationality. The paradigmatic spokesman for this view is Kant. Second is the view that the moral horizon lies in the depths of nature and the order of things, but as those are reflected within the person. So contact with the order of things is through our own desires, sentiments, affinities. The paradigmatic spokesmen here are those who reacted to both Descartes and Kant—the Romantic poets (Taylor, 1989b, p. 314). The problem is that for both Kantians and the Romantic poets the result of internalization is increasing subjectivism. Therefore, the constitutive good for both, the basis of morality for both, is called into question. Internalization renders problematic any of the normative concepts central to Kantians: personal dignity, persons as ends, categorical imperatives, happiness, universal good, and so forth. For the Romantics internalization undercuts the basis of morality by leaving us captive to our own feelings. Although we understand the natural order through the voice of nature within us, that voice speaks only to us, so that nature is always mediated by someone's personal vision. So although an important relationship is established between physical nature and our own nature of being (Taylor, 1989b, p. 371), the articulation of nature expressed through the poem or the painting is always "her" or "his" vision, not yours or ours. Truths about the nature of reality or human nature are unique to each person. This, says Taylor, leads to the idea that not just the articulations but even the paths to them are unique. Then it appears "that the good life for you is not going to be the same as the good life for me; each of us has our own calling" (1989b, p. 375). Internalization of personhood thus puts us moderns in a predicament: Our moral sources are now ontologically diverse (Taylor, 1989b, p. 401), as the saying goes: "To each his own." The diversity of sources then translates into a loss of community


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and its public order of references. "The individual has been taken out of a rich community life and now enters instead into a series of mobile, changing, revocable associations" (1989b, p. 502). It is the "conversation of a community . . . [that] provides the language by which we draw our background distinctions. . . . The self-interpretations which define [a person] are drawn from the interchange which the community carries on" (Taylor, 1985b, p. 8). The disengaged self might participate in what he calls a community or association, but with standards inside each self, such groups are at best aggregations of similar individuals pursuing their individual interests, though in concert. Without a "rich" community the modern self is therefore without a grounded, secure identity. The way out of the predicament is to regain for modern man the sense of rootedness and the fact of social constitution that were lost in the transition from premodern to modern society. But Taylor also wants to retain the modern ability found in our turn within to transcend the communal view by reflecting on "any quite innovative set of categories in which to see [his] predicament" that might cause "a gestalt shift in [his] view of the situation" (1985b, p. 40). At the very least, man needs such autonomy lest he become trapped in the absolutist, exclusivist worldviews reminiscent of the cosmological phase of self-development and that today characterize the worldviews of religious fundamentalism and fanatic nationalism. Therefore, to escape the rigidity of boundaries emblematic of the cosmological orders and to avoid the absurdities of unconditional disengagement, the modern self must somehow touch down in a middle phase, located in a public order of articulated preferences but able to transcend the communal conversation in which that articulation occurs. This means that a "publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings," as informed the lives of the ancients, is today "an impossibility" (Taylor, 1989b, p. 512), if only because such an order denied, and denies, to the modern self an examined version of that order (1989b, p. 504). At the same time, any such cosmic order "which could claim to define substantially our paradigm purposes as rational beings" (1989b, p. 395) would jeopardize the positive aspects of modern identity: the ideal of moral benevolence, the call for universal concern, the moral appeal to universal justice. Here is the trade-off, the price of modernity, as Ernest Gellner might say: We want to keep and reinforce such universal imperatives, but their sources are the powers of disengaged reason and of creative imagination, sources that are not only internal but also thereby personal. These are our own powers. When powers are seen as our own, subjectivism is almost ineluctably the result. Then "we cannot separate what is manifested from the medium which we have created to reveal it." So it is difficult to say, therefore, "what is being celebrated: the deep recesses beyond or below the subject, or the subject's uncanny powers" (Taylor, 1989b, p. 429). What Taylor seeks is a careful balance between personal autonomy—the ability to stand back reflectively from our communal conversation, though not so far back as to step into some abstract awareness without attribute or into some positionless position—and a public order of standards and evaluations. In Sources of the Self Taylor claims that we need for this balancing a form of retrieval (1989b, p. 520) and

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that what is retrieved must fit in with modern identity. Clearly, Taylor does not want to surrender the powerful demands for justice, equality, freedom, and beneficience made possible in the modern era through liberalism, broadly defined, and the ideological reactions to it. And this makes Taylor's positions neither antiliberal nor antimodern, for the predicament he sees—the inward turn to the personal and the concomitant loss of the external, public order that roots identity in community— does not have liberalism at its center, though the roots of the predicament grow out of liberalism. Rather, at the center of our predicament is the disengaged instrumental mode of reasoning often associated with, but not confined to, liberalism. So Taylor's target is not necessarily liberalism; it is instead this disengaged instrumental reason whose habitat is any society resting on capitalist, commercial, technological, and bureaucratic institutions. These are modern societies, devoid of traditional community. Because of that, they fragment life and destroy for its inhabitants any meaning deeper than instrumentality. Although such societies may not be liberal, they will be atomistic; that is, they will be societies with a focus on individuals as social isolates, as individualists. Moreover, Taylor objects not to modernity and its defining inward turn but to the modern turn within that results in moral sources either limited by disengaged reason or limited to creative imagination. To offset or balance this, what is it that Taylor thinks we need to retrieve? We need to revivify, to retrieve, "a public order that ... is available unmediated by our powers of creative articulation" (1989b, p. 427) and that does not rely solely on disengaged reason. It would be "a publicly established order of references. . . . These are matters on which we will not normally have formulated a belief; not because we doubt them, but because we're too busy relying on them." These form "the tacit background of objects of reliance" (1989b, p. 491). Right here we can see our present predicament—our lack of publicly established references—but a predicament for Taylor as well. The tacit background is what modern autonomous persons will wish to make explicit. This is in part the thrust of liberalism. Letting the background remain tacit subjects us to guidance by standards and references beyond both examination and control. The standards would not only be unmediated by creative articulation but possibly unmediated by any articulation. The predicament for Taylor is how to retain aspects of modern identity with this kind of public order, especially when bringing such an order or background under the intense light of scrutiny makes the objects of reliance shrink, if not disappear. So how do we reconcile the modern power of autonomy with the need for this tacit background? Where do we find, how do we establish, external sources and standards alongside personal autonomy? Taylor provides some clues at the conclusion of Sources of the Self, though he admits that these are nothing more than assertions. He sees the retrieval of the public order and its reconciliation with modern identity as linked with Judeo-Christian theism. We must, he says, try to honor both our "highest spiritual aspirations" and the realization that these have led historically to acts of savagery, mutilation, and destruction. This history, he continues, is our greatest challenge, for it is not a foregone conclusion that the Judeo-Christian theism—the focus and traditional


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articulation of these spiritual aspirations—must result in mutilation. That theism also has the central promise of a divine affirmation of the human (1989b, pp. 52021). And that affirmation might redeem our inward turn from the endless spinning of creative imagination and from groundless individualism founded on disengaged reason.8 We might summarize the modern predicament as a problem of reconciling personal autonomy with community. Autonomy encapsulates the ideas of disengaged reason—"radical reflexivity"—and creative imagination—the "capacity to change myself by fresh insight" (Taylor, 1976, p. 75)—and the ability to transcend a particular conceptual structure "by invention of new concepts" (1985c, p. 152). Community expresses the idea of the public order unmediated by creative articulation indexed to a personal vision. The goal is to find the way to balance, even combine, the two. But as we shall see, the same predicament arises in the theories of Alasdair Maclntyre and Michael Sandel. Indeed, the desire to reconcile, balance, or combine community and individual autonomy is the fundamental difficulty in most communitarian critiques.9

Alasdair Maclntyre: Individualism Versus Narrative Unity Like Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre also sees three phases in the history of the self, and, likewise, the history is characterized by the increasing distance between self and community. But unlike Taylor, Maclntyre has taken an intellectual route that puts him decidedly in a position that is both antimodern and antiliberal. During the "Maclntyrean" first phase of the self, that of the "Homeric" or "heroic" society, membership in a variety of social groups established individual identity. One was known "as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no 'I' apart from these" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 172). These memberships were not voluntarily entered into or chosen. Instead, the relationships and roles of each person were fixed by the circumstances into which each was born, for the stratification of society mirrored the stratification of nature, which mirrored the stratification of the cosmos. The fact that a man was a role rather than held a role gave each person an identity secured in a place sanctioned by both the society and the cosmos. To attempt to withdraw from one's given roles would be "an enterprise of trying to make himself disappear" (1981, p. 126). Within these prescribed statuses every man had a telos, an innate function or purpose, that was to fulfill his social roles. Just as roles placed and defined one's life in the cosmic scheme, so the fulfillment of duties and responsibilities associated with those roles determined the worth of one's life. How well one fulfilled these roles was not a matter of individual judgment; the criteria of role performance came with the role, not with the man. In this teleology, says Maclntyre, evaluative claims were factual claims. To call a man "good" was to make a provable statement about his character, for he was good according to how he performed in his roles; good, that is, according to the objective impersonal criteria attached to each role (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 84). Yet,

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Maclntyre claims, a change occurred in this teleology in fifth-century Athens. A new self emerged, one also established in social roles and a moral objective order outside the self, but one that could now call the self into question. The distinction between the Homeric or heroic self and this Athenian or Aristotelian self rested, then, on the distance between the self and its social roles. No longer was the self nothing but the social roles it had inherited. Now "the self, as distinct from its roles, [had] a history and a social history . . . intelligible as the end product of a long and complex set of developments" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 31). The Aristotelian self still had a telos—to move toward and achieved eudaimonia, a whole life lived well. The means for achieving this telos were the virtues, which also served to define, in part, a life lived well. Men had a set of roles to fulfill in accordance with the telos, but whereas the Homeric self was embedded in its roles, the Aristotelian self was embedded in the pursuit of the good. Although in the Homeric society the cosmic order dictated the place of each person in a hierarchy of social roles, in the Athenian society it dictated the place of each virtue. Thus the pursuit of the good provided choices among the roles within the boundaries of the hierarchy of virtues. The ordering of roles was now open to choice and question, but the virtues inherent in each role were not. Some persons possessed the requisite virtues innately; others had to come by them through systematic training. Nevertheless, all persons benefited from education—training in the virtues—to ensure control of their appetites and emotions. "To act virtuously ... is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 149). But the virtues and one's roles could come into conflict as one moved toward eudaimonia. For example, the polis might demand that the citizen be a warrior willing to die for the community, whereas the family would demand the continued presence of a husband and father to produce male heirs and to rule the household. Aristotle attempted to resolve such tensions by arranging in a hierarchy relationships as well as virtues. But, Maclntyre points out, Sophocles's Antigone is evidence of the people's recognition of the possible agony in choices available among roles. Both Kreon and Antigone had real and tragic choices within a range of available and conceptually enclosed social roles. For the ancient Athenians, the self was truly revealed in the conflict of one's roles. What was not in conflict for the Athenian or, says Maclntyre, for the man of the Middle Ages, was the framework in which role conflict arose. The community was constituted and enclosed by the shared project of achieving the common good: "What is good for me has to be good for [any]one who inhabits these roles" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 205). The virtues, as both means to the good and part of the definition of it, were therefore local yet universal. The specific roles and rules were sanctioned by each community; yet once sanctioned, anyone living in or according to them would fulfill them in the same way. Such a life was in harmony with the cosmos, mirroring the natural and celestial orders. But the advent of choice and conflict among roles signified a crack in the mirror, some loss of the moral coherence found in Homeric society (1981, p. 135). The mirror was shattered with the outright rejection of teleology. Moral coherence was lost altogether when science mechanized the universe and stripped both it and nature of purpose. Man, too, lost his telos, as purpose or ends became


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something chosen rather than inherited. Thus begins the third or "modern" phase of the self, the era of individualism (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 195). Having lost teleology, the "big picture" that provided coherence to social and philosophical systems, modern man today has nothing but fragments of such systems that cannot in themselves provide meaningful direction. Free to choose from a limitless supply of purposes and values and attachments, modern man "is unconstrained by any social bonds. His own ends . . . are for him the only criteria of action" (Maclntyre, 1967, p. 128). But what is the criterion for the choice of ends? Without a Ideological perspective that orders society, nature, and the universe, man has none save a recognition of his own preferences: Everything may be criticized from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers . . . have seen the essence of moral agency. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. (Maclntyre, 1981, pp. 31-32)

Such a description is reminiscent of the "punctual" self. Having disengaged or distanced itself from all roles and ends, the self is now able to choose those for itself. Yet the self separate from all particularity ceases to be a self at all. The modern self can take on any role, pursue any interest, adopt any purpose "because it is in and for itself nothing" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 32). There is no way to define the self except as disengaged choice, a set of perpetually open possibilities. Yet even this is empty, for at bottom the choices of the self are criterionless, without principle, value, boundaries, or standards. Choices are merely arbitrary reactions to preferences or emotions. They are, in short, barely choices at all. This move into modernity has deprived man of the conception of a completed and fulfilled—a whole—human life (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 34). Such a life was predicated on a necessary social identity bounded by a telos shared in community. The roles played within that boundary defined the self and placed one "at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress—or fail to make progress—toward a given end" (1981, p. 34). But rationalists of the Enlightenment saw as "progress" the release of man from such ecclesiastical and aristocratic communities. To achieve a new social order based on that progress, to liberate men from the parochialism and xenophobic myopia of the way of life centered on ties to kin, church, and village, required breaking allegiances to caste, clan, and community. So released, men were free to secure membership in the new modes of authority and responsibility. Yet, says Maclntyre, men were unable to do so, for these new modes and the subsequent new roles lacked any grounding. Adrift in a sea of competition and commercialism, unable to anchor their aims to anything but desires, men were lost, not free. Maclntyre argues that persons need social relationships for identity. These are

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not appendages that outlive their purpose, only to be excised. They are, rather, the very conditions for securing personality, social cohesion, and moral coherence. The story of one's life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which one derives identity. What modern man, and modern society, needs to do is reinstate the teleological structure that unites the moral fragments that modern man can neither understand nor piece together. Coherence reposes on a concept of telos that constitutes the good of a whole human life, conceived as a unity. Such a unity is not simply individual but is and must be seen as communal. The problem, Maclntyre points out, is that the foundations of the Homeric and Aristotelian teleologies are no longer plausible. The former involved Greek mythology; the latter, Aristotelian metaphysical biology. What needs to be accomplished, therefore, is to restore the ideas of Aristotelian teleology and virtues, but to divest them of the metaphysical biology (1981, p. 196). This Maclntyre attempts to do by introducing to the modern age a social teleology, the idea of the narrative unity. This is not simply the unity of an individual's life from birth to death. It is the recognition that the history of one's life cannot be told apart from that of the community's. These two histories must be, and are, unified. Therein lies the narrative unity. I am both "the subject of a history that is my own," and I am constituted by a network of similar, interlocking narratives. I am not, therefore, detachable from my social and historical roles and statuses, for without them I could have no standards or ends outside myself. I would then be condemned to the solipsism of the modern individualist. These standards, values, and ends are those internal to the roles and practices of the community. The story of the self, consequently, must be one of the search for identity "in and through membership in communities such as those of the family, the neighborhood, the city and the tribe" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 221). Maclntyre's position comes to this: Modern liberal societies have too many disparate and competing moral theories, largely because societies have lost the teleological nucleus that unifies and limits these competing fragments. The variety spawns conflict, not consensus. Without shared moral principles or vision, life lacks unity, security, and meaning. A teleological hierarchy of virtues can guide social and political life and provide moral consensus. If we do not accept such a structure, then, claims Maclntyre, echoing Charles Taylor's view, we shall be forced to accept "a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on society which lacks genuine moral consensus" (1981, p. 254). Yet it is not clear that the virtues independent of Aristotelian cosmology can be hierarchically arranged, even within a community, so as to generate unity and consensus. The problem seems to be that such virtues, standards, and statuses would provide security and solidarity only if they were rigidly imposed, so that in knowing his role a man "knows also what he owes and what is owed him by the occupant of every other role and status" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 122). Yet in the local communities Maclntyre prescribes (1981, p. 263), social roles would then eclipse individuality, as they did in the Middle Ages. Persons would become interchangeable and secondary. It would not be selves but roles that characterized such communities. 10 It is easy to see how the individual could then be submerged for the sake of the whole, for the sake of the well-being of society. If an individual becomes


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secondary to the common good, then his interests can easily be sacrificed at the altar of that good. Is this offset by Maclntyre's inclusion of autonomy within the narrative unity, so that roles can be questioned? The model he espouses is Athenian autonomy, perhaps epitomized by Socrates who challenged the Athenian laws and standards but, in the end, in recognition of the social context that bound, defined, and gave meaning to his life, who accepted death rather than escape. Through such autonomy a person escapes emotivism and can question his life by having some criterion outside himself by which to decide among possible choices. To establish that criterion or framework, a standard is necessary "which the individual is not free to accept or reject as he wills or chooses" (Maclntyre, 1967, p. 88). Now that cosmology and metaphysical biology are no longer plausible, the source of that standard is sociological: It is set by the community's established social practices. Here I find criteria proposed to me which I can make my own in the sense that I can frame my choices and my actions in accordance with them, but their authority is derived not from my choice but from the way in which in such a community they cannot fail to be regarded as normative. (1967, p. 208)

This ability to question and choose, the ability to reflect, is narrowly confined to the community. In contrast with this social self is the achromatic or autonomous liberal self "who asks, what do I desire, as a man, apart from all social ties, in the frame of the universe?" Such a person "is necessarily working with a meager stock of descriptions, with an impoverished view of his own nature, for he has had to strip away from himself all the attributes that belong to his social existence" (Maclntyre, 1967, p. 100). The liberal self that Maclntyre depicts needs to be free of all social perspectives, whereas the self situated in the community is hardly free of any. For the communitarian self, security of identity is guaranteed in the permanence of social position and the absence within the community of "fundamental conflict" (Maclntyre, 1967, p. 103); for the liberal self, autonomy is guaranteed by disposing of all social ties to ensure that no ends are imposed. Yet is the choice really only between the disengaged liberal and the individual situated in a well-ordered society, a person "who cannot but think of himself in terms of the life of that community"? (1967, p. 103). Are the questions that liberal selves ask themselves always existentially empty, and are those of socially situated selves always communally confined? Maclntyre's choices are not really so bald. Here he has described the extremes, and liberalism is living out, and forcing societies to live out, one of these extremes. The socially situated self, on the other hand and as we have seen, is not without important choices, especially among purposes. Only in a social context can individuals frame purposes, so that although they can question society, their ability to do so derives from their membership in the community. Yet modern man, armed with autonomy in search of social teleology—narrative unity and the good—would no longer need to be restricted to "the moral limitations of the particularity of those forms of community. . . . [For] it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, for the universal, consists" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 221).

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How are the moral limitations of those communities—family, clan, neighborhood, city—transcended? In part they can be transcended because communities themselves are based on traditions, and traditions, says Maclntyre, are transcended "through criticism and invention" (1981, p. 222). In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maclntyre uses "tradition" to serve the same purpose as "community" serves in After Virtue, but with one important difference: Tradition permits different individuals within that tradition to hold various relationships to it. Such variety leads to the "fundamental conflict" that Maclntyre saw as absent in the self situated in and secured by community. Yet this switch to tradition does not allow Maclntyre to escape the dilemma completely, for although individuals can attempt "to amend or redirect the tradition" (1988, p. 326), they can do so only from within the tradition, "in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition" (1988, p. 350). So to Maclntyre, a tradition "in good working order" is one that operates according to "unarticulated presuppositions which are never themselves objects of attention and enquiry" (1988, pp. 7-8). This position is a strong reminder of the tacit background in Taylor's scheme. Indeed, continues Maclntyre, those who challenge or theorize about these presuppositions "already in some way or other are or have been alienated from these traditions about which they theorize" (1988, p. 8). Certainly liberalism is in Maclntyre 's estimation a breeding ground for just such alienation. Liberals search for a position free of tradition from which to judge among competing theories. Hence the liberal emphasis on neutrality. But as Maclntyre strongly argues in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? identifying a neutral standard is an impossibility (1988, pp. 329, 331). Here he recapitulates his attack in After Virtue on modernity and liberal individualism: The "project of modern liberal, individualist society [is] ... of founding a form of social order in which individuals could emancipate themselves from the contingency and particularity of tradition by appealing to genuinely universal, tradition-independent norms" (1988, p. 335). Maclntyre may well have a case against some liberals—Kant, for example, who aspired to provide a means of rational justification such that tradition and authority would be superseded by undeniable rational principles independent of any social particularity. But liberals (as I shall argue in Chapter 6) wish to emancipate themselves from some traditions—from this tradition or that tradition—not from tradition per se. Therefore, given what Maclntyre argued in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? about liberalism itself as a tradition, liberals can, and, I would say, are inclined to, agree. Yet his position on the nature of tradition seems to raise a different problem for Maclntyre, a twofold problem. The first part of the problem is that even tradition carries within it its own kind of rationality and its own criteria for rational superiority. This makes it difficult for any tradition to admit that another is superior. Indeed, for one tradition to admit this of another would make the two so similar as to appear to be within the same tradition. If in addition, "no fundamental correction [of a tradition's] conceptual scheme from some external standpoint is possible, [then] no rational debate between traditions can occur." So we are left with a "social universe composed exclusively of rival traditions" with no tradition able to justify its claims over against those of rival traditions (1988, p. 348). This position sounds surprisingly like the emotivist, relativist position of indi-


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viduals in our modern liberal order, a position that Maclntyre went to some length to criticize in After Virtue. In this view, persons—with no standards outside themselves—are unable to justify rationally their first principles or any moral position, and so they must fall back on sentiments or feelings. Presumably Maclntyre thinks that they ought to fall back on their intellectual and moral traditions. But on what do those rest? How are the tradition-guiding principles determined to be first principles? Maclntyre is clearly no relativist; he argues as an "Augustinian Christian"—one who reads Augustine through Aquinas's interpretations of Aristotle— that Thomism has won the day. This Catholic tradition has demonstrated to Maclntyre's satisfaction its rational superiority, and it has done so through the dialectical method in which the central tenets of one's own tradition are open to question (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 388) and in which this tradition transcends but includes rival theories. But, of course, this has been done to, or with, rival theories within the tradition. Those who have allegiances to other traditions may well not be convinced (1988, p. 403), and so we seem stuck irremediably with relativism. Even within the tradition how is one theory demonstrated to be superior? This leads to the second problem. Traditions change and mature, are transcended, "through criticism and invention" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 122), through inventiveness and imagination (1988, pp. 277, 355). Maclntyre goes so far as to say that through imagination persons can even understand rival traditions. This, however, "requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight ... to be able to understand the theses, arguments, and concepts of their rival in such a way that they are able to view themselves from such an alien standpoint" (1988, p. 167). Questions to ask of Maclntyre are, then: How rare a gift is this empathy? Why is it a "gift"? Why is it rare? What was rare—meaning "difficult"—for a fifthcentury Athenian may not be so for a twentieth-century democrat, especially if the basis of the rarity meant being able to step outside the hierarchical views of the polis, in which any other viewpoint verged on the "barbaric." The dilemma for Maclntyre is that this ability to step outside, to transcend, one's own tradition seems to bring him perilously close to a depiction of the liberal disengaged self. Moreover, inventiveness connotes not simply understanding another's perspective but also making up perspectives unknown and unseen. If the self can invent values and modes of thought, then isn't Maclntyre's narrative self in the very same modernist or liberal position of interiorizing selfhood and relying on itself for standards or criteria? Invention subverts not only the Ideological concept of a whole human life lived well but also the tradition, for that may now be evaluated with standards, rules, and roles that exist within, not outside, the self. Perhaps Maclntyre sees this as inevitable, as Taylor seems to. Modern man cannot do without autonomy, without radical reflexivity, but autonomy jeopardizes community. Can the two be reconciled? Though Socrates saw his role as that of selfproclaimed gadfly, Athenian leaders could interpret that role only according to its established rules and roles. In the Athenian panoply Socrates was the corrupter of the morals of the young. Though the stories each side told about what Socrates did were "different and incompatible" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 173), the end that each side chose was the same. To maintain the priority of the community and its laws, Socrates took his life. Through autonomy an individual can transcend the moral limitations of his

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traditions, but the community derived from that tradition must order banishment or death of its transcenders so as to maintain its integrity and cohesion. Here the conflict is that between Zeus the lawgiver and Prometheus the bringer of fire. Is that necessarily the standoff Maclntyre sees? Is there no way to extend the boundaries of the community to accommodate the inventions and insights of the autonomous? Maclntyre says that there is. The person in the tradition can, as mentioned, try to amend or redirect the tradition. But it remains to be explained how that is to be done unless the "unarticulated presuppositions" are scrutinized. Any community, Maclntyre explains, "governed by appeal to some sort of fundamental principles must possess institutionalized ways in which those who deviate from, rebel against, or put in question those principles are called to account" (1988, p. 241). From one perspective, of course, autonomous persons require this because giving an account, having the ability to respond, is part of being autonomous. Yet in the histories of communities in which the impersonal and objective standards of excellence reside within the community, such accounts are required but not welcome. As Maclntyre has already informed us, such accounts are given only by those already alienated. And so, in the history of those Catholic communities so much admired by Maclntyre himself, "the church courts" held accountable not just those who committed venial sins but "especially those who questioned the doctrines from which those standards were derived. Heresy and skepticism were . . . more fundamental than adultery and Sabbath-breaking" (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 241). Inseparable from the tradition that gave us both Augustine and Aquinas is the history of the Inquisition, excommunication, forced conversions, torture, and death. If the community is to continue to provide secure personal identities through social stability and standards outside the self, if it is to continue to be a constitutive community, then there appears no way to accommodate the autonomous, especially those who by "a work of imagination . . . [can] place him or herself imaginatively within the scheme of belief inhabited by those whose allegiance is to the rival tradition" (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 394). We are back, then, in a quandary similar to the one in Taylor's account: The self can disengage from communal standards, even invent new ones, and thereby transcend community boundaries. But this threatens not only to leave the self without community; in Maclntyre's view it threatens also to leave the self without a "self," beyond the horizon of evaluations or stripped of the attributes of social existence. This tension between liberal autonomy and communitarian sociality will become clearer—because the issue becomes even more muddled—in the arguments of Michael Sandel.

Michael Sandel: The Unencumbered Self Versus the Socially Situated Self Like Taylor and Maclntyre, Sandel distinguishes between a premodern self and a modern self. The crux of the distinction lies, again, in distance; this time, in the distance that deontological or rights-based liberalism—the liberalism of much contemporary moral and political philosophy—requires between the self and its aims and attributes. This liberalism, Sandel argues, is based on faulty philosophical and


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metaphysical foundations. In short, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as the kind of beings deontological [liberalism] requires us to be" (Sandel, 1982, p. 14). According to Sandel's view, liberal society is a collection of individuals, each with his own aims and interests, which are pursued jointly for mutual benefit. Because each also has his own conception of the good life, the government that governs best neither predisposes toward nor presupposes any single particular conception. This neutrality grants to rights a priority over the good, so that rights limit the establishment of any vision of the good. Hence this liberalism is rights based and deontological, which is perhaps best understood as antiteleological—that is, its first principles in no way depend on any notion of final human purposes or on any particular conception of what the good is for man. Within this kind of scheme the principles of justice hold primacy because they are independently derived; that is, justice does not repose on any determinate notion of the good. This derivation makes justice more than simply one value among many. It gives it foundational priority; it is prior, that is, to all empirical ends. According to Sandel's reading of A Theory of Justice, its author, John Rawls—a quintessential contemporary theorist of deontological liberalism and the focus of Sandel's critique—follows Kant in arguing for the primacy of justice and for the priority of the right over the good. Indeed, justice is the very standard by which values and the good are judged and by which conflicts among them are resolved. This, however, introduces an epistemological problem. To judge such conflicts, to have such standards, one must find a perspective outside or beyond them from which to assay the situation. When the very structure of society is under scrutiny, we need, according to Rawls, an "Archimedean point" (Rawls, 1971, p. 260). Such a point must be neither so immersed in the world that its criticality is compromised nor so detached that the standards involved would be groundless. This is, of course, Rawls's "original position." The same holds true for considerations of the nature of the subjects or selves of deontological liberalism. For the right to be prior to the good, the liberal self must be able to stand back from conceptions of the good to choose among them. To be able to stand back in this fashion and to be able to choose, the self must be conceived as apart from those conceptions; it must be at some remove from these ends. The self must also be prior to these ends, as "before an end is chosen, there must be a self around to choose it" (Sandel, 1982, p. 19). Therefore the self is prior to and independent of its choices. Essential to agency are not the ends chosen but the capacity to choose. In arguing for such a conception of the self, Kant had proposed the "noumenal" realm. He had said that the self is essentially unknowable: "No fixed and abiding self can present itself in the flux of inner appearances." Therefore, to ensure the continuity of the self, some principle of unity that "precedes all experience and makes experience itself possible" must be presumed.11 Rawls, however, cannot accept the notion of the noumenal realm, for he denies that it has any connection with the human situation: Either the self is disembodied without attributes and is thus nothing but abstract consciousness, or it is "radically situated" and its identity is affected by any change in one's circumstances. The former roves about the Kantian empyrean in which the self, with no object of awareness other than itself,

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cannot be known, while the latter splashes in the sea of circumstances in which the subject is not distant from desires, interests, and aims but is those. In place of these, Rawls proposes to revise the Kantian conception of the self by moving it from the realm of transcendental idealism into the realm of "reasonable empiricism" (Rawls, 1977, p. 165). Rawls's project is to find an ontological equivalent of the Archimedean point, to avoid the pitfalls of both a disembodied self and a radically situated self. Thus he reaches for a perspective metaphorically halfway between them, beyond one's social situation but not so far beyond it as to be an empty abstraction. The self needs a critical perspective from afar but "not too far" (Sandel, 1982, p. 17). The solution proposed by Rawls is "to conceive the self as a subject of possession," what Sandel calls the "voluntarist" self (Sandel, 1982, p. 54). As a subject of possession, the definition of the self is untouched by any of its attributes, which are merely possessions. The subject is "antecedently individuated," meaning that the boundaries and identity of the self are determined and fixed prior to any experience or relationship. Possession establishes a relationship to attributes—they are mine rather than yours—yet permits a distance from them— they are mine rather than me. Thus the deontological self is saved from Kantian transcendence by being both distinct from yet related to its ends. It is Sandel's purpose, at least in part, to refuse Rawls's claim that he can detach liberalism and the deontological self from Kantian metaphysics. To depict the self as a subject of possession, Sandel points out, is to strip its identity of any attributes, to place it "beyond the reach of experience," to make it "invulnerable" to circumstances, and to fix its identity "once and for all." With the boundaries of the self antecedent to and untouched by contingency, and with its identity empty of constituent traits, the self is free to choose ends as possessions. There are therefore no ends or traits, no attributes, without which the person would cease to know himself. In short, the disembodied or "unencumbered" self found in Kant is also found inescapably in Rawls as well (Sandel, 1982, p. 62).12 Sandel sees, as Taylor and Maclntyre did, that at bottom this unencumbered or voluntarist self is emotivist, as the character of its choices is arbitrariness.13 There are no grounds for justifying choices other than groundless preference; there are no means for assessing the quality of ends to be chosen. This self is Taylor's "simple weigher," whose reflection is limited to the prudent assessment of the efficacy of various choices in fulfilling wants and desires. As self-knowledge this kind of reflection consists of knowing, in Rawls's words, "not only what things we want but also how much we want them" (Rawls, 1971, p. 416). Nowhere does the deontological agent ask, Which of these choices most reflects me? This cannot occur, because the self can take "as its objects the contingent wants and desires and preferences of the self, but not the self itself" (Sandel, 1982, p. 189). In contrast with the "unencumbered" view, Sandel proposes the "cognitive" view. According to this account, one's particularities are not like seasonal fashions that are changed periodically. Stripped of these, the self that is left is no self at all. As Daniel Bell observed, "The person has disappeared. Only attributes remain" (Sandel, 1982, p. 45). The cognitive self is identified by its particularities, aims, traits, and relationships. These are values and ends that are essential to the self, with


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a sanction independent of the mere fact that the agent holds them (Sandel, 1982, p. 165). They are different from "arbitrary construals" (Taylor, 1985a, p. 262), as they are grounded in the community. Thus the self is socially constituted, defined by and inseparable from its ends "already before it" (Sandel, 1982, p. 59). According to Sandel, once one concedes that ends are given in advance, one thinks of oneself no longer as an agent who chooses his ends, but as an agent who is bound in advance (1982, p. 117). Unlike the unencumbered self, this socially constituted self is (again in Taylor's terms) a "strong evaluator," for his reflection goes to the very boundaries of the self. Reflection enables the self to discern from among the "clutter of possible ends" where its boundaries and definition lie, "what is me from what is mine" (Sandel, 1982, p. 59). Therefore, the self is not radically situated such that identity is contingent on any change in circumstance. Rather, identity is contingent on reflective self-understandings, that is, on discovering through reflection those ends and values and circumstances that make me the person I am. Through this reflective self-understanding, this "cognitive" approach, the person learns to distinguish between ends that are constitutive—"I am this"—and those that are possessives— "This is mine." "The relevant question is not what ends to choose, for my problem is precisely that the answer to this question is already given, but rather who I am" (1982, p. 59). Whereas voluntaristic agency is antecedent and dependent on choice free of contingency, cognitive agency depends on reflection to discover antecedent, constitutive ends. To be capable of such reflective self-understanding, "we cannot be wholly unencumbered subjects" (1982, p. 172). One must have something constitutive to reflect on. If the self is defined by antecedent ends given by the community, how can one self be differentiated from other selves constituted by the same content? Physicality aside, it cannot. Sandel claims that our self-understandings "comprehend a wider subject than the individual alone." Because I am partly constituted by the shared practices, traditions, and ends of my community; because my individuality is a social product developed through interactions and relationships with others, participation in joint practices, and "a common vocabulary of discourse", then my identity is not an isolate but a conjunction, not a subjectivity but an intersubjectivity (1982, p. 172). We share a common identity through these common practices, aims, and attachments. As Taylor and Maclntyre also argued, without considering this constitutive community one can neither fully explain nor understand oneself. Clearly, the socially constituted self has choices and conflicts. As with Maclntyre's Aristotelian self, there are tensions among various ends and roles. The boundaries of the self, unlike the unencumbered self, are not prior to contingency and are not fixed. They are, rather, possibilities limited only by the antecedent clutter of possible ends. Reflection enables me to discover among that clutter where my definition and boundaries lie. But what is a discovery? How do I know from within that clutter of possible ends those, more than others, that truly constitute me? Moreover, if some ends are more truly constitutive of who I am than other ends are, then the others who share those ends with me must be truly more conjunctive with me. Then intersubjectivity is not shared communitywide but only with part of it. Sandel says as much:

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Behind Individualism Where [a] sense of participation in the achievement and endeavor of (certain) others engages the reflective self-understandings of the participants, we may come to regard ourselves, over the range of various activities, less as individuated subjects with certain things in common, and more as participants in a common identity, be it a family or community or clan or people or nation. (1982, p. 143)

Sandel is clear that community is constitutive of persons, though he is unclear in defining it: Community "describes not just what [people] have as fellow citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover" (1982, p. 180). He is clear that ends stipulated by the community define the self and remain inseparable from it: "The independent self finds its limits in those aims and attachments from which it cannot stand apart" (1982, p. 182). And he acknowledges that there is also a process involved in personal identity: The task of the socially constituted self is "to sort out" the contours of one's identity in the face of the seeming welter of multitudinous, indispensable ends already given. Yet if the self is inseparable from aims and attachments, then how and to what extent is this an "independent self"? If there are ends to sort out—indeed, to choose from—then how does one do this sorting? How does one know whether an end defines "who I am" rather than "what is mine"? By intuition? By preference? Aside from being limited to a range of predesignated ends, how is this procedure of discovery different from the choices of a Rawlsian self? It would seem that once again a communitarian theorist posits a reflective process or autonomy within a circumscribed set of givens or ends, within, that is, a community. For all three theorists, though perhaps especially for Sandel, this raises the same vexing question: Who is doing the reflecting? If there are ends that constitute my identity, and yet I am able to reflect on those ends, to render the boundaries of my identity clearer, and to discover who I am in the given clutter of ends, then must there not be a reflecting self able to stand back from those ends? Sandel and Maclntyre and, to a lesser extent, Taylor have a conceptual problem: In order to be judged, an object must be separate from and not fused with the subject that judges. The subject that reflects must be differentiated from the objects reflected on. If the subject is not at some remove from its ends, then it is embedded in and must be those ends. Perhaps Sandel would retort that the reflecting self must be able to stand back from only some of those ends, those that are contingent rather than constituent. Yet the ends that constitute the self by definition cannot be the ends reflected on; any end that is an object cannot be the subject. Sandel claims that the limits of the independent self are found "in those aims and attachments from which it cannot stand apart." But if the self cannot be separate from these aims, which truly do constitute its identity, then it cannot reflect on them. How then can one understand reflectively who one is? One can know oneself only not to be contingent ends. Does this last point go too far? Clearly, one can reflect on predetermined aims and attachments and, from those, discover that some are integral to who that person is. Losing these integral ends and relationships affects a person's identity. He ceases to be the person he was. This is common sense. Yet Sandel makes a claim beyond this. These constitutive ends and relationships are found only in the clutter of ends


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given by the community. If some ends can be reflected on, why not all ends? Because, answers Sandel, the limits of the independent self are found in that clutter. The self cannot go beyond without entering a deontological, or unencumbered, state. To avoid the liberal self devoid of all character Sandel postulates a self limited by communal ends. These provide the "fixity of character" (1982, p. 180) essential to selfhood. But those limits can certainly not be "found" or discovered. To do that would require reflecting on them. That, in turn, requires separation from those ends, which Sandel states one cannot do. For if, as Sandel insists, reflecting shapes the contours of identity (1982, p. 59), then the reflecting subject must be separate from and prior to the constitution of that identity. Only then can the reflecting agent discern from within a clutter of ends those that constitute his identity. Sandel has an extreme problem with autonomy and community that Taylor and Maclntyre seem to avoid. Taylor and Maclntyre contend that the self can transcend community, or traditional, boundaries and thus can stand apart from the community's ends, though only at great peril to the constitution of the self. Sandel argues, however, that the self is inseparable from and thus embedded in at least some of the community's ends. If the self is the community framework and its ends, then the self cannot reflect on those ends and the framework; if the self can reflect on the ends, then those ends cannot constitute the self. If Rawls's theory of the self is untenable, if not incoherent, then by the same token, but from the opposite side, so is Sandel's. According to the Rawlsian account, what is beyond agency and thus not subject to choice are the self and the principles of justice, as they obtain prior to any actual choosing. What is not subject to reflective self-understanding in the Sandelian account is the community framework that sets the bounds of and constitutes identity. Just as the framework of justice is assumed, so is Sandel's framework of community. Just as "the morality of right, which assumes freedom of choice within its bounds, cannot itself be vulnerable to any choice that would challenge or restrict it" (Sandel, 1982, p. 156), so too the morality of the good, which assumes freedom of "sorting out" within the bounds of ends and attachments, cannot itself be vulnerable to reflection that would challenge or expand it. How else can ends and identity be secured? In both cases an unassailable framework, antecedently given, is a prerequisite of identity. Rawls posits an unchosen framework of agency, an a priori self whose boundaries are fixed "once and for all," independent of any ends. Thus the bounds of the Rawlsian self provide a basis for choice that is itself not chosen. Sandel posits an unexamined framework of constituent ends given by an antecedent community. The bounds of community provide the basis for reflection on self and ends that is itself not reflected. In the end, for both theories, "the self disappears." For Rawls the self stripped of any traits drifts off into pure abstraction, which is no self at all. For Sandel the self is fused with and constituted by its ends, inseparable and thus indistinguishable from those ends, which is no self at all. If "the limited scope for self-reflection . . . betrays the thinness of the deontological self" (Sandel, 1982, p. 181), then it also betrays the thinness of Sandel's socially situated self. Rather than leave the theories of Sandel and Rawls floundering in contradictions, we can propose a third theory of the self that can redeem them both by requiring for its full explication a combination of the Rawlsian and the Sandelian

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selves. To generate such a theory we can use openings in the accounts offered by both theorists.

The Self as a Two-Track System Asking a Rawlsian subject Who are you? does not stump him but elicits a recital of those attributes that he thinks define him. Otherwise, that self is indistinguishable from other selves. Thus Rawls must make some room within his theory for constitutive attributes. In "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Rawls does so. He regards citizens as free in that they have a capacity for a sense of justice and can conceive of themselves—and others—as being able to form and live out a conception of the good (Rawls, 1985, p. 240). They are also able to change their conceptions and thereby change themselves, for example, when they undergo religious conversion. What does not change, however, is "their public identity as free persons" because that identity is predicated on their "moral power" to form, revise, and rationally pursue a conception of the good, irrespective of its contents. "They do not cease to be, for the questions of political justice, the persons they were before" (1985, p. 241). Thus a Rawlsian self can change the content of his character—who he is ontologically—because the change is in the content, whereas the structure of personhood remains the same. What Rawls describes, albeit in political terms, is what we found in Taylor's differentiation between persons and agents. Taylor sought to identify those capacities that make us distinctly human. Among them is strong evaluation. Such evaluation requires (1) some standard by which to evaluate, (2) some act or value to evaluate, and (3) some subject to do the evaluating. Imagine that a person acts in a way that society condemns; say, a soldier is a coward in the face of an enemy attack. The nature of the cowardly act does not entitle us to withdraw or suspend the obligations owed to that soldier as a person. Indeed, it is because he continues to be a person that he can be held accountable for his actions. As a person or self he is separable from those actions. He commits them, but he is not defined solely by them. He is something more besides. Rawls has such a distinction in mind, not between agency and personhood, but between agency and self-concept. Persons "may regard it as simply unthinkable to view themselves apart from certain religious, philosophical, and moral convictions, or from certain enduring attachments and loyalties" (Rawls, 1985, p. 241). To alter those would be to change one's self, the person one defines oneself to be. Without these particular convictions or attractions the person would be disoriented and in crisis and would certainly no longer be the same person he had been. Yet by altering his personality and personal definition, he retains his personhood, what Rawls calls the "public or political identity" (1985, p. 242). To hold that the boundaries of the self "are fixed once and for all" such that they are impermeable, invulnerable to transformation by experience, as Sandel says of Rawls (Sandel, 1982, p. 57), contravenes common sense and all the evidence of psychological and religious transformation. What Rawls, and presumably other deontological liberals, can say is that persons can identify themselves by their attributes but that no attribute or


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conviction or end is beyond scrutiny. This is so because all of one's identity is not captured by those attributes. There must be a subject, a part of the self, that scrutinizes. Sandel himself admits of such a subject, though, as we saw, it threatens to undermine his entire theory. The socially constituted self, through reflectivity, "turns its lights inward upon itself, making the self its own object of inquiry and reflection." Sandel then notes that reflection establishes "a certain space between it and me. ... It [an obsession] becomes more an attribute and less a constituent of my identity" (1982, p. 58). Although he is discussing obsessions in this context, the point extends beyond that to any object of reflection. Moreover, an object of reflection cannot become less of a constituent, implying calibration. Rather, at the first instant of reflection, or before, the critical space is established; with the end or obsession becoming an object and no longer being the subject. Yet this philosophical point does not seem to bear much psychological weight. Surely an Irish Catholic paraplegic woman who works for the Ford Motor Company and is active in the feminist movement can identify with any and all of these characteristics. But to identify with them is already to presuppose a distinction between the subject and its ends or traits. The fact that there is such a separation means that one can work on those traits, as Sandel describes a person working on an obsession. Sandel claims that an obsession is anything that has taken hold of the person, that has eliminated the "space" between it and the self. Yet this describes the very nature of constitutive ends. It is therefore true of any constitutive end, and not just of obsessions, that reflection restores "the shrunken space between self and ends" (Sandel, 1982, p. 58).14 It is that space that enables the agent to stand apart from and thus reflect on his traits. Thus, one's traits or ends may be constitutive of the person in the sense that they are not merely features of his condition but actually define part of who he is. Sandel grasps this notion, at least intuitively. He suggests that the good of the community and the preexisting ends are only partly constitutive of one's identity (Sandel, 1982, p. 161). He never elaborates on or identifies which part is not so constituted, which is why his postulates reduce to a stark two: Either the self is prior to its ends, or it is constituted by those ends. A more satisfactory theory of the self, to avoid the problems found in relying on either postulate alone, would seem to require both. The self would therefore be constituted by "two tracks." It would be constituted by traits, aims, and relationships that formed a self-concept and by a reflective subject that made up its agency. The agent could then turn its lights inward to participate in the constitution of its identity, but unlike the socially constituted self this agent would be separate from the ends. As Erik Erikson commented, "We can become aware of its work, but never of it" (1968, p. 218). So when one is self-reflectively scrutinizing her selfconcept, or any aspect thereof, she is not necessarily rejecting it or denying its importance. She is simply no longer embedded in it. Therefore, "objectifying our own nature" in this way hardly makes that nature "irrelevant to our identity," as Taylor says (1988, p. 314—15); it makes it vital to our identity. Anyone holding to deontological liberalism who saw only agency would be susceptible to the criticisms that Sandel, Taylor, and Maclntyre have made. As long

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as the boundaries of the self are conceived of as fixed and given prior to any experience or ends; as long as man is by nature thought to be antecedently individuated, joined to others only voluntarily and for mutual benefit, then as a consequence society will stress values based on individualism rather than those of, say, altruism and cooperation. But to assume the opposite, as Sandel does, that personal identity is formed "in the light of ends already before it" (1982, p. 152), also has severe consequences. If little thought is given to the nature of the subject who reflects, then reflection can easily be limited to a narrow range without considering that the reflecting self may be able to transcend that range. If the social environment limits the definition of a person in a specific manner and to particular ends, it is reasonable to assume that the individual will come to accept that socially sanctioned definition as his own.15 The self as a two-track system would seem to provide the essential elements of both communitarian and liberal theories. We cannot imagine identity devoid of traits. Yet even though roles and virtues (Maclntyre), evaluations (Taylor), and aims and attachments (Sandel) are necessary, they alone cannot account for selfhood. For there must also be an active agent that does not depend on what we define ourselves as but on how we come to that definition. Losing that definition certainly creates an identity crisis. One ceases to be the person one was. But one does not necessarily cease to be a person. The pieces can be picked up, because the resurrection of identity is not contingent on the renewal of specific particularities, but on the renewal of only some particularities and a subject to pick them up. Identity, therefore, consists of both something to reflect on and a self embedded in language and logic to reflect.16 George Herbert Mead, the renowned social psychologist, described the "essential psychological problem of selfhood" as how to extricate oneself experientially from the self, how to get outside the self, in order to take the self as an object (Mead, 1934, p. 138). There seem to be two persistent theories on how to come to terms with this problem. The communitarian theory, subsumed in all its varieties under the genus "premodern," posits a socially constituted self that is seen in and defined by the ends and values of the community in which the self is situated. When the self examines any of these constitutive traits, it is examining itself. The other theory, christened the "modern" or liberal theory, sees the self as able to step back from any experience, as it is captured by none and able to take as an object any trait or attribute that the self might possess. The self can examine anything surrounding the self, but not the examining self itself, for anything that can be examined cannot be the self. What then occurs, comments Charles Taylor, is that "on the level of theory, [these two] are sorted out and become exclusive alternatives" (1985b, p. 114). Each theory is held to be the correct interpretation, and each accuses the other of having no self at all: The communitarians criticize liberal theorists for positing a self without attributes and thus empty of all distinction, and the liberals criticize communitarians for submerging individual selves in collective ends and the common good. In the next chapter I shall examine in more detail the two-track theory of the self, one that overcomes the limitations of the other two theories by proposing a


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self-system constituted by agency and self-concept. Using this theory I shall show that the self is neither antecedently individuated and thus impervious to and independent of changes in circumstances nor socially constituted and thus embedded in the communal ends that are antecedently given. Selfhood is, rather, a multifaceted compound, and I shall call this view of the self as a two-track system the theory of compound selfhood or compound individuality. But this does not mean that presupposing a self looking and a self observed requires hypothesizing a Kantian noumenal self prior to and beyond all experience. Instead, the theory of compound individuality will enable us to accomplish what Rawls suggested—to move the self from transcendental idealism into reasonable empiricism. To do so I shall use empirical data drawn from developmental psychology, and I shall then show how the two "exclusive alternatives," as described by Taylor, are really two parts of a more comprehensive whole.

2 The Theory of Compound Individuality

Surprisingly, the increasing interest among communitarians, and among students of political theory in general, in notions of the self, the person, and individuality has not led them into psychology. Part of the explanation may be that psychologists themselves renewed their study of the self only after they had broken free of their preoccupation with and domination by behaviorism. Today, communitarians would find compatible positions in the theories of a new generation of social psychologists, the "social constructivists,"1 and liberals would find support in the "humanistic psychology" movement that emphasizes the importance to individuals of autonomous choice.2 Yet the one area that can be said to have had in recent years the greatest theoretical impact on self psychology is developmental psychology, or what is also called developmental structuralism. It is from this massive and growing body of empirical research that we shall derive the theory of compound individuality.3 The term developmental structuralism was first used in biology: structuralism, to indicate that an organism undergoes a process of growth through increasingly complex forms by differentiation from and reintegration of earlier forms; developmentalism, to describe the internal coherence and spontaneous activity of living things. The idea of structuralism was introduced into other disciplines, for example, into anthropology by Levi-Strauss, into psychology by Foucault, into literary criticism by Barthes, and into philosophy by Althusser. But it was combined with developmentalism and pioneered in psychology by Jean Piaget. Piaget focused his research almost entirely on the structures of cognitive development. He proposed that cognitive or mental growth occurs through a succession of increasingly complex stages, each a structural whole but each also only part of a greater whole, the succeeding stage or structure. Cognitive categories, Piaget believed and demonstrated, are fundamental to understanding mental development—a statement that is not tautological. Mental development comprises emotions, will, imagination, creativity, morality, religion, the self; whereas cognition involves simply, but not without complications, the processes of knowing. Self psychologists, moral developmentalists, learning theorists, object-relation psychoanalysts, and ego psychiatrists argue that the cognitive structures are necessary but insufficient for whatever area of mental or psychological growth they are examining. "Cognitive development," wrote psychologist Jane Loevinger, "is the cornerstone of human development as a whole, because cognitive principles constitute the broadest and 38

The Theory of Compound Individuality

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the most encompassing structures that one can imagine" (1976, p. 42). The cornerstone of the developmental theory of compound individuality or compound selfhood is the "hard" cognitive structures (Gardner, 1972) described by Piaget. It is essential, therefore, that I explain the basics of Piaget's theory.

Piaget's Cognitive Structures All developmentalists, whatever their research orientations, posit hierarchy. Whatever the perspectives, that hierarchy appears in general terms to be the same: a series of levels of organization, each level a totality yet simultaneously a part of the larger, more inclusive, and more complex level that follows it. "Wherever development occurs it proceeds from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchic integration" (Werner, 1957, p. 126). Piaget proposed a hierarchy of such levels of cognition: sensorimotor intelligence, preconceptual intelligence, concrete operational intelligence, and formal operational intelligence. (Some of these levels could be subdivided, but for our discussion this is not necessary.) The emergence of the levels is age related, and the levels arise in invariant sequence. The concrete operational level, for instance, cannot appear before the preconceptual level. Neither an empiricist nor an a priorist, Piaget saw knowledge as actively constructed and reconstructed over time as the individual interacts with the environment and seeks to maintain an equilibrium—order and constancy—between himself and the external world. When Piaget began his musings and experiments, this was a novel, even radical, notion: that individuals were constantly trying to make sense of the world by constructing hypotheses for "testing" and by fitting them together into some sort of coherent picture or account (Gardner, 1972). The patterns of interaction between the individual and his external world Piaget called "schemas" or "schematas." The repertoire of schemas is the individual's method of adapting to the environment or to experiences. The schemas undergo constant modification as new experiences or objects are taken in (assimilation) or as the individual adjusts to those objects or experiences (accommodation). Nevertheless, the levels retain throughout these "schematic" changes their property of being unified wholes. To summarize the Piagetian levels: A baby "makes sense" predominantly through her reflexes, then through sensorimotor experiences and knowledge of objects, and on to mental actions or operations (i.e., actions performed in one's head rather than, e.g., by hand). This use of mental symbols develops into "concrete operations" by which a child can understand that relations exist among actions, so that she can view the same scene from different points of view without thinking that components of that scene change whenever her perspective is changed. This mental ability culminates in the stage of "formal operations" by which a person can think about her own thinking (a structured whole of operations on classes, not just on symbols). Let us briefly examine each level independently.

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Sensorimotor Intelligence (birth to two years) Piaget found infants to be "undifferentiated," that is, fused with the material world. The infant cannot distinguish between herself and the world. There is no inside and outside, no subject and object, no body and environment. The infant is aware of events—movements, for example—but cannot separate them or does not see them as separate from herself. "During the early stages the world and the self are one; neither term is distinguished from the other ... the self is material, so to speak" (Gruber & Voneche, 1977, p. 132). By eighteen months the infant has become successful enough in differentiating her body from her surroundings to begin exercising control over her physical actions. Thinking, according to Piaget, grows through the internalization of action. Now the infant can act out situations recalled from memory. Thinking and physical actions are developing together, so that the infant can coordinate her actions and perceptions into schemas. Also by eighteen months comes the ability to use symbols that represent the physical world in images or pictures. These symbols are still perceptual, not conceptual, for the child is simply seeing resemblances or relations between actions or situations. For example, a toddler may fall down and suddenly stop, turn onto her side, and pretend to sleep. She has recognized the similarity between her position when she fell and her position when asleep. Preconceptual Intelligence (one to five years) Thinking at the preconceptual level is still "representational." Although the child can discriminate among colors, for example, she does not think to categorize or classify by color. Piaget called this level "egocentric" because the child reads all experiences through her own immediate world, seeing everything as an extension of herself. She believes that objects are man-made and can be influenced from a distance by her wishes or actions; she ascribes to all objects life and feelings; and she believes that her dreams and thoughts are immediately accessible to others. At the end of this stage, a child will begin to offer reasons for her beliefs. To the question "Why do you think this car is alive?" a younger child might answer, "Because I do." A child at the end of this stage, however, might instead explain: "Because it goes fast." By this time the child can also classify objects correctly according to color or size or shape. But she can do so only by one category at a time, having trouble with two or more simultaneous relations. Hence a child has no difficulty with the term small but does with the term smaller, which implies a comparison with something else. The classical Piagetian experiment to test a child at this stage of preconceptual thought is the test of conservation. Water is poured from a tall, thin glass into a short, broad glass. Although the child can accurately describe the two glasses, she does not perceive that their capacity is the same despite the change in shape. Thus when the water is poured, the child will say that the short one holds less water. She cannot yet understand relationships between whole and part or classes and subclasses.4 Judgments are made on the basis of perceptions; the child cannot take the role of another. For example, if a child examines an object with one red side and one green


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side, and an experimenter then places the green side toward the child and the red side toward him and asks the child what color the experimenter sees, the child will answer, "Green." Language is quickly developing throughout this level, which is crucial to further cognitive development. Language begins to replace actions. Eventually verbal thought—as opposed to thoughts in images—transcends action through speed and comprehensiveness. Thus more and more of the child's thinking is freed from physical actions. For example, the child may no longer have to touch objects to count them. Concrete Operational Intelligence (six to ten years) More and more actions that previously needed to be acted out physically are now performed solely as mental operations. The child can now imagine actions and is freed from needing to perform them physically. But such operations are limited to actions on actual objects or materials easily imagined or already in visual form— hence the term concrete. By this level the child has also developed the ideas of series and classes. Asked to arrange sticks according to size, a child at the concrete operational level will survey the entire field of sticks and quickly arrange them in order, whereas the child at the preconceptual level must examine each pair of sticks one at a time. Classes can be multiplied and divided; the child can classify blocks using two or more characteristics-—for example, color and shape—and she can draw a largest and a smallest circle without needing to draw intermediate sizes. Piaget described these new operations or cognitive abilities as creating a capacity to see relationships with others. Children play together instead of playing side by side. Despite this development, the child still has problems taking the role of others and has trouble relinquishing her own point of view. Relationships between classes still pose problems, and the child at the concrete operations level cannot imagine new possibilities and is unable to see general rules.

Formal Operational Intelligence (eleven years to adult) Formal operational intelligence is the level of abstract logic and rationality. Thinking can now deal solely with verbal elements without the need of physical referents. The adolescent can establish, operate on, and understand abstract relations on relations, that is, prepositional thinking and proportionality. She can also imagine possibilities. Whereas a child at the concrete operational level uses trial-and-error methods to achieve a solution, an adolescent at the formal operations level can mentally make plans and create hypotheses for testing, and she can test them mentally—logically—without having to do them physically. This hypotheticaldeductive and prepositional thinking is a property of formal operations. Only at this level can she create her own conditional statements: "If I do this, then this will follow." The adolescent at this level will usually begin to seek general laws, principles, or reasons as explanations, whereas the child at the concrete operational level and below is satisfied with descriptions or partial explanations.

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Before this level the adolescent is unable to gain access to her own cognitive processes, unable to treat her own thinking as an object of introspective thought. Now she can criticize her own standards, ideas, and assumptions and can deal with complex relationships. Not only can she take the role of others and argue by implication, she can also take a view of the future, not just of past and present. This level thus enables the adolescent to survey and create possibilities; to imagine cases, examples, and worlds that do not exist; and to deliberate and reflect. Dialogue is internalized, and the adolescent can think about thinking. The adolescent can operate not only on objects themselves but also on statements or "formal" propositions about objects. Piaget believed that this level was initiated through cooperation with others and through exchanges of viewpoints, leading to a consideration of perspectives different from one's own.

The Self-system: Process and Product Piaget's fundamentally significant and valuable contribution was to suggest, and to demonstrate experimentally, that the development of cognitive abilities proceeds through levels of increasing complexity, levels that are increasingly differentiated and more inclusive. The repetition of actions leads at each level to patterns of action or "schemas" that enable the child to interact with the environment through increasingly sophisticated accommodating and assimilating experiences. Still later, cognitive structures emerge with linguistic sophistication, enabling the individual to operate on the physical world with conceptual tools and then finally to operate on thought itself. Each level is associated with particular ages and unfolds in an invariant sequence. The explanation of the invariant sequence is straightforward: One level does not appear before its predecessor, because the succeeding level builds on the preceding one. More significant than this, as differentiation increases through the hierarchy, each level not only incorporates those levels preceding it but transcends them as well. Thus formal operations show the properties of concrete operational intelligence and also those properties not present at the concrete operational level—hypothetical-deductive reasoning or propositional thought. Any researcher using a developmental-structural model owes a debt to Piaget. Of course, different researchers focus on different aspects of human development, for instance, psychosexual stages, identity formation, and object relations. But taken together these studies yield a consistent model of human growth. That model shows two types of growth: (1) the emergence of basic structures or "levels," which, all agree, arise in invariant sequence and once transcended, remain in operation, and (2) phases or "stages" that occur or appear as contents or manifestations of those particular basic structures or levels. The basic structures are innate, whereas the stages are determined by one's personality, history, and culture. Thus, although the stages differ from person to person and from society to society, the basic structures, because they are inherent, are the same for everyone.5 But the more crucial aspect of this distinction for our discussion lies elsewhere:


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Although the basic structures remain in operation once they have unfolded, the stages associated with a basic structure disappear when a new basic structure becomes central to how the individual interacts. Piaget's cognitive levels are basic structures, for we saw in his theory that the succeeding levels build on the preceding ones and that the functions of cognitive structures transcended by later levels remain in operation. Thus the preoperational level continues operating—one can still dream, for example—after the conceptual levels have unfolded. Notice, however, that so far Piaget's psychology contains no discussion of the self. The cognitive operations he studied are, because they are basic structures, innate. At no point in Piaget's developmental hierarchy of innate operations, at no particular level, can one say, "There is the self." The reason is simply that there is, according to developmental psychologists, no inherent self (Broughton, 1981b, Wilber, 1980). This is the nature of the sense of self: It is a stage phenomenon, not a basic structure. At each level the sense of self is generated and interpreted according to the basic cognitive structure of that level. From the interactions between the individual and the environment a self-sense emerges. These interactions and their limits are determined by the cognitive abilities that constitute each basic structure. Thus, for example, when an infant is limited to and thus bounded by early sensorimotor intelligence, there is no sense of self because the infant cannot differentiate between himself and the world, for example, between his leg and the table leg. But as his sensorimotor intelligence matures, the infant can make such a differentiation. When he bites his blanket, nothing happens, but when he bites his thumb, it hurts. His sense of self has become body bound. Once preoperational intelligence unfolds, however, the sense of self can shift away from the body and into the mind. Though the sense of self is no longer as the body, the individual still has a body. The functions of sensorimotor intelligence remain, but the sense of self has been completely replaced. Piaget suggested that each cognitive structure provides operations or capacities that serve as tools for making sense of—he said, for "constructing"—a type of external reality. Yet those operations correlatively structure an inner world or self as well. The interactions between the individual and the environment must establish a boundary between self and other, subject and object, inside and outside, so that the subject can know the world. As the interactions change, so the boundary changes. When identity shifts to the mind and out of the body, then the individual can operate, can control, the body. This can happen because the sense of self has changed. What was subject has now become object. Before, the infant could not operate on or "see" the body because he was the body. Now he is conscious of his body, and his identity is no longer bound by his skin. What, then, is the self? It is a two-part "system": how a person defines himself and what he defines himself as. The first we call agency; the second, self-definition. Agency. "Ego," wrote Loevinger, "is above all a process, not a thing. . . . The striving to master, to integrate, to make sense of experience is not one ego function among many but the essence of the ego" (1976, p. 59). Substitute the word self for

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ego in this quotation, and one has the essence of agency. The process uses the cognitive abilities available at each level as tools for operating on the world and, more specifically, for operating on what had most recently been the subject or self. That self has now become, with the shift in boundary, an object of awareness. Thus, preoperational thought can be used to control bodily functions and impulses once the self is no longer constituted as the body. Self-definition, The agency aspect of the "self-system" changes as new basic structures emerge, and the boundary between self and other shifts so that what once constituted subjectivity can now be objectified and operated on. Agency is always characterized by the process of using the cognitive tools—that is, itself—to organize a meaningful self-concept and worldview. It organizes, in brief, a selfdefinition. Central to that self-definition is what was agency at the prior level. Thus with the unfolding of preoperational thought and the shift of agency into mind, the body becomes part of the self-definition. It is no longer the self itself: The body is "mine"; it is no longer "me," though it still makes up how the individual describes or defines herself. Ask a child at this level to describe herself, and she will say something like "I have red hair"; ask a child at the concrete operational level, and she will say something like "I like horses" or "I play chess." The shift is from a literal self-consciousness focused on her body—for what was most recently agency becomes the center of the self-definition—to a self-consciousness about what she does. Therefore, the self-system consists of both process and product, of agency or the organizer of identity and of self-definition or what is organized into an identity. A cognitive-developmental approach to identity, comments John Broughton, shows that human growth can be understood only if one realizes that new conceptualizations of self are not simply new self-definitions—that is, new content—but are also new in form—that is, also a process for ordering psychological experience. "This entails that the concept of self is not a self-concept, emphasizing the particular features of a single self, but is a concept of selfhood" that must include agency, or, in his terms, "subjectivity" (198 1b, p. 16).6 What we cannot be conscious of is our agency, and what we place at the center of describing ourselves is our self-definition.

Membership Versus Autonomy Developmentalists who have examined the nature of or changes in the self, or its equivalents,7 agree that a stage of self is associated with each basic or cognitive structure. They agree that although devoid of self the cognitive structures are the basis of the self, both as tools for generating a self-definition and as boundaries of the self or agency. They agree that self-development proceeds through stratified stages characterized by increasing complexity, integration, unity, and interaction, similar, in fact, to the procession of the basic structures that underlie them. Indeed, these theorists are in such agreement on these matters that it is possible to say that they are unanimous on the existence, emergence, and nature of these stages.8 What


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they all describe in looking through the prism of the hierarchy of development is not one self but a "series" of selves, yet not so much a concatenation of selves as an "evolution" of self. Each self disappears to be replaced by a "higher-order" self, for at each new level of identity, all the basic structures that preceded that new level are integrated into identity. This integration makes the individual at each level a compound. Thus the individual is a compound self or a compound individual. I refer to this psychology of a hierarchy of self-development as the theory of compound individuality. Although it is true that associated with each basic structure is a stage of self, it is essential to keep in mind that the basic or cognitive structures can unfold without identity shifting to that level. In other words, there can be a lag between the use of the cognitive abilities available at a new level and the shift of self-definition and agency to that new level. Thus, for example, as we shall see, an adult can use formal operations to rationalize or justify maintaining the stage of self—"membership"— associated with concrete operations. Although there is a "body-self" associated with sensorimotor intelligence and a "representational" or "magical" self associated with preoperational intelligence (Arieti, 1967; Wilber, 1980), our discussion will be limited to the "membership" self of concrete operations and the "autonomous" self of formal operations. These latter two are the stages at which the individual becomes truly social, when what is most significantly other to the self is other selves. Here lies the root of the communitarian-liberal debate and the key to a possible resolution.

Membership Self The world of the preoperational or "magical" self is one of shifting images. Although there is some differentiation here between inner and outer, the boundary between self and other is not clearly defined. Thus whatever one senses, whatever appears in one's subjectivity, is taken as absolutely real. This is the stage of "imaginary" friends that are to the child quite real. With the advent of the preoperational ability to bring up images without requiring the presence of the "corresponding external stimulus" (Arieti, 1967, p. 61)— for example, a child can imagine her father without needing to have him present— identity begins to move from the physical world of the body-self to the mental world. But the thinking at the preoperational level is not linear or logical. It is what Jacques Lacan called in The Language of the Self "the forgotten language of childhood," in which syntax collides with magic. At this level resides the notion that wishing someone to break his ankle may in reality cause him to do so. Language brings forth a more complex world, one not just of physical objects and images and symbols but also of concepts. To coordinate this complexity requires, however, a different level of abilities. The rise of concrete operations, the first truly logical mental operations, supplants the tendency of the preoperational child to give magical explanations and to confuse the part for the whole. Now the world can stop shifting, and it "starts to hold still" (Kegan, 1982, p. 32); it becomes "concrete." Through concrete operations the child constructs a world that is orderly, regular,

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and stable. These operations enable the child to coordinate perceptions. Thus whereas the preoperational child can compare nickels and dimes, the concrete operational child can compare "coins." She can, that is, create classes of things. Now the child can understand the rules of conservation, that the water poured from the tall, thin glass into the short, squat glass is the same amount of water. Those rules extend beyond conservation of number to conservation of group membership. This membership, because it is essential to the creation and maintenance of a stable worldview and a stable sense of self, becomes of ultimate concern. Concrete operations enable the child to take perceptions, impulses, and concepts as objects. Through this ability the child develops "a continuing sense about things and people" (Kegan, 1982, p. 161), as well as an enduring disposition. From this disposition the child develops a self-concept. But perpetuating one's sense of things and people—worldview—and one's sense of self—self-concept—requires learning the rules for coordinating perceptions and conceptions. Those rules are not simply the tools for coordination but are at this level the actual source of the worldview and self. Because operations are concrete, the rules to learn or that can be learned are limited to those of the flesh-and-blood others ("concrete" others) by whom the child is surrounded. Able to sustain perceptions and conceptions, the child is able to build out of what is given or shared a continuing and stable social order that retains its properties from one social perception to the next. By acting on and coordinating this creation the child generates a sense of self. That is, the child knows herself as a member of that social order. She cannot know herself apart from this group context, for there is no self independent of that context. Because the child is limited by concrete operations to external characteristics, the boundary between self and other is simplistically drawn. Groups—one's own and other groups—are defined by obvious, concrete characteristics such as sex, age, race, and costume. Within these groups everyone will be seen to be, or the child thinks they ought to be, very much alike. Although the coordination of perceptions brings with it the ability to take the role of another, this ability is limited to those of one's own group, as within that limit there is no possibility of losing one's self. Control of the world and of oneself is gained through mastering the rules by which the world and the group are seen to be governed. To ensure that this mastery is not undermined, the child avoids anything that is uncertain or unpredictable and focuses instead on amassing information and statistics. Therefore it is not surprising, as Kegan (1982) observes, that the favorite reading of many children in the membership stage is The Guinness Book of World Records. It is the limits of concrete operations that lead the child to concentrate on such interests. When one asks a child at this stage, "Who are you?" the answer will resemble the concrete characteristics listed by James Joyce's young Stephen Daedalus: "Stephen Daedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Gallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe." The hallmark of this stage is competition and compromise. Both refer to the experiencing of roles (Kegan, 1982, p. 163): Competition establishes, tests, and measures the enduring disposition; compromise tests one's newfound ability to take


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the roles of others, to see from another's point of view. The elaborate games and rituals characteristic of this stage are means for understanding, exercising, and celebrating roles. Each participant shows herself and others not only that she has a prescribed role but also that she can fulfill it. Participants therein "display themselves, the selves they have become" (1982, p. 166). There is plenty for the child to learn within the limitations of her group. The rules important to learn are those that enable her to fit in with others (Loevinger, 1976, pp. 17-18). The group places new demands on the child, or, rather, her newly discovered awareness of the group demands more from her. The group "expects the adolescent to be able to take other people's feelings into account ... to be able to keep agreements, meet expectations, and construct reasons for doing so—all invitations to the yearning for inclusion" (Kegan, 1982, p. 168). All of this is quite different from the egocentrism characteristic of the preoperational child. Endowed with some perspectivism, able to operate with concepts, and thus to learn rules and roles, the child learns to construct and perceive a particular shared reality. Everyone who comes into contact with the child is a teacher describing the world and its operations until finally the child learns the rules for making that world and its roles her own, perceiving it as described. This membership is reinforced as the child acts according to the rules of the group, fulfills her assigned roles, and shares the common reality through communication. As G. H. Mead said, the self is "socially constituted . . . and must extend as far as the social activity or approaches of social relations which constitute it extend" (1934, p. 223). Agency is constituted by the rules and roles of the group; the self-definition, by the contents or the shared reality. Thus although the child can choose among acceptable social roles, the range of roles and the factors involved in choosing them are circumscribed by membership. "Since this [membership] mind is not yet capable of formal operational thought, the self would have no inner capacity to easily judge the true role from the false (or fraudulent) ones—it would tend merely to conform to those roles assigned it" (Wilber, 1983a, p. 285). Because the individual cannot see her own agency; because she cannot scrutinize "the obligations, expectations, satisfactions, purposes, or influences" (Kegan, 1982, p. 97) of the group; and because she cannot reflect on the rules and roles of her shared reality (she can learn them but cannot question them), the group rules. The need to conform is the central feature of the membership self, and the member is therefore acutely aware of the opinions of others. Having no critical distance from them, the child is captured by their viewpoints, opinions, and expectations and thus conforms to them.9 Because control and stability are essential to the membership self, the child seeks approval from others as a sign that her place in the group—and thus her self— is secure. The limit of the self lies in its inability to consult itself about, to separate from, the shared or group reality. Her membership, as her agency, is unconscious. It is not so much her reality, as the shared perceptions are herself. The group's norms are her norms, and the group's codes are her codes. She obeys the rules simply because they are the group's rules.10 Yet the language belies the state of the self. Because the group is the source of self, there is no self to share with others or to conform to group norms. There is no self separate from the group and thus none to bring to the group. As Kegan re-

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marked, others do not speak for her; she is the others speaking (1982, p. 64). Without a self separate from the group the child is not initiated into a ready-made community and does not submit to its system. She is the community standards, purposes, rules, and roles. These are not internalized; they are, as her agency, unconscious operators. "Something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it. . . . [I]t is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitution of reality" (1982, p. 31). Rather than taken within, the framework is built up from the inside. In rough terms, the self is seeking like minds and like opinions to reproduce, maintain, and reinforce its membership by sharing the symbols—beliefs, ideas, stories, purposes, and so forth—of the group. When a person is thrown into a new group, the content may change, but the need to conform remains. Consider the case of a teenage boy who grows up in Little Rock, Arkansas, hating blacks and then moves to Madison, Wisconsin, and becomes an egalitarian (Kegan, 1982). Though the perspectives are diametrically opposed, the mode for defining oneself is exactly the same: conformity to one's peer group, expressing the need to fit in. But having no self separate from the group, the member does not perceive it in this way. Membership is most typically the identity of early adolescents. The adolescent, comments James Fowler, "needs mirrors" (1981, p. 151), the eyes and ears of trusted others to reflect the image of an unfolding personality. Thus, for example, adolescent love is preoccupied not so much with burgeoning sexuality as it is, Erik Erikson tells us, with forming a personal myth of the self that is mirrored in another. Membership, Erikson also says, is the home of ideology, which he defines as "a coherent body of shared images, ideas, and ideals which provides for the participants a coherent, if systematically simplified, overall orientation in space and time, in means and ends" (1960, p. 81). But as a developmentalist would argue, membership is not necessarily a pernicious level. It marks a step out of egocentrism and toward full perspectivism. The ability to take the roles of others, even if limited, is crucial to a coherent worldview, for it enables viewpoints to be shared and understood. Erikson argues that ideology, despite the simplifications and possible rationalizations, is for adolescents salutary. "Youth needs to base rejections and acceptances on ideological alternatives vitally related to the existing range of alternatives for identity formation" (1960, p. 33). The youth is thus presented with new options, ideals, roles, and rules, but in a way that is limited and manageable. Whatever the content, aim, or end, the need of this stage is everywhere the same: "uncompromising commitment to some absolute hierarchy of values and some rigid principle of conduct" (1960, p. 81). In the adolescent quest for identity "there is a universal trend toward some form of uniformity (and sometimes to special uniforms or distinctive clothing) through which incomplete self-certainty . . . can hide in group certainty. . . . Even those who care to differ radically must evoke a certain uniformity of differing" (1960, p. 71). But why should self-certainty be incomplete? Membership is a level of shared and certain reality and thus of shared and certain self. But in middle adolescence, belonging and membership become desperate needs, because affiliation can become conscious. The unfolding of formal operations can bring the onset of doubt as


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adolescents expand perspectivism beyond the group and as the agency of the membership self becomes an object of the new self's attention.

Autonomous Self The unfolding of formal operational thought brings forth the "full range of operations involved in ratiocination" (Gardner, 1972, p. 103). This includes the capacities to express relations in terms of linguistic propositions; to consider systematically the relations of propositions to one another; and to generate counterfactuals, to make hypotheses, and to draw inferences. Whereas concrete operations enable the individual to use rules on concepts and to operate on the world of physical objects and persons, formal operations enable the individual to operate on logical or "formal" propositions about the world. Rather than just operating on the objects themselves, the individual can also operate on statements about objects. Formal operations enable the individual to transcend the concrete world and so apply to it, or operate on it with, general laws and rules that need not refer to the contents of the particulars. Able to act on the world propositionally, hypothetically, and abstractly, the individual can create plans in which any given concrete event is but one instance or one possibility. She conies thereby to realize that her own group or social order is only one possibility among many. While the membership self could conceive of the future, she could do so only as an extension of the concrete present. For her, possibility was a subset of reality. For the formal operational adolescent, reality is a subset of possibility. She can now imagine ideal states and unseen worlds. "The result is a high degree of flexibility; rather than being embedded in their own concrete point of view, youth are able to approach any subject matter from multiple perspectives" (Labouvie-Vief, 1980, p. 152). Such full-blown perspectivism means that one can separate from and thus operate on the group and its standards. The individual can now see the roles and rules that had constituted the self at the concrete operational level. Rather than being these rules and roles, the formal operational adolescent has rules and roles. Whereas the individual at the concrete operational level operated within a flow of concrete events that carried her along and shaped her identity, the individual at the formal operational level can reflect on, can step back from, those events. Whereas meaning for the membership self derived from the group, for the formal operational adolescent a group can be formed around one's own meaning. The principles and processes by which meaning is made transcend the group itself. The individual can therefore be autonomous as responsibility appears above all to be to the individual self. Responsibility implies ownership of actions. The obligation to act may come from different sources (authority, social pressures, conscience, self), but responsibility is ultimately always a response of self that defines the relationship to that source of obligation. Self has now moved from being relationships to having relationships. The boundaries of the group—family, gang, clan, tribe, nation—are transcended. Other people are known for the first time, for they can be known as independent, separate persons and not as representatives or members of a sodality.

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Social attachments are not necessarily lost, however. Indeed, they may be even more profound, for because the individual is separate from the group, she can evaluate the effects, and therefore the importance, of a group's organization, purposes, and assumptions. Whereas the self was derived from the community at the prior level, the self at the autonomous level can bring itself, can commit itself, to that community. Precisely the same is true of personal relationships. Relationships at the membership level defined the self, for there was no self independent of them. Now relationships are the content, not the context, of the self. No longer constituting agency, relationships can be operated on and can form part of the self-definition. Relationships can be freely entered, not compelled. These are conscious relationships. The interaction within them is between discrete, independent selves who present themselves in relationships and are not embedded in or formed by them. Identity shifts to the formal operational level as the individual grapples with the realization of the relativity of her own self-definition. With formal operations comes for the first time self-reflectivity. This is both a blessing and a curse. Not only is her world one of open possibilities, but so is her self-definition. She is now aware of the beliefs, values, rules, and roles that had constituted the self, and she asks, "Where do I stand?" and the more familiar "Who am I?" Asking such questions is the hallmark of the autonomous self. Identity shifts from what I am to who I am. Late adolescents at this stage do not describe themselves in concrete facts but use those facts to form more general hypotheses. Rather than saying, as the membership self does, "I like basketball," the late adolescent says, "I am athletic." Yet that is merely the beginning of how they describe themselves. Attention focuses now on the "metaphysical" self: Who is in charge of my life? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? What is happiness, and how can I achieve it? Because the person is now self-reflective, identity shifts from self-definition to agency. At the concrete operational level and earlier, there was only self-definition, for before formal operations there could not be self-reflectivity. When identity shifts to autonomy, the result appears to be an intensive focus on agency. The individual continues to have a self-definition, a set of personal beliefs, actions, values, and goals that are central to and that characterize her. But when pressed—for instance, by persistently asking, Who are you?—she will identify herself as the organizer of psychological experience more than what is organized (Kegan, 1982, p. 103). "The person is not his duties, roles or institutions, but the 'haver' of them" (1982, pp. 238-39). "Instead of being just 'me' (the self-concept or others' conception of me), the self is also the transcendent 'I,' the actually existing center of organization, the conceiver of self" (Broughton, 1982, p. 267). In other words, when pressed, autonomous selves soon abandon discussions of their self-concepts and resort to descriptions of the processes by which they come to self-definitions: There is a hub or a core to my self and shooting off from that are these qualities that define me: my law practice, my family, my friends, my club, my golf. What is that core? It is the way I change these qualities, the way I rank them in order of importance, or the way I see them change. They may not change, but I do; or they


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may change, but I really don't. The core isn't really any thing. It is my own style or way to decide what's important. That is really what I am.11

Identifying with agency brings with it, notes Kegan, a shift from conceiving of oneself exclusively as a member of a particular group or order to a sense of membership "in the human community." It is this identity that provides the status of individuality: "However distinctly given persons may be known, the construction of individuality suggests a way of knowing them which is common among them" (1982, p. 67). As James Mark Baldwin pointed out, individuality is singular, but it is also universal—a property shared by all persons. One may continue to have special obligations to those in one's own group, but now one also senses obligations to all other persons as persons. For example, an Israeli soldier, serving as a medic during the 1967 Six-Day War, revealed in his discussion of aiding Arabs and Israelis alike this sense of dual obligation: If he [an Arab] had to receive some kind of treatment, he'd receive it, just as every Israeli and every other soldier [would], without any problem. . . . Regarding the Arab, I'll do the same actions, but I'll do it not out of love, well, out of, I don't know, not out of love for the man, but out of some kind of duty I have toward him. (Kegan, 1982, p. 70)

This is the first and only level of individuality, for only at this level can the self be independent. The self is not simply the owner of its actions but is also the author of those actions and of itself; for at the autonomous stage the self-definition is not something given or something found but is something created, created by choices, deliberations, analysis, and self-reflection. The self can choose itself, so to speak. It is free from the dictates of nature—of instincts and impulses—and free from the dictates of outside authorities. At this level the self is distinct from the roles it plays. Now the self recognizes its agency, its aspect as the organizer of roles, determining which role is appropriate to a given situation. Agency is finally consciously differentiated from self-definition. The autonomous level emphasizes individuality just as the membership level emphasized group. The functions of the prior levels—the bodily functions and impulses, the imaging mind, the conceptual mind, the rules for operating on concepts, the taking of others' roles—are integrated into the autonomous self as components of that self. The self is, therefore, a compound of all the preceding levels and the integration of those with the current one. That current basic structure— formal operations—holds functions not found at the prior levels: The self is now able to think the impossible and to think about thinking. It is able "to assume, to presume, to construct ideals, and to conceive the potential, the metaphorical, the probable and improbable, the possible and the impossible" (Arieti, 1967, p. 144). To clarify still further the differences between the membership self and the autonomous self, we turn to the work in moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg. It has been said of Kohlberg that he did for understanding how the mind organizes the social-personal world what Piaget did for understanding how the mind organizes the physical world (Kegan, 1982). He did so, says Broughton, by doing what most cognitive-developmentalists eschew: Kohlberg put "the self into the stages of the theory" (Broughton, 1981b, p. 324). Ironically, however, Kohlberg

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seems to have left out any direct analysis of the self. Yet his "conventional" and "postconventional" levels of moral reasoning correspond precisely to our membership self and autonomous self, respectively.12 What interests us here is not so much how adolescents shift from being membership selves to being autonomous selves but how adults try to remain at or justify the membership stage in order to escape the conflicts, tensions, and contradictions that can ensue when formal operations unfold. In addition, Kohlberg has been an immensely important figure in the exploration of moral theory through the study of psychology. Although it is true that the membership self and the autonomous self can readily be found in the empirical data underlying his theory of moral development, those data and therefore his theory as well run into difficulties when he tries to extract a level of self at which the person lives by and acts according to rational principles on which all rational persons would agree. The theory of compound individuality and the "two-track" self can use Kohlberg's data while avoiding the problems associated with his "higher levels."

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development Thirty years ago, influenced by the theories of James Mark Baldwin—the father of social psychology—and the experimental work of Piaget, Kohlberg began a series of interviews with seventy-two Chicago schoolboys (aged ten to sixteen) to determine whether reasoning about situations involving conflicts over rights and claims (moral dilemmas; see boxed text for Kohlberg's most famous example) showed any of the features of developmental stage structures. Every hypothetical dilemma involved some question about the relationship between self and other, and the theory derived from these interviews purports to show how the self differentiates from and relates to society and others.

In Europe, a woman was near death from a very bad disease, a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium for which a druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only raise about half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell the drug cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make as much money as I can from it." So Heinz broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have stolen the drug? Why? Why not? Moral development, Kohlberg tells us, "is fundamentally a process of the restructuring of modes of role-taking" (1969, p. 399). Each new structure is characterized by a new cognitive ability that enables a person to understand and coordinate


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more diverse points of view and to take into account more of the relevant situational factors. Consequently, as the person proceeds, he is able to handle more complicated dilemmas in a consistent way. Each stage is higher than or superior to its predecessor because each stage is "a more differentiated, comprehensive, and integrated structure than its predecessor" (1969, p. 195). Little of this should by this time be new or surprising to the reader. Kohlberg also echoes other developmentalists in arguing that people move through these stages in an invariant sequence. The stages of his theory, also like those of other developmentalists, are inductive generalizations derived from empirical data.13 Kohlberg classified moral reasoning by three levels—preconventional, conventional, and postconventional—each with two stages. Because only the conventional and postconventional levels and their stages are pertinent to our discussion, my remarks will be limited to them.

Conventional The moral reasoner on the conventional level is concerned with the performance of good and right roles and with the fulfillment of expectations. At Stage 3 those roles and expectations are limited to primary group relations based on sentiment. Those primary groups are dyadic (two-person) relationships, of which society is an aggregation and social relations are mere extensions of interpersonal relations. Moral intentions are therefore based on interpersonal values, and relationships are limited to dyadic, concrete relationships of significance. One's primary concern at this stage is to please and help those significant others, to gain their approval as a "good boy" or "nice girl." At the next stage, Stage 4, expectations and duties are defined by rules of the system, not by one's relationship to specific persons. Whereas Stage 3 community was restricted to primary groups in which the self shares the same perspective (the self is that perspective), Stage 4 community demands that one be able to take the perspectives of many roles. Individual relationships are here superseded by the view of community as a system of shared, fixed roles and rules. Society is seen to be a system of relationships, not an aggregation of relationships. Values can be protected only by the maintenance of law and order through a system, not by the actions of a few individuals. Therefore, one must consider what is good or bad for that system above what is good or bad for one's personal relationships. The primary concern of the Stage 4 reasoner is to prevent deviations of the laws, as such deviations threaten the whole system of shared expectations. Stages 3 and 4 appear to follow our description of membership. Yet the Stage 4 "law-and-order" orientation requires some advanced role-taking ability and thus some rudimentary kind of formal operational thought. Thus, from the viewpoint of the theory of compound individuality, it could be described as a transition stage, for competing systems and social orders cannot yet be assessed. Stage 4 is reason in support of the known and established order of one's own country or subculture within it (e.g., the Catholic church). The emergence of some formal operations enables the reasoner to rationalize or justify his society and his position in it. But, Kohlberg claims, given the opportunity to engage in a discussion

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of moral dilemmas, the reasoner will see the limits of Stage 4. The ability to create hypothetical possibilities characteristic of formal operations will lead the reasoner to an awareness that one's own society is merely one possibility among many. Now aware of many possible systems, the moral reasoner is drawn to criteria for choosing among them and for adhering to any one of them. This leads to the postconventional level. Postconventional Whereas Stage 4 was a system-maintenance perspective and thus did not provide any guidelines for changing society, Stage 5 is the perspective of a rational approach to making laws and rules. The person, no longer embedded in the social order, can now reflect on it. Rather than striving merely to maintain the social order, the Stage 5 reasoner seeks to clarify the purposes for which society has been structured. Society is now defined through contractually agreed-upon expectations, rights, and obligations. The social contract presupposes equality among partners, reciprocity of partners, and liberty of partners, for otherwise a contract cannot be binding. Here the person is able to step back from concrete laws to judge them in accordance with what laws could or ought to be. The Stage 5 reasoner can take a perspective outside society and, Kohlberg argues, prior to society (1971, p. 203). At this stage the moral reasoner is concerned with how the civic order and its laws are "made" (Kohlberg, 1971, p. 200). Social institutions must be seen, according to these reasoners, as the products of rational thought. Although rational persons may contract to establish a certain kind of institution in one society that they might not establish in another, such institutions are considered valid as long as the terms of the contract are based on the free consent of rational agents (Kohlberg, 1969, p. 399). Within an established order, Stage 5 reasoners seek rational agreement on and justification for the laws and institutions they share. Although Stage 5 reasoners can recognize the relativity of many laws and institutions, they believe that to be obligatory, laws must be consistent with individual rights—life, liberty, freedom from oppression—and consistent with the interests and welfare of the majority (Kohlberg, 1971, pp. 201-3). Obligations to such laws are part of the social contract. Stage 5 reasoners juxtapose natural rights and utilitarianism. Individual rights are sacrosanct in any society and must be guaranteed, because they are prior to any social contract, but the guiding Stage 5 maxim is "the greatest good for the greatest number," provided that the good is rational. Consideration of social utility can lead to laws being changed rather than simply having laws frozen in place, as in Stage 4 "law and order" reasoning. According to Kohlberg, Stage 5 reasoners argue that to be obligatory, laws must be made through constitutional procedures that all rational persons can accept. Such laws are binding on all citizens, even those who disagree, and are to be obeyed as part of the contract (1971, p. 204). But what should a person do in situations for which there are no legal definitions or in which those that do exist are questionable? The Stage 5 criteria used for making laws (impartiality, universality) are then applied to moral choices. This marks the next stage, Stage 6. At Stage 6, reasoners seek rational agreement not on the nature of a shared


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social order or its procedures but on the principles underlying such orders. To the Stage 5 reasoner, obligations to the laws are limited to those who share in the social contract, who share a social order. At Stage 6, reasoners seek rational agreement on a set of moral principles that are valid irrespective of any definite social order and irrespective of any individual's social, economic, racial, or political status. Those principles are (1) persons are of unconditional value—similar, if not identical, to Kant's Categorical Imperative—and (2) individual justice—"the right of every person to equal consideration of his claims in every situation, not just those codified into law" (Kohlberg, 1971, p. 210). A just society is therefore one predicated on and whose actions and laws are determined by such principles. Whereas Stage 5 justice derives from what is legal, at Stage 6 what is legal derives from what is just. In brief, although Stage 5 can yield "a set of procedural principles on which men could agree ... it cannot yield a universal morality on which all men could agree" (1971, p. 208). Here Kohlberg has made clear what at previous stages seems only implied: that his stages are not only about how persons reason morally but also about substantive moral contents. This "hidden agenda" has been the focus of some sharp criticism, and critics have been outraged by Kohlberg's suggestion that there are universal substantive moral principles on which all rational persons agree. I shall address this claim, and others, when I look critically at Kohlberg's theory. But for now my focus will be on clarifying the distinction between the membership self and the autonomous self, by using Kohlberg's theory of moral development. Kohlberg's postconventional stages do not really help us other than to suggest that at Stages 5 and 6 a person with full formal operations is able to examine critically the laws and values of the social order by stepping back reflectively (stepping out into another role). To pursue the clarification, let us look at some of the "conventional" responses from participants in two incidents that struck at America's sensibilities in the 1970s: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.

My Lai During the Vietnam War, Paul Meadlow, a foot soldier, admitted before a military tribunal, to firing, on orders from his superior, Lieutenant William Galley, at unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village, My Lai. In a televised interview, Meadlow made the following comments in response to the question, "Why did you do it?": If an officer tells you to stand on your head in the middle of the highway, you do it. ... We was [sic] supposed to get satisfaction from this village for the men we lost over there. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson. [In killing] I was getting relieved from what I had seen over there. . . . My buddies getting killed or wounded. ... It was just revenge.14

Meadlow's interview revealed that he never questioned his orders. Rather, he expressed a Kohlbergian preconventional view that one obeys orders to avoid punishment—"getting slapped in the head or kicked in the chest." Meadlow showed little acknowledgment that his actions were not acceptable conduct. When asked how he could have shot babies and children, he responded: "It's just one of those things."

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Lieutenant Galley, his superior, showed a Kohlbergian Stage 3 orientation. He based his behavior on his notions of what he anticipated others would regard as the actions of a model officer. When asked why he fired at civilians while his company of soldiers moved through the village, he answered: Because that's what I was instructed to do, Sir, and I had delayed [in the village] long enough. I was trying to get out of there before I got criticized again. ... I was a run-of-the-mill guy. I still am ... I had to obey orders and hope that the people in Washington were smarter than me.

Through his actions Galley tried to win praise for fulfilling his role. As with all membership selves, Galley is dependent on others to define for him what is right and wrong. His responsibility is to fulfill the expectations of those "in charge" who made the definitions. If, for example, the "higher ups" (Kohlberg & Scharf, 1972, p. 6) define a group of women and children as the enemy and define an officer's role as seeing to it that the enemy is destroyed, then, as Galley said, he "acts as directed . . . and [will not] feel wrong for doing so" (Kohlberg & Scharf, 1972, p. 6). Clearly, Galley could not step back from his role and the rules (obeying orders) to test logically the validity of the orders. His testimony at his court martial indicated that he could not comprehend the meaning of the Geneva Convention, that is, the section that requires soldiers to test the legality of the orders they receive. Galley admitted that he had received instructions about the Geneva Convention, but when asked, "What are the principles involved?" he responded: "That all orders were assumed legal, that a soldier's job was to carry out the order given him to the best of his ability. . . . You could be court-martialed for refusing an order." Calley sensed no tension between the Geneva Convention and his orders, because he recognized no conflict between his orders and the law. He could not comprehend the Convention in any way other than how he did, because as a membership self he could see only that all orders were the law. When pressed about what he would do if he had a doubt about an order, Calley responded: "If I questioned the order, I was supposed to carry it out and then come back and make my complaint." Contrast this kind of reasoning with that of Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Galley's company. Bernhardt repeatedly refused to fire at civilians. When ordered to shoot a woman running from "LZ dotti" [another village], Bernhardt instead ran after her shouting, "Dong lai!" ["Stop!"], but she got away. Calley then berated him for not shooting her. Later, when another woman was shot because she would not halt, Bernhardt reported the incident to his captain. The captain responded that shooting her was brigade policy. Bernhardt commented: They couldn't think of a better way to stop her. I just wouldn't have stopped her at all. Nothing needs an excuse to live. . . . When I saw them shooting women and children 1 figured, "Well, I'm going to have to be doing my own war and let them do their own war."

"Doing his own war" translated into firing over the heads of the villagers at My Lai. He explained his actions in this way:


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I [won't] do anything if I know it is wrong. No matter whose law it is, no matter whose leadership I am following, [if it is wrong] I won't be able to do it. . . . I am just compelled [not to]. ... Since My Lai I have had to follow my own decisions. . . . Now this is what I do: I try and apply logic to it rather than anything else; logic to say, "Is this right, or should I do this?"

Bernhardt is clearly able to stand back from the laws and orders that he is meant to follow. "People must be guided by their own standards," he explained, "by their self-discipline." He is able to differentiate concrete rules from what is legally and personally acceptable and to calculate the consequences of actions not only for himself but also for others. In Lieutenant Galley and Michael Bernhardt we have examples of a membership self and an autonomous self. Galley is driven by expectations, as he tries to live up to the conventional role of a good soldier. When that role demands that he murder civilians, he has no way of stepping outside it to scrutinize those expectations. Bernhardt, on the other hand, is able, through formal operations and self-reflectivity, to operate logically on rules and roles, to judge whether they have a valid legal and moral basis or whether they should be rejected. As an autonomous self, Bernhardt identifies with following his own standards and his self-discipline. From the perspective of an autonomous self, it is easy to condemn the actions and thinking of Meadlow and Galley, because the right response is so clear. "Why can't these men act courageously and do what is right?" The same question was asked of Nazi guards at Auschwitz and of the participants in Stanley Milgram's obedience study in which an experimenter orders a subject to give increasingly severe electric shocks—even supposedly "lethal" shocks—to an actor who is pretending, unseen but audible, to be a learner. How can people on orders inflict pain on the innocent? Often unnoticed in these situations is that many participants are membership selves who may actually be acting courageously (Kegan, 1982, p. 65). They may think that although they do not like what they are ordered by authority figures to do—indeed, most of the subjects in Milgram's experiment protested, wept, and shook uncontrollably—they are doing what is right by following the orders. To quit would not be courageous but cowardly. The world of rules and roles, of authority figures issuing orders, and of conformity to them, is both the membership worldview and the source of one's self. Admittedly, the position that I have described as the membership self reflects some strong claims. One standard reading of situations like My Lai or that of the Auschwitz guards is to suggest that they acted under extreme pressure. But this assumes that the pressure forced them to take actions they knew to be wrong. The membership self, on the other hand, is doing what he thinks is right. Galley admitted no remorse—"I [will not] feel wrong" for acting as directed—because he had acted morally. Following orders was not an excuse but a sufficient and compelling reason for action. Galley's identity, his self, was built on his doing so. Therefore Galley was embedded in his point of view. He was psychologically unable to "perceive the particularity, the historicity, or even the reality of [his] own [position]" (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 252), because he could not stand back from the standards by which he operated.


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This does not mean that adults such as Galley or those involved in Milgram's experiment were unable to explain and rationalize their actions. But they can do so only in terms of their own worldview. In other words, because they are embedded in the rules and roles of the group, or society, membership selves are not so much conforming to that social order by accepting its terms as they are themselves that order and can see only in its terms. Though formal operations are available, the person is unable to use them except to justify his membership self. Though the person could be self-reflective, he is unable to be so because he is not yet able to extricate himself from the membership world. Nothing has pushed him to the limits of his way of knowing the world. Therefore, his identity has not shifted to the autonomous stage. Stanley Hauerwas describes how Albert Speer eschewed selfreflection while serving the Nazi regime: He had no effective way to step back from himself, no place to stand. His selfdeception began when he assumed that "being above all an architect" was a story sufficient to constitute his self. He had to experience the solitude of prison to realize that becoming a human being requires stories and images a good deal richer than merely professional ones. (Quoted in Fowler, 1981, p. 281) Only when confined in Spandau Prison could Speer come to terms with and take responsibility for the crimes against humanity that he had committed. While he was accepting the use of slave laborers in Germany's factories and mines, Speer notes that he "did not see these men at all ... I was moving within the system. ... I did not see any moral ground outside the system where I should take a stand." Unable to step outside his position, Speer, and any membership self, could not find any compelling reason outside the established order. As Maclntyre points out, "Hence it would be concluded by an adequately reflective [though not self-reflective] adherent of such an established order that there can be no good reason for appealing to some standard external to that order" (1988, p. 217). Having reflected on his life and identity inside prison, the purpose for which prisons were originally conceived by the Quakers, Speer asked: "Who was that young man who had now become so alien to me?" (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 280)

Watergate Employees of the American federal government involved or implicated in the Watergate break-in and/or cover-up provide examples of predominantly Stage 3 and Stage 4 reasoning.15 The break-in, an attempt by burglars in the employment of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) to plant listening devices at the Democratic Party National Headquarters, was the surface, investigations revealed, of a fetid swamp of illegality and harassment that went as high up as the president himself. In an exchange with Senator Howard Baker during the Senate Watergate investigations, Mr. Donald Porter, at the time of the burglary an assistant to Mr. Jeb Magruder, head of CREEP, explained why he had lied to the grand jury: BAKER: At any time did you ever think of saying, "I do not think this is quite right"? PORTER: Yes I did.


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BAKER: What did you do about it? PORTER: I didn't do anything about it. BAKER: Why not? PORTER: In all honesty, probably because of the fear of group pressure that would ensue from not being a team player. . . . My loyalty, Senator Baker, is to one man, Richard Nixon. ... I first met Mr. Nixon when I was eight years old, when he ran for Congress in my district. ... I felt I had known this man all my life—not personally, perhaps, but in spirit. I felt a deep sense of loyalty. I was appealed to on this basis.

Porter is not like Galley. Porter was aware of the group's motivations and pressures; he could observe and act on (justify) his relations to the group. He even recognized that what he was doing was wrong. But he was unable to act against the group because it was one source of his identity. He was willing to do what he knew to be wrong because his loyalty to Nixon superseded any notion of right or wrong. His overriding concern was to maintain not the system—the society (Stage 4)—not even the group, but to maintain what was the expression of his source of identity— interpersonal loyalty (Stage 3). Porter had the tools—formal operations—for distancing himself from the group, but he was unable to do so because his identity, his meaning, his self, was attached through it to Nixon. He feared that the group would report his disloyalty to Nixon, and that would have destroyed the source of his identity. Unlike Galley, it was not the group's orders in which Porter was embedded and thus could not critically examine; rather, he was embedded in his loyalty to Nixon. Another conspirator, Egil Krogh, gave a standard Stage 4 justification for his actions: I see now that the key is the effect that the term "national security" had on my judgment. The very words served to block my critical analysis. . . . [T]o suggest that the national security was being improperly invoked was to invite a confrontation with my patriotism and loyalty and so appeared to be beyond the scope and in contravention of the faithful performance of the duties of my office. . . . The very definition of national security was for the President to pursue his planned course.

Krogh's concern was to fulfill his role of maintaining the nation, which meant maintaining the president. His perspective gave him no way to judge whether the president's planned course was itself a breach of national security.16 Membership selves cannot scrutinize the nature of their commitments or loyalties, as these are the way of agency and the source of the self-definition. Because adult membership selves do not seek to determine by analysis or role taking whether their cause is just or whether their conscience is "right," they seek merely to bring their actions and beliefs into line with those of the group. Doing so is doing right. A membership self cannot reflect on his need to conform, because the self cannot see what constitutes agency. The need to conform is the principle that organizes experience. Donald Porter succumbed not to group pressure to commit acts he knew to be wrong, but he succumbed to the fear that if he did not commit these acts, he would face ridicule and sanctions from those in the group, those who loyally served President Nixon. Though he sensed a conflict between loyalty and "what was

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right," his need for approbation from Nixon, if only indirect, resolved the dilemma. Porter thus used formal operations to justify and reinforce his membership identity: "I am loyal to Richard Nixon; Nixon or his authorized agents have authorized me to commit improprieties—including perjury; therefore, I shall be loyal and do as instructed." Porter's testimony reveals that conformity did not so much outweigh truth; loyalty to Nixon was Porter's truth. Porter could not bring into question the nature or basis of his loyalty, the boundaries of his self. Loyalty and conformity give way to "higher" or more comprehensive principles when identity shifts to autonomy. From the perspective of the theory of compound individuality, this means that individuals act according to the dictates of reason, according to principles that are valid independent of the group's or society's standards. From Kohlberg's perspective the claim is even stronger. It is that individuals act according to universal moral principles on which all rational persons can agree. This position has been controversial, to say the least, and in the mind of some critics has placed Kohlberg's entire theory in jeopardy. Indeed, of all the developmental theorists, Jean Piaget apart, Kohlberg has drawn in recent years the most critical attention, both within and outside psychology.17 Examining the nature of these critiques will help us determine whether the theory of compound individuality is susceptible to the same criticisms.

Critiques of Kohlberg In the early 1970s, on the strength of his empirical work, Kohlberg claimed that his theory showed not only how people reason morally but also how they ought to reason. In effect, he claimed to have solved a two-thousand-year-old philosophical conundrum: how to decide what to do when rights and claims conflict. Stage 6 ethical principles, those on which all rational persons can agree, define the right decision and reasoning for anyone in that situation. Understandably, the criticism of Kohlberg's theory has centered on Kohlberg's arguments in defense of this claim and on the absence of convincing cross-cultural data to support the claim.18 The critics contend that Kohlberg is presenting a theory that is not universal and whose principled stages are not empirical. Rather, he is presenting a theory based on a Western supremacist view of morality and a description of principled stages drawn from extrapolations from his own political predilections. Critics were certainly justified to respond in this way in 1971 when Kohlberg, with few cross-cultural or longitudinal data, announced: "Almost all individuals in all cultures use the same thirty basic moral categories, concepts, or principles, and all individuals in all cultures go through the same order or sequence of gross stage development."19 To substantiate such claims, cross-cultural research would have to show (1) an invariant sequence, with movement upward and without significant regressions or skipping of stages; (2) the full range of moral stages, including the highest (otherwise those stages cannot be part of any empirical claim); and (3) a correspondence among all types of moral reasoning found in the study and the stages Kohlberg describes.


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In 1983 John Snarey of Harvard compared forty-three studies carried out in twenty-six countries (counting the United States) to ascertain whether these claims were substantiated. Of these studies 23 percent represented primarily Western populations; 46 percent were on non-European populations influenced by the West (e.g., India and Taiwan); and 31 percent included non-Western village populations. The studies also showed strong variety in age groups, male and female populations, and socioeconomic background. Seven of them were longitudinal studies; the rest were cross-sectional only. Thus, Snarey concludes, "the diversity and number of cultures ... are sufficient to evaluate the claim of cultural universality" (1983, p. 15). With reference to stage invariance, Snarey's analysis shows that 86 percent of the studies showed an increase in upward stage movement, with 100 percent showing no stage skipping. The studies bear out Kohlberg's claims about movement to higher stages being age dependent. Were all of the stages present? Every study found Stages 1 through 4, without exception. In the Western urban societies tested, 100 percent found Stages 4/5 (a transition stage to be discussed later) to some degree and Stage 5 to a lesser degree. In non-Western urban societies, Stages 4/5 and 5 appeared in 91 percent of the samples. In non-Western traditional folk societies, however, Stage 5 was absent from 100 percent of the cases. How do we account for this? Kohlberg himself conceded that Stage 5 was a rare occurrence even in the United States, and in the mid-1970s he dropped Stage 6 altogether from his revamped scoring manual (Gilligan & Murphy, 1980). But even conceding the rarity of Stage 5 reasoning, how does Snarey account for its complete absence in the folk societies? One explanation is that given the small samples of adults tested in those societies, it would be unusual, because of the infrequency of Stage 5 in any culture, to see any postconventional reasoning. But two of the traditional cultures tested— Kenyan village leaders and Tibetan monks—showed no one beyond even Stages 3 or 3/4. In the case of the Tibetan monks, not only did they fail to score at the postconventional level, but they also scored most often at the preconventional level, below most of the laymen in their communities. Three of the researchers make the identical case about the absence of Stage 5 in folk cultures. Vasudev, Uwe Gielan, and Ting Lei, the principal investigators of the studies in India, Tibet, and Taiwan, respectively, contend that Kohlberg's ethical principles miss the alternative ethical principles that the subjects use in these cultures. Were the Tibetan monks really reasoning from preconventional positions, or was Kohlberg's scoring system unable to accommodate their responses or to decipher their alternative ethical principles? Additional research and more careful analysis need to be undertaken to answer this, but as Snarey concludes, bias appears evident. To summarize, the data in Snarey's comparison strongly support the claim of the invariance of stage movement, and they also demonstrate the universal presence of Stages 1 through 4. But are the postconventional stages really culture bound and ethnocentric? Is the reasoning of the Tibetan monks based on insights that are regressive and infantile, or is it so unorthodox and paradoxical that it only sounds like but does not truly represent the preconventional level? Whatever the causes—and these cannot be my focus in this discussion—the

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absence of the postconventional stages in the cross-cultural studies makes those stages suspect. This is a clear problem for Kohlberg's theory, but does that absence have any bearing on compound individuality and the autonomous self? Could it be that formal operations themselves are absent, that so-called primitive people cannot think self-reflectively? Claude Levi-Strauss and Bronislaw Malinowski both found evidence that primitive peoples can reason about their customs and norms rather than blindly conform to them (see Levi-Strauss, 1963, 1966; and Malinowski, 1954). That is all we need to claim for the autonomous self; that is, it is autonomous with respect to the conventions of one's society and the groups or institutions therein. The existence of formal operations does not depend on ethical principles; it is the other way around. One needs formal operations to be able to reason from ethical principles, but one does not need to reason from ethical principles in order to have formal operational thought. Perhaps the homogeneity of folk societies and the kinds of moral conflicts within them obviate full-blown perspectivism. But because folk peoples do not use formal operations does not mean they do not have them. As a basic structure, formal operations are a universal invariant, arising in all humans by a certain age and in the course of normal human development. But their presence does not mean they are used to form identity or to reason morally. Certainly Richard Nixon was capable as president of formal operational thought, but one could with cogency question his moral reasoning during the Watergate episode. The evidence already in on Kohlberg's work verifies at least rudimentary formal operations universally, for at least some is required for Stage 4 reasoning, and the cross-cultural and longitudinal data show Stage 4 reasoning present in every culture. The upshot of this is that the theory of compound individuality accommodates all of the empirical findings related to Kohlberg's theory, whereas some of those data call into question aspects of Kohlberg's theory itself. The data do support all of Kohlberg's contentions if applied only to Stages 1 through 4, but they leave in doubt his claims about the principled stages. Despite the early bluster, Kohlberg himself has had obvious doubts about these stages. One of the interesting anomalies that appeared in Kohlberg's studies was the regression of young adults from Stage 4 or even Stage 5 reasoning to an anarchic or hedonistic relativism resembling Stage 2 reasoning. Such regression would be devastating to the idea of invariance. Because he found evidence of some stage movement upward when these hedonistic relativists had "matured," Kohlberg proposed a transition stage—Stage 4/5—between conventional and principled thinking. He revised extensively the scoring manual and stage descriptions, with the result that Stage 6 descriptions disappeared altogether and the incidence of Stage 5 reasoning based on a redefinition of that stage drastically declined. This maneuver served merely to oxygenate the flames of criticism. The presence of possible regression, the elimination of Stage 6, and the absence of data supporting Kohlberg's claims that the ethical principles of the highest stages were empirical led many critics to agree with Richard Schweder that "reason may be less cunning than Hegel or Kohlberg suppose" (1982, pp. 423-24), that Kohlberg's principles are not the basis of an objective morality dictated by rationality but are the moral principles, the moral and political content, that he most wants to support. It is by no means clear to professional philosophers that there are any formal criteria, let alone natural empirical principles, for resolving moral conflicts.


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Two communitarian critics have argued not against Kohlberg's principled stages per se but against forms of "autonomous rationality." Reid and Yanarella criticize the Kohlbergian idea—borrowed, they say, from Kant and Piaget, that an individual can use reason divorced from sociality or social circumstances and history to construct "his own reality in such a way that he can be said to be the maker of his own destiny" (1977, p. 518). Their critique does affect the theory of compound individuality, as the autonomous self is embedded in a rationality that permits separation from one's social milieu. According to Reid and Yanarella: Autonomous rationality or autonomous man obscures the social and institutional context of human subjectivity by situating the problem of identity in a purely internal context. . . . [A]n alternative model of dialectical sociality—derived from Hegel and Marx—radically redefines the problem of individuality and self identity in terms of a practical struggle to overcome the predefined identity imposed upon individuals by the sociocultural totality, by reconstituting the social conditions and cultural context in which they exist in order to realize their true social nature. (1977, p. 519) At issue is what is meant by "true social nature." Kohlberg, who does not talk about identity per se, has argued that the basis of all developmental theory is interaction between "a moral subject" and others (1985, p. 501) and is not "purely internal." Furthermore, from the perspective of any developmental theory, the self or subject is not autonomous from the outset but must, as Kohlberg's theory shows, move away from its conformity to the predefined identity imposed by society. How, then, is Kohlberg's theory at variance from the idea of dialectical sociality described by Reid and Yanarella? Their Marxist solution of reconstituting social conditions may make the struggle to overcome this predefined identity easier, but it certainly does not make the struggle possible. Individuality and autonomy, as Kohlberg and the theory of compound individuality both argue, are inherently social. That is an essential point of developmentalism. Yet this differs from the Marxist interpretation in that in developmentalism one cannot assume autonomous identity from social or institutional arrangements or changes. Reid and Yanarella are correct to criticize Kohlberg for failing to develop the sociality aspect of the theory as publicly and thoroughly as he developed the aspect of separation or differentiation, but they are wrong to suggest that he does not have one. As it turns out, the one aspect that Kohlberg does have may be even more deleterious than if he had none at all, for as with many developmentalists, Kohlberg stresses autonomy or agency at the expense of inclusion and relationships. The result is the propagation of an individualism that, as the communitarians contend, leaves both social and personal development in jeopardy.20

Liberal and Communitarian Selves Revisited The mistake, or oversimplification, made by liberal individualists is that criticized by Reid and Yanarella and by the communitarians in Chapter 1: positing identity o selfhood as agency only, as subjectivity without contents or constituent traits. I have presented the theory of compound individuality in part to offset this notion by

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showing that self-development involves at every level both social interactions and constitutive traits or self-definitions. Every stage of self-development is an increase in complexity of what one is and what one has. Properties that at one level constituted agency are at the next level seen as possessions or definitions of the self. At the membership level the self is constituted of parts played in the community and by the community itself. At the level of formal operations the autonomous self no longer is those roles, duties, shared reality, or communities, but it has them. They do not possess him, but he, them. Likewise, at this level, the self is seen to have a self or selves. All exclusive identification is by definition unconscious. The moment that one is aware of having a body, the person no longer is the body. The self cannot see those structures with which it is identified, for no observing structure—no subject—can observe itself observing. But as an autonomous self the person is conscious of agency, that he is not only a system of self-concepts but also the organizer, even the "creator," of them. But having rules, roles, and obligations moves responsibility, as was said, to the self. Rules and rights and principles are then followed not to avoid punishment, to maintain social cohesion, or to uphold group norms but to avoid self-condemnation. The independence of the self, the reliance on the self, the separation from social obligations and norms, and the view of relationships as freely entered and, worse, easily abandoned are the very objections that communitarians have leveled against liberalism. The consciousness of agency seems ineluctably to result in individualism. The response of a liberal who adopted the theory of compound individuality might be this: Although the self is autonomous, it still needs relationships, if only to reinforce its independence. Because selves are now shared in and not derived from relationships, the self can internalize the perspectives of others without fear that the self will be either lost or overwhelmed. The greater role-taking ability available through formal operations means that more and multiple viewpoints can be understood. The autonomous self relishes this diversity of viewpoints, because every new and different perspective internalized teaches the self more about itself and the world. The communitarian critique, this liberal might add, is therefore unfounded, for the ability to internalize the worldviews of others results not simply in the prospect of having more and different relationships but in the possibility as well of having deeper relationships than those of membership. One can now understand another and can give oneself to others, whereas before the person had no self to give. Indeed, modern liberals, as Gerald Gaus points out (1983), differ from their classical predecessors in their insistence on the connection between, if not the reconciliation of, the individual and the community. J. S. Mill, John Dewey, Hobhouse, Bosanquet, T. H. Green, and Rawls, though markedly different in many respects, all agreed, argues Gaus, that individuals require sociality and community for full human development. According to their modern liberal account, no individual can develop all the capacities she possesses. Therefore all individuals need others, who are developing different capacities, to complete their own natures.


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Rawls, for example, reasons that each person relies on the talents and lives of others to round out her own life (1971, pp. 529, 565). He points out, "It is as if others were bringing forth a part of ourselves that we have not been able to cultivate" (1971, p. 44). Yet this liberal recognition of a need for relationship and sociality, rejoins the communitarian, in no way undercuts the individualism through which that need is expressed. Surely this notion of needing others to complete one's own life or nature brings the liberal perilously close to treating others, implicitly or otherwise, as means to their own development and to the fulfillment of their lives. This instrumental attitude toward relationships, according to the communitarians, is, as I shall discuss in the next chapter, an inescapable hallmark of liberal individualism and at the heart of the communitarian critique. Moreover, continues the communitarian, at the very moment that one internalizes the voices of others for interior dialogue, one may then cease to need further relationships. Although the voices are of others, they are now part of the independent self. Though socially derived, the person has the illusion of self-sufficiency: One can fulfill one's need for relationships simply and solely by conversing with the voices within. Within the terms of the debate set by communitarians, liberals seem to have no way out of this impasse. Liberals insist on autonomy, but communitarians insist that autonomy leads to or implies an individualism as self-sufficiency that is aberrant, manipulative, and pernicious. The communitarian antidote is to restore some form of constitutive community. The liberal might be tempted to associate the communitarians' socially situated self with the membership self. After all, at the membership stage it is impossible to conceive of any relationship or social role apart from those already defined, determined, and guided by the rules of the social order. It is a description of self, and life, familiar to any field anthropologist.21 It is also the basis of the distinction that Taylor, Maclntyre, and Sandel have made between the premodern and modern conceptions of the self. One comes to know oneself only in relation to the larger whole of which he is a part. To attempt to answer the question Who am I? without this backdrop or context would plunge one, as Taylor says, "into a kind of nullity, a sort of non-existence, a virtual death" (1985, p. 258). Yet the very fact that the communitarians are concerned with such a question— and it is one of their principal concerns—makes their theory distinct from a mere description of the membership self. For the question Who am I? that is such a concern of Sandel's (1982) often signifies a problem with one's identity. The problem arises in this way only when one is self-reflective, only when there is separation between the self and society.22 Then there is a distinction among the contents of the self, the self-definition, and the reflecting subject or agent, the unknowable but necessary vehicle of all introspection. This brings us back to the discussion in Chapter 1, but with a twist: The formal operations that the communitarians recognize as necessary to personal identity take them beyond a pure description of the membership self. Thus when Charles Taylor insists that all strong evaluations are the result of articulation and are based on communal, that is, inherited, language and categories; when Michael Sandel states

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that knowing oneself is the result of reflective self-understanding; when Alasdair Maclntyre claims that the person need not "accept the moral limitations of the particularity of those forms of community" in which he lives but can use "criticism and invention" to transcend them, they are all making a crucial distinction between a rudimentary capacity to sort sensory data, which we ascribe even to animals, and the conceptual and linguistic capacity that enables persons to take themselves as objects of attention, ascribable only to humans. To take oneself as an object of attention means that there must be a separation between the subject examining and what is examined, even if that object is an end that is constitutive of one's selfdefinition. The introduction of self-reflectivity, which the communitarians endorse, removes the description of the self from membership by transforming the central characteristic of the membership level, the nature of rules and roles. Yet a dilemma remains. The dilemma lies in the communitarians' wanting to have identity constituted by social rules and roles, while also wanting the person to be self-reflective. They want to preserve the kind of selfhood secured in the polis or the medieval village when knowledge and options were limited, when life was set. This seems the only way that relationships, communal ends, and standards outside the self can be taken seriously as constituting personal identity. This seems the only way to provide a sense of both meaning and belonging to our modern lives. The purpose of reflection, then, as they see it, is not to sunder the relationship between self and village but to bring the self voluntarily into conformity with the given aims and attachments, rules and roles, of society. This requires internalizing the social sanctions and boundaries. Such an act already implies a self separate from the one that is to be taken within. The membership self lacks the conceptual apparatus to accomplish this. Yet once the self can do this, once self-reflectivity arises, then the embeddedness in social rules and roles, and the assured conformity to them, ends. With self-reflection comes distance; with distance comes alternatives; with alternatives, as Peter Laslett (1975) wrote, the polis ceases to be a community, because all situations cease to be "totally shared situations." The problem of personal identity arises, and the secured social identity, the membership self, is thereby lost. Then relationships cease to be constitutive and become, as in liberal individualism, means to one's private end. But they do not have to be only that. When relationships are constitutive of agency, they are without commitment. The basis of commitment is self-reflectivity, for then the person can bring himself to and into the relationship. The person can commit himself to others, to society, to the rules and roles of the group. But commitment always comes with the risk of tergiversation, the threat that scrutiny will not lead to commitment but to departure, censure, critique. It is this aspect that the communitarians seem determined to avoid. Thus Sandel wants relationships to be constitutive of agency, that is, inseparable from the self. And yet he wants persons to be able to look within, to determine or discover from among the aims and attachments those that are more constitutive than others. But he cannot have it both ways. If the self is embedded in aims and attachments from which it


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cannot stand apart, then these cannot be reflected on; if the self can reflect on them, can step back and operate on them, then these aims and attachments are not constituents but attributes. The confusion stems, it seems, from Sandel's desire to contrast the liberal deontological self with the socially situated self. In fearing the unencumbered self, in seeing in this liberal notion a self without character and thus, ironically, without a self (1982, p. 180), Sandel goes to the opposite extreme and posits agency that is constituted by given ends and relationships or, rather, ignores agency and posits a self as traits only. But criticality does not enable one to escape from all particularity but, instead, to escape from any specific particularities. Self-reflectivity, when one becomes aware of and identified with his agency, permits the person to move from one backdrop to another, to take the roles of many, of any, others. In so moving, one is never without self-definition; that is, one is never without particular fundamental traits or ends or roles that make him the person he is. To think that one can be without these, to fail to see that identity begins, as the communitarians remind us, from within a social matrix, is to make the mistake found in liberal individualism. By interiorizing all identity, the person has the illusion that he is free of encumbrances and obligations, free to generate his own aims, values, and ends, and owes nothing to anyone or to society for them. To think, however, that the self is constituted by and limited to a given set or horizon of traits, ends, or circumstances is to make the mistake found in the communitarian critique. Without distance between the self and rules and roles, there is no possibility of self-reflection. And so we have been led back, through the thicket of developmental psychology, to the liberal-communitarian debate on the nature of the self. Yet we come to it with a reinforced appreciation for what each can bring to a more suitable theory of the self. For neither alone is adequate. Thus the theory of compound individuality has been introduced to present, at this point, a more balanced, realistic, and sophisticated view of identity than is found in either liberal individualism or communitarianism. The theory shows that one's sense of self changes qualitatively at different levels of development, that one's self-sense is both a product of and a part of the process of developmental changes. Within this developmental schema, individuality is one stage of selfhood in a hierarchy of such stages and is a compound of all those basic structures that preceded this stage of self and constituted the earlier stages. Individuality is available only at the level of formal operations, once the person can introspect—is self-reflective—and has the capacity for full perspectivism. At this stage the person is aware of and describes himself both as a constellation of concepts, traits, values, goals, and the like—a self-definition—and as the active subject or orchestrator—agent—of that constellation. The notion of agency does present the subject as not embedded in any particularity. The self, of course, cannot step back from its own subjectivity. The subjectivity of the individual, however, is embedded not in any specific evaluation but in the process of evaluation; and it is not embedded in any specific vocabulary or conversation but in the structure and logic of language. To conceive of self-evalua-

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tion exclusively in terms of essential evaluations is to define "I" only in terms of "me," which characterizes a membership self inescapably tied to specific social rules and roles and is typical of many of the communitarian descriptions. Yet the autonomous self of the theory of compound individuality can hardly be aligned with the unencumbered self. Self-reflectivity introduces perspectivism, which, as I stated, is not a step out of all roles but out of these roles. Perhaps here is Rawls's Archimedean point, far enough from this particular social perspective, but not so far away as to become pure abstraction. Our situation is what Mary Midgeley described in Beast and Man: "We can always walk on [out of our culture] if we want to enough. What we cannot do is ... to be nobody and nowhere" (1978, p. 291). To think we can is to make the mistake of conceiving the person as process only. The self is unencumbered to this extent: It can criticize any standpoint, including its own. It can thereby evade any necessary identification with a specified contingency, but it cannot be without any particular identity. After all, language, the basis of the ability to critique, is itself a social particularity. In taking up any perspective, the self can be different but not empty. Because agency is located within the self in this process, and not within social rules and roles, the self is autonomous, free of these encumbrances or attachments. But no longer embedded in them does not mean no longer identified with them. Now the self can relate to them; now selves can be in and can have relationships rather than being found in or derived from them. The theory of compound individuality shows that the communitarian reminiscences about the ancients and their way of life are not so much about a lost way of life as about a lost psychological state. It is the memory of harmony, of a time when one was never out of step with one's social environment or out of touch with the ends and attachments that made life meaningful. But the appeal goes beyond nostalgia. The communitarian conception of the self reminds us of the dangers in conceiving of identity without social particularities. Meanwhile, the appeal of the deontological liberal is his reminder that the self is not captured by the social roles it plays or the rules it follows. The theory of compound individuality places both of these theories in a perspective that incorporates, or highlights, their attractions while offsetting the distortions of each alone. The autonomous self is one in which agency can be free of any specified social rules or roles but must still identify as a self-definition with some rules and roles. The self is steeped in history and in need of relationships, but selfreflectivity enables it to transcend the boundaries of any particular horizon or attachments. The problem is that once the self is autonomous, the most forceful, and perhaps the most appealing, aspect of the communitarian challenge is forfeited, that is, that relationships constitute a common identity among selves. If the self is not constituted by others, then relationships seem to be values and commitments that the deontological self may find important, but no more so than any other value. Surely, then, even the autonomous self is nothing different from a new, though more elaborate, description of the old individualism. But the theory of compound individuality also offers a different perspective on


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autonomy, on individualism, and on relationship. At one stage of autonomous selfhood the individual is a compound in a different sense: He is a compound of self and others, an individuality constituted by autonomy and relationship. This stage of selfhood, which is called—one hopes without confusion—compound individuality,23 is distinctly different from individualism. Here relationships are more than means to private ends; they are constituents of identity. But rather than being unable to separate from them, as Sandel suggests, the self is unwilling to do so. By considering this new perspective in some detail in the remaining chapters, I shall explore (1) a way to move beyond individualism, (2) a new angle on an old political dilemma—"how to unite the radical moral autonomy of Kant and the expressive unity of the Greek polis" (Taylor, 1975, p. 388)—and (3) a way to reconstitute the self of liberalism as compound individuality. I shall begin by concentrating in the next chapter on the nature of personal autonomy and its importance to compound individuality.


II Beyond Individualism


3 Autonomous Selfhood: Individualism Versus Compound Individuality The autonomous self, as discussed, emerges with the unfolding of formal operational thought. Here identity is embedded in these operations, that is, in abstract reasoning, rationality, the system and rules of logic and language that are independent of the phenomena they govern. For the first time self-reflectivity is possible, and it marks this level as that of individuality. Only at this level can the person be independent of the rules and roles of his "sodality" and thus be free of the need for group conformity and approbation.1 This description accounts for only part of the pattern of identity that characterizes each level of self in the theory of compound individuality. That is, it accounts for differentiation—in this case, the self's emergence and separation from its embeddedness in membership. But it leaves out the other two requirements of identity—integration and relationship. Those requirements are indeed involved in this self-reflective process. First, in differentiating from the sodality the person comes to create a new meaning for "self" and "other." In disengaging from membership the person reviews the rules and roles that had constituted her identity. By acting on what had previously been her subjectivity, her context, the person establishes a new boundary between self and other. The sodality has moved, as it were, to the "other" side and can now be acted on as a content. Integration refers to the need to incorporate into this new level of self the prior basic structure. In this case, it is concrete operations—not the specific rules and roles that constituted the self but the need to live according to some specific rules and roles. In differentiating from the sodality, the person is now free to choose among its, and other, rules and roles, to accept or reject them. Because "self-ruled" is the literal meaning of autonomy, we refer to this level as the level of autonomous selfhood. Yet identifying this level as that of autonomy and individuality is not quite so simple. Although the literal meaning of autonomy is clear, it does not tell us what constitutes self-rule. There is, as J. N. Gray comments, "a deep obscurity in the concept of autonomy itself" (1983, p. 89). One reason for this obscurity is that autonomy underlies two distinct, nearly antithetical, kinds of individuality. To refer to both as autonomous is to cite what brings them together but in no fashion indicates what drastically pulls them apart. Thus Isaiah Berlin, for example, claims that every form of autonomy has in it some degree of a "process of deliberate self73

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transformation that enables [men] to care no longer for any of [society's] values, to remain, isolated and independent, on its edges. ... I retreat into my own deliberately insulated territory, where no voices from outside need to be listened to, and no external forces can have effect" (1969, pp. 135-36). Yet, as I shall argue, rather than describing autonomy, it seems that Sir Isaiah has described instead one kind of individuality that autonomy supports. For autonomy need not entail a rejection of society's values or an isolation from the presence or influence of others. Berlin is describing how autonomy is exercised by an atomist, an atomistic individual.2 But autonomy is also exercised in a markedly different way by a markedly different kind of individual, the compound self or compound individual. Before turning to this, I want first to discuss briefly a definition of autonomy compatible with both kinds of individual, for as I hope to demonstrate, the autonomy underneath is the same for both. But what will interest us more and will make up the bulk of this chapter is the distinction between atomistic individualism and compound individuality. The distinction between the two is the key if liberalism is to avoid the pitfalls associated with individualism, some of which have been pointed out by the communitarians (as I discussed in the chapter on the self), and if liberalism is to reconstitute its self to reflect sociality. That distinction lies in the third requirement of identity formation—relationship. Defining Autonomy In his article on political power and concept contestability, John Gray presents two divergent conceptions of autonomy. One, described as Aristotelian, is a closed concept "compatible only with a fairly narrowly defined range of ways of life" (1983, p. 87). According to this view, unless specific choices lead to human flourishing they cannot be considered autonomous choices. Thus choices will soon be restricted to those that consistently provide demonstrable human flourishing. Gray rules out this restricted-range conception because "we have no reason to suppose that the choices of autonomous man will converge on any single way of life" (1983, p. 88) or, we might add, will necessarily converge on any single range of ways of life. The opposite conception of autonomy Gray calls the Kantian view, "primarily a formal, procedural, and open concept: it desiderates the general conditions of any respectworthy choice. Such a choice, if it is to be autonomous, must be rational" (1983, p. 86). This conception presents the two qualities most frequently cited as defining autonomy: rationality and choice, though neither quality alone is sufficient. Choice can be autonomous, argues Joseph Raz, only if the one choosing has "a variety of acceptable options available to choose from and his life became as it is through his choice of some of these options" (1984, p. 191). The notion of acceptable options seems a significant one, for if all options save one are unacceptable, the chooser has little choice and perhaps no autonomy. (We cannot say no choice, as there is the option of choosing not to choose, but that, too, may be an unacceptable option, thus undercutting autonomy.) One wonders, however, how many acceptable options are necessary to make choice autonomous. How

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many constitute a variety? Yet, as Raz contended, the idea of availability of acceptable options is not sufficient for defining autonomy. Animals also can choose. One could argue that a cat's consistent choice of saccharin-laced cat food, in the face of thirty-seven varieties, caused that cat to have cancer, and thus its life became as it is through its choice. Unless one is willing to grant animals autonomy, more must be added to the conception. However much animals may choose, they are not rational. They may think, but they do not reason. Adding to choice the second quality—rationality—might then define autonomy. People would be autonomous if they could give reasons for their choices of life-directing, acceptable options. Yet children can give reasons for their choices and are capable of making rational choices, within limits, but we would hardly say that those choices are made autonomously. Within the theory of compound individuality, it is the case that membership selves, those defined as their sodalities, can give reasons for choices and behaviors. Their range of choices and behaviors are restricted to those sanctioned by the sodality, but within that range members can choose. The members, however, accept the range of choices as given; they do not choose the range, as was also the case with Sandel's constitutive community. The ability to influence the range of choices might well be what separates an autonomous choice from a heteronomous one. This takes us back to John Gray's point about limited or restricted ranges: There is no single way of life or single range of choices on which all autonomous men can agree. So autonomous men want not only acceptable choices within a range but also acceptable ranges within which to choose. For example, when purchasing a car, I want to have several choices within my price range. But at the same time, I might also want to question the "range" itself. Why do I need to buy the car? Is there inadequate public transportation to get me to and from work? Why aren't there bike paths so I can ride the five miles to work without needing the new car? Part of autonomy must therefore include evaluating and deciding on the acceptability of the range. This idea brings out an aspect of autonomy so far overlooked. More than a kind of choice, autonomy is a process of choosing. This process must involve not only rationality but also self-reflectivity, for to choose autonomously one must have some critical distance from the range offered. Indeed, as Stanley Benn comments, the content of the choice is at best secondary: The emphasis in autonomy is "on processes and modes of consciousness [or self]" and leaves "out of account the content of the autonomous man's principles and ideals. There is no reason why an autonomous man should not be deeply concerned about social justice and community—but I have said nothing to suggest he will be" (1975/76, pp. 12930).3 Instead of content, argues Benn, autonomy rests on rationality and selfreflectivity, otherwise "the nomoi that govern him can be those absorbed uncritically and unreflectively from parents, teachers, and workmates. . . . Such a person . . . governs himself, but by a nomos or set of standards taken over from others" (1975/76, pp. 123-24).4 An unreflective and uncritical rational chooser Benn (1975/76) calls heteronomous, and John Gray (1983) calls autarchic. This chooser lacks precisely what distinguishes the autonomous self from the membership self: self-reflectivity. When the individual can take himself as an object of attention, he simultaneously objec-

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tifies and relativizes his sodality, whereas at the membership level the self is the group, its norms and nomoi. The "autonomous agent must also have distanced himself in some measure from the conventions of his social environment and from the influences of the persons surrounding him. His actions express principles and policies which he has himself ratified by a process of critical reflection" (Gray, 1983, p. 24). Self-reflectivity provides that critical distance. Whereas at the membership level the limits of choice, however rational, were set by the norms and nomos of the group, at the autonomous level the norms and nomos themselves are self-imposed, adopted as a set of standards arrived at through critical reflection. There is nothing in self-reflectivity that insists that the group's set of standards must be rejected in whole or in part. The set simply must be scrutinized. Autonomy does not require that one's rules or laws be created ex nihilo or de novo. Most likely they come as selective or modified versions of those of the sodality. They are combined, as is one's identity, into a form that is one's own. The group no longer constitutes the person. Now he is constituted by those insights and principles by which he governs his life and makes his choices. The autonomous person is therefore not only rational but also differentiational. That is, he is separate from or independent of his sodality or cultural matrix and is now able to reflect on it. The critical distance or independence comes from the emergence of the basic structure of formal operational thought. The person can now take the roles of others who are not in his sodality; he can scrutinize the sodality's worldview from the perspective of one outside it. He can now control or regulate the rules and roles, principles and practices, governing his life, something he could not do when identified by those rules and roles. Autonomy is therefore not independence per se, but is independence from the need to follow the norms and rules of one's social milieu. At this stage the person can see that "traditionally settled forms of life can prove to be mere conventions, to be irrational. . . . Role identity is replaced by ego [autonomous] identity; actors must act as individuals across, so to speak, the objective contexts of their lives" (Habermas, 1975, p. 85). The demand of identity at the autonomous level is to be able to go "behind the line of all particular roles and norms and stabilize [identity] through the abstract ability to present oneself credibly in any situation as someone who can satisfy the requirements of consistency even in the face of incompatible role expectations" (1975, p. 86). The acting subject is now what Habermas calls "context free." What can he mean by context free? At the autonomous level an agent can no longer be thought of as a compilation of specific roles. Rather, he has the ability through employing principles "to construct new identities in conflict situations and bring these into harmony" (Habermas, 1975, p. 90). The actor is now free of any context, of any kind of traditional—what Habermas calls "imposed"—norms and can now distinguish and operate according to principles that generate norms. Not only can the person distinguish the general from the particular, the symbolic from the concrete, but now he can make such generalizations himself. Having established through the theory of compound individuality a level of autonomous selfhood, it would seem that we have arrived at a position that both braces and weakens the liberal and the communitarian positions. Individuality has

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been shown not to precede society but necessarily to come through it. This bolsters the communitarian criticism of liberals who see the individual as prior to society and who see society as an aggregation of the voluntary contracts of those trying to maximize their own self-interest. But at the same time it undercuts the communitarian notion that individuals are socially constituted. Now the individual can remove himself from the social matrix that shaped him. So although the communitarian is correct that identity is a social product, the liberal is correct that the individual, though not prior to society, can be independent of it. And yet to take up that position is to jeopardize one of the central claims of the theory of compound individuality—to wit, that every level of self requires sociality or relationships. Now the self requires that context only to define the self against it, to separate from it, to use it, and, if need be, to withdraw from it. It is the autonomous self as atomis who plays this out.

Individualism According to Charles Taylor, the appeal and force of atomism, what I have been referring to as individualism, derives from the affirmation of "the self-sufficiency of man alone" (1985c, p. 189). Individualism "imparts a high degree of completeness ... to the single human being, with the implication that separateness, autonomy, is the fundamental, metaphysical human condition" (Arblaster, 1984, pp. 15-16). One condition of this autonomy is that individuals do not need and are not expected to accept the principles or values of others. Indeed, "the human essence," comments C. B. MacPherson on the canons of individualism, "is freedom from the dependence on the wills of others" (1962, p. 263). The burden of choice is always the individual's alone, as someone else's choices are a poor guide to solutions to one's own dilemmas. The individual must, and can only, trust his own experience (Arblaster, 1984, p. 19). This is an invigorating freedom. Now the person can choose his own way of life independent of any relationships—personal, social, societal—that he does not choose to enter voluntarily. Because he is autonomous, he is free of his sodality and is no longer defined by his relationships in or to it. Now he possesses relationships and a self to share, if he chooses, in them. Society then becomes the background to the rights and interests of individuals. Seen as "primary, more 'real' or fundamental than human society and its institutions and structures" (Arblaster, 1984, p. 15), the individual takes precedence over society. Each person has his own goals and interests and enters into contractual relationships to pursue and achieve those goals and interests. Obligations are then established by freely contracting with others, a method, as Kant pointed out, that enables each person to make himself reciprocally a means to another's ends without violating either person's freedom. According to this view, society is an amalgam of these contracts, with the state providing the mechanisms by which competing claims or interests are adjudicated. Protected by a foundation of rights, rules, and procedures that ensure that one person does not unduly pursue his interests at the expense of another, each indi-

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vidual proceeds along corridors of justice built on the following principle: "From each according to what he chooses to do, to each according to what he makes for himself (perhaps with the contracted aid of others) and what others choose to do for him or choose to give him."5 Are the separation, privacy, and noninterference that some political philosophers consider an individual's right also a psychological necessity? In other words, is atomism built ineluctably into the nature and notion of autonomy? Steven Lukes argues that if pushed to its logical conclusion, autonomy will eventuate in ethical individualism, the doctrine that the final authority of ethical behavior, values, and principles is the individual alone (1973, p. 101). Anthony Arblaster recalls and notes the relevance of Aristotle's view of autonomy, a view that brings us back to Charles Taylor's definition of atomism: "Aristotle is absolutely explicit on the question of self-sufficiency. The normal human being is not self-sufficient. . . . Hence autonomy for the individual human being was not an ideal because it was not seen as possible, let alone desirable" (1985c, p. 22). But Taylor avoids the confusion that plagues both Lukes's interpretation and Arblaster's citing of Aristotle. Atomism, not autonomy, requires the affirmation of the goal or ideal of the selfsufficiency of man alone. Autonomy does not necessarily entail isolation (the misstep we found earlier in Berlin's interpretation) or self-sufficiency. As I have already pointed out, it involves being able to step back from and reflect on one's sodality, the ability to step back to cast a critical eye on the values and goals of one's group and the ability to make rational choices among those and other values and goals. Nowhere does autonomy demand, however, that one should not be or cannot be influenced by one's group, peers, or past. Atomism or ethical individualism is one form, but not the only form, of personal identity that autonomy undergirds. There is another, distinctly different form that we have labeled compound individuality that also requires autonomy. To understand how compound individuality differs from atomism, we must first review how autonomous selfhood is psychologically constructed. As the person emerges from the membership level, he comes to see his own sodality and its norms as only one possibility among many. The rules and roles of the sodality that had seemed absolute are instead seen as applications of general principles that can be applied in myriad ways. Enabled through self-reflectivity to take the viewpoints of those outside his own group, the person comes to recognize that the world is seen from many different perspectives. He is now free to choose among them. This is the realization and intoxication of autonomy. The autonomous person now has two principal tasks. Being self-reflective, he needs to make the self into a system, a coherent whole. This self-system is an organization of experiences and meaning, what we have called the construction of a worldview. The second task is to defend and maintain the integrity of that system. The first task begins as the self establishes a boundary between self and other. (This is true of course for every level of self-development.) This is manifested as a shift from what was "me"—what I was embedded in—to what is now "not me"— what the self is differentiating from. When the "not me's" are seen as "others"— that is, when they are seen to be completely separate from him—then differentiation

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is complete, and integration of identity and relationships with those others can ensue. But if the differentiation process is not complete, relationships will be difficult to form and maintain, for the person will still question where "he" stops and "others" begin. In short, one fears that the autonomous self may be lost, overwhelmed, or abandoned (see Kegan, 1982, esp. chap. 8). As a result, some developmentalists see atomism as a state reflecting, ironically, incomplete differentiation—a state manifesting an inability to form an identity in relationships because of fear or anxiety about being absorbed. Robert Kegan writes of the atomist that he "decides entirely for the individual probably because [he] is unable to hold onto the construction of the individual apart from the group if he has to also consider the group" (1982, p. 66). Not being fully differentiated, the self cannot yet be brought to a relationship but is still part of, and thus may be found in, a relationship. Behind the newly discovered sense of freedom and choice and control, then, is the threat that these, and thus one's autonomous identity, will be lost. The atomist's task is therefore to protect and preserve himself against such a threat. To do so the atomist either cuts himself off from others to avoid external influences on his inchoate worldview or manipulates others to reinforce his worldview by manipulating theirs.6 Yet the very pattern of development that we have identified in psychological growth carries this threat built in. Successful differentiation cannot come without establishing some relationship with the newly defined environment, in this case, other persons. Thus individuation presents the autonomous self with a paradox: Autonomous selfhood cannot be maintained without relationship, but relationships might threaten the worldview and undermine autonomy. The way out of this is to use relationships to one's advantage, to use them to reinforce or express one's identity but not to let those relationships touch who one is. To maintain his worldview intact, the person is willing to sacrifice relationships and to remove himself from the need to consider others by relying on abstract principles to make his decisions. Thus on behalf of detached logic and rationality, and thereby a reinforced sense of independence, the person has become what psychologist Carol Gilligan calls "the lone contemplator." Here is the hub of the communitarian critique of the liberal unencumbered self. The tension between separation and attachment—a tension built into every level of selfhood but now noticed for the first time because of self-reflectivity—has been resolved in favor of differentiation. So the atomistic self "converts the world within its reach into operations on behalf of its personal enterprise" (Kegan, 1982, p. 223). That enterprise is to fulfill the person's interests by making others fit into the needs of his own "self-authored" system (Kegan, 1982, p. 250). Autonomy, it would seem, has led through psychological necessity to individualism. But it must also be the case that some can choose the opposite pole of identity and decide in favor of inclusion or relationship. Carol Gilligan found just that. Her studies show that when making judgments, women are concerned more with relationships than with adherence to principles or rules. Yet this phenomenon is not seen simply as an indication that women develop differently from men. Rather, argues Gilligan, it is considered a sign of a woman's deficient development. Devel-

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opmental psychologists have persistently interpreted this orientation toward relationships as a hindrance to the development of mature-—that is, principled—judgment.7 This bias in testing and attitude leads Gilligan to conclude that American society (and by implication other Western liberal societies) honors and thus fosters selfdevelopment only as differentiation, and she dismisses an emphasis on attachments and relationships as a subordinate stage to be transcended (1986). Thus researchers such as Daniel J. Levinson have found, not surprisingly, that "the 'models for a healthy life cycle' are men who seem distant in relationships," and that "close friendship with a man or a woman is rarely experienced by American men."8 Thus women's judgments are measured against a male standard and found wanting. The result is that a woman's focus on relationships and her subordination of achievement to nurturance and of competition to caring leave her "personally at risk . . . vulnerable to the issues of separation that arise at mid-life" (when, e.g., children move away from home). This situation, concludes Gilligan, "seems more a commentary on the society than a problem in women's development."9 Empirical research demonstrates her point. The absence of adequate social support structures for adults holds women, in particular, in what many researchers biasedly refer to as "adolescent"—in this case, attachment-oriented—categories.10 For many of these psychological researchers, this means that growth toward differentiation, which they consider the norm, is impeded. Researchers such as Kegan and Gilligan, on the other hand, find that the lack of appropriate social structures does hold back both women and men. But the kind of social structures they see as necessary are not those that foster differentiation at the expense of relationship, but those that foster differentiation in relationships. "The greatest source of difference [in development] lies with the differing embeddedness cultures available to men and women. . . . One thus has to begin analyzing the possibility that the cultural arrangements are themselves deleterious."11 The arrangements are deleterious for both men and women, for social arrangements that encourage psychological growth toward only one pole of personal identity—whether that pole is relationship or differentiation—thwarts or distorts the development of the other pole. Because society does not value attachments as highly as it does differentiation, it not only labels women's orientation as deficient but also fails to support their efforts to develop themselves, instead of sacrificing themselves, in relationships. Likewise, society thwarts male development by considering any relationship orientation as ancillary, even adolescent. It is worthwhile reiterating Gilligan's point: Development around attachments is not any more deficient than is development around independence. The first is submissive, and the second is assertive. Each focuses identity on only one pole, to the distortion, if not exclusion, of the other. As we have seen when developing the theory of compound individuality, identity at the membership and autonomous levels is contingent on social conditions and relationships. Therefore social institutions—and in adolescence, schools in particular—have a crucial role to play. By determining how the innate or basic structures will be manifested, social arrangements influence and circumscribe the forms that identity can take. In other words, social institutions reinforce, foster, and express

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certain forms of identity or selfhood. They can determine whether autonomous selfhood will be manifested, and remain, as atomism or whether it can move beyond individualism to a different kind of self, to compound individuality.12 If men and women are to move on a large scale beyond individualism, beyond the distortion or exclusion of one of the poles of identity, then social institutions must exist to foster that movement. Before examining the nature of compound individuality, the level of autonomous self beyond atomism, and the kinds of social structures that might promote it, I need first to discuss briefly how atomism itself is fostered, even reinforced, by social conditions. The idea that social structures can shape personality can be traced back as far as Aristotle, who saw politics as shaping man's inner life and leading him toward virtue.13 The same is true of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, and Marx. In recent years sociologists and political scientists have provided empirical support for the idea that, in modern parlance, social structures produce distinct personality types. Foremost among them are Inkeles and Smith, who in Becoming Modern and its companion volume, Exploring Individual Modernity, show how traditional men are transformed into modern men through their contact with modern social institutions. Inkeles and Smith found that living in cities, having access to mass communications, working in cooperatives or nonindustrial occupations, and, especially, attending formal schools and working in factories all effected more than attitudinal changes. Such experiences reshaped the consciousnesses—the values, needs, behavior, and disposition—of those within these institutions (1974, pp. 10-11). Persons from traditional backgrounds having such experiences "incorporated the norms implicit in such organizations into their own personality" (1974, p. 307). Their purpose in studying the effects of modern organizations on traditional men in Nigeria, Israel, India, Chile, Argentina, and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) was to test empirically the claim that there was a "type of man" or set of characteristics manifesting an identifiable syndrome that could be called "modern" (Inkeles & Smith, 1983, p. 13). Although the separate cultures gave the individual personalities a distinct character, nevertheless, Inkeles and Smith concluded, the cultures did not fundamentally alter the basic principles governing the structure of modern "personality in all men" (1974, p. 12). What are the characteristics of modern men? The authors identified, among others, a sense of personal efficacy; respect for science; openness to new experiences; acceptance of responsibility; the ability to adhere to schedules, to follow abstract rules, and to respond to authority; and the ability to make plans in advance. Once-traditional men had become more-informed participant citizens, highly independent in relations to traditional sources of influence— especially in making personal decisions—and ready for additional new experiences and ideas (1974, p. 290). Some of these characteristics are slightly mislabeled. For example, openness to new experiences, which Inkeles and Smith also describe as open-mindedness and flexibility, refers to a person's willingness to meet strangers, to support scientific exploration, and to accept such technical innovations as birth control (1974, p. 291). These traits herald drastic changes for traditional men, for, as Inkeles and Smith document, the result is to establish independent individual identities. As in To-

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queville's America in the 1830s, the ground is then fertile for culturing individualism.14 If social institutions create forms of personal identity, as Inkeles and Smith and others15 have argued, then what kinds of social structures might foster growth toward a form of personal identity beyond individualism? Before attempting to answer that, I shall examine the vision of new personal identity beyond individualism, what I have called compound individuality.

Contextualism and Compound Individuality Carol Gilligan (1982a) calls her vision of selfhood beyond individualism, in which the poles of differentiation and attachment are both recognized and active, the "collective life." It is a way of being and interacting that balances these two poles of identity. We can imagine the difficulty of coming to this state. Men's orientation is largely toward separation because they fear that inclusion will jeopardize their freedom, as relationships might entail obligations that would limit their independence. Women, on the other hand, orient toward inclusion because they fear that increased self-assertion and differentiation will bring not self-reliance but isolation, loneliness, and anxiety. But both need, Gilligan observes, intimacy. For men, intimacy is "the critical experience that brings the self into connection with others, making it possible to see both sides—to discover the effects of actions on others as well as on their cost to the self" (Gilligan, 1982a, p. 163). Without this experience, as we have seen, differentiation hardens into indifference and lack of concern for others (while allowing the person to retain, presumably, a willingness to respect others' rights). For women the need is for intimacy, but with an emphasis on autonomous choice, on creating a situation in which one's self can be engaged and examined. Without that experience women fail to see that there is an integrity to the self that is brought to, rather than found in or defined by, relationships. Yet in neither case does Gilligan tell us how intimate relationships evolve or are encouraged. A defender of individualism need not insist that an atomist is unable to see both sides; the point seems to be, rather, that he is unwilling to acknowledge or act on the viewpoints of others unless those viewpoints pertain to his own interests. Nor does it seem the case that atomists cannot connect with others. We can imagine atomistic relationships that to those involved seem intimate. Imagine, for example, a relationship of genuine complementarity in which an atomistic man who wishes or needs to exert or assert his separate self dominates an atomistic woman who needs to subordinate herself in a close attachment to another. The woman wants to define herself by the relationship; the man wants a relationship that confirms or even celebrates his self-definition. The complementarity is complete when each partner becomes for the other what that other, through fear, cannot face in himself—the need for attachments—or in herself—the need for differentiation. Each is fulfilled not at the other's expense but because their needs are symbiotic. Both use the relationship to define themselves in what Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) called "cooperation"—involvement with another to enhance oneself that, in the

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process of fulfilling one's own needs, also enhances the other. Such relationships can be, as Robert Kegan points out, warm, loving, and supportive, but they keep individualism intact. Therefore, he says, they cannot be intimate: "It is quite possible to form long-lasting love relationships which . . . actually serve to support the resistance to an evolution which permits intimacy" (1982, p. 249). Whereas these relationships reinforce the partners' own closed self-definitions, intimacy is the characteristic of relationships of persons that Kegan calls "interindividuals" (1982, p. 249). Intimacy here, as with Gilligan, is a special term referring to interdependence, self-surrender, and the capacity for interdependent self-definitions. Interindividuals can "at once mutually preserve the other's distinctness while interdependently fashioning a bigger context in which their separate identities interpenetrate, by which separate identities are co-regulated" (1982, pp. 120, 253). Such is also Gilligan's collective life: "Responsibility includes both self and other, viewed as different but connected rather than as separate and opposed" (Gilligan, 1982a, p. 147). The conceptions of "collective life" and "interindividuality" form the substance of compound individuality. Admittedly, these descriptions reveal a kind of individuality different from atomism. The new relational dynamic seems to transcend an individualism that necessitated the loss of either individuality or intimacy. And these descriptions, taken from clinical observations, describe not how people ought to feel or ought to interact but how they do feel and interact. Yet how are we to interpret such terms and concepts as identity interpenetration and identity coregulation? It is one thing to suggest that persons remain open to contrasting or contradicting influences or worldviews, that they be willing to extend, modify, and reconstitute their self-conceptions in light of new views. Isn't this simply being "open-minded"? But to suggest that compound individuals are those who submit their identities to regulation by others in social encounters strains credulity. It may solve by definition the communitarian problem of reconciling autonomy and relationship, but it seems to defy social life and common sense. The emphasis in the relationships, and in our explanation, rests on the idea of interdependence. Interdependence takes two forms. One form is expressed as a need for relationships, for communicative exchanges that challenge, confirm, or complement one's worldview. In this way one's notions or definitions of self are open to change and transformation. When this occurs from one person to another and vice versa, instead of in one direction only, the persons can be said to have interpenetrating or reciprocal identities. The second way is a need for intimacy with others established through special commitments. Such commitments, generally of a kind found in dyadic relationships—in friendships, marriages, and partnerships—generate special obligations, including the obligation to keep oneself open and to respond to the wishes, needs, movements, expectations, and transformations of the other. Mutuality or reciprocity is also at the core of these relationships. It is measured, writes Stanley Benn, by "the extent to which each is sensitive to the others' responses to his own effort, [and each] is prepared to monitor his own attitudes to his partners and to the partnership, and to adjust to changes in the interest, tastes, values, and personalities of the others" (1982, p. 58).

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The difference between these two ways of interdependence is that in the first case—"thin" interdependence—one is not obligated to accommodate, or to attempt to accommodate, the changes in others. One may be obligated to respond to another, to hear another out, and to consider his view, but he is under no obligation to act on what is communicated. Indeed, an atomist may do this to the extent that he is not compelled to change his self-definition. But in intimate relationships—relationships of "thick" interdependence in which one's identity is partly constituted by that relationship—one is not only sensitive to others but is also defined by connections to these others as well. Whatever happens to them affects and changes everyone involved. Thus these persons are compound individuals. One is required to incorporate the perspectives of one's partner into one's worldview, to modify one's own perspective in accordance with the changes in the other. Doing so directly affects who one is. Identity can no longer be closed or exclusively regulated. It is interpenetrating, reciprocal, and coregulated—something akin to Sandel's constitutive relationships. The relational context of the compound individual demands that one can no longer rely solely on logic or rationality in making autonomous choices. One must now take active responsibility for considering the consequences of choices on those involved. Autonomy thereby comes to resemble the opposite of atomistic selfsufficiency, for one does not find the right principles first and then review peoples' positions from the perspective of that self-chosen principle. Rather, one considers the viewpoints of each person and tries to come to positions that accommodate them or that at least take them all into account. In doing so, however, the compound individual does not sacrifice his own views but includes himself in any calculus of choice or hurt or risk or care. Both the atomist and the compound individual build a meaningful, coherent worldview by establishing a boundary between self and other. Coming to know the world includes coming to know oneself in relation to that world. Whereas the atomist strives to make that worldview fixed and inviolate—whether an internal view constructed or an external view adopted—the compound individual sees her worldview, and the boundary between self and other, as contingent. She does not create and maintain a worldview in isolation from others. The compound individual "assumes that each genuine perspective will augment or correct aspects of the other, in a mutual movement toward the real and the true. . . . The boundaries of the self and outlook are now porous and permeable" (Fowler, 1981, pp. 187, 198). But, again, the identity of the compound individual is not porous and permeable with regard to every encounter, every give-and-take. It is so only in relations with particular others. Only then is the self a compound of other individuals. If one's life is like a book, then certain of its paragraphs, pages, and chapters will be jointly written. Then one's life is understood and one's self is known only by looking also at the text, the life and self, of the other.

Contextualism Although both Kegan and Gilligan find intimacy to be the key to moving beyond individualism, how do they propose to develop it? One course might be to encour-

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age contextualism, a level of thinking characteristic of mature adults that may exceed Piaget's formal operational thought. According to Gilligan's empirical work, some individuals in the midst of real-life dilemmas find that categorical or abstract principles alone are inadequate to deal with the issues. In addition to applying principles of abstract reason, which may have sufficed in hypothetical dilemmas that divest participants of their history and psychology and that separate the conflicts from the social contingencies out of which they arise, these participants became concerned about their actual relationships, their responsibilities, and the consequences of choices on those involved.16 They attempted to create a wider context that could embrace or balance the categorical and the contextual, so that judgments would be contingent rather than absolute. These would be made in full recognition of the tension between weighing rights and principles and counting responsibilities and relationships to particular persons in specific situations. Such tension was seen and accepted as a concomitant of the context, something that could not be resolved or thrust aside. Consider, for example, this case cited by Gilligan and Murphy (1979): Mr. X is having an affair with a married woman. He decides that the right thing to do is to tell her husband about it. But overwhelmed by pressures at the university where she teaches and by illness in her family, the woman is unable to face the additional stress that would ensue from disclosing the affair to her husband. She promises, however, that she will tell her husband at the appropriate time. In the meantime her husband learns of her affair from another source. Now caught between the sense that he has compromised his principles and the realization that the possible consequences of acting on them might have done real damage to the woman he cares about, Mr, X asks: "Was her right to sanity which I thought was being jeopardized less important than the husband's right to know? . . . That is the issue I've got to resolve" (1979, pp. 94, 95). Through this and other experiences, Mr. X concludes some time later that conflicts of rights do not reduce to a logically deductive moral solution. That is, in such real-life dilemmas one cannot come to an acceptable decision simply by examining and acting on the principles involved. One has a commitment to both principles and principals, that is, a concern for those in relationships that may overrule his dedication to principles alone. Thus judgments appear to occur in two contexts that frame different aspects of the problem: the context of universal logic and abstract rights and the context of compassion in which the particularity of consequences for actual participants dominates. Mr. X based his morality on the principle of justice: "I have some obligation to correct injustice in whatever way 1 see." For the husband the injustice was "his not knowing the truth." Truth, declaims Mr. X, "is an ultimate thing." But his relationship created "special obligations and responsibility for consequences" for those directly involved. The relationship tempered his principled stance, indeed, overrode it (1979, p. 94). Before this dilemma Mr. X believed that his principles of justice, as Kohlberg argued (1973a), were context free or universal and could objectively generate the right actions and solutions in moral dilemmas. The substance of any decision thus conforms to or fits the principle. Instead of following his principles and informing

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the husband, Mr. X deferred to the responsibility that he felt for the woman and thereby compromised his principles. The result is, as Mr. X says, that though he violated his principle of justice, "I made the right decision" (Gilligan & Murphy, 1979, p. 96). The principle of justice might lead to the "right" solution in the ideal world, but it may not be the best solution for the actual time and place and personalities. The right solution depends therefore on the context of the issue or dilemma. "Interindividuals" or compound individuals use this contextual thinking (or "dialectical modes of reasoning") that incorporates abstract reasoning and generalizable principles but grounds their application in a context of consideration of the consequences of choices and of actual responsibilities to the persons involved.17 Consider another example: Judy is a mother in conflict with her daughter, Sarah. Judy holds a set of values essential to how Sarah has been raised. Now grown up, Sarah is rejecting many of these values. Instead of assuming that her own values must be right, Judy creates a context in which both her and her daughter's values can be examined jointly—assuming that Sarah is willing—thereby testing together what makes good values. Together mother and daughter might then define values acceptable to both, rather than each of them being responsible only for her own. Judy is willing to consider values that might run counter to her own and to learn from values that challenge her own. Most important, she is willing, on the basis of her daughter's values, to transform her own. Such willingness, comment Kegan and colleagues (1988), is not a matter of temperament but of psychological development. This "openness" requires exploring differences instead of either simply acquiescing to another's or simply accepting those differences—"She has her values; I have mine." Judy thus combines a respect for Sarah's position with the possibility of generating a new kind of relationship. Contrast this with Martha, undergoing the same sort of conflict with her daughter. Martha believes that her responsibility is to support her daughter and to respect her daughter's independence. Although Martha honors her daughter's adoption of values at variance from her own—in other words, although Martha applauds her daughter's ability and right to select her own values—Martha cannot acknowledge that her own standards or values might need to be questioned. To honor her daughter's autonomy and simultaneously to maintain the integrity of her own values, Martha takes a relativistic view: Her values are good for her; her daughter's are good for her daughter. Both Martha and her daughter may help each other meet their own standards, but not to investigate how either defines or arrives at those standards. To assume that her daughter's standards might be better would lead to the surrender of her own self-sufficiency. Martha's position stems directly from her capacity to see herself as the originator of her values and standards and from her need to maintain that capacity. Honoring her daughter is simultaneously honoring both her daughter's integrity and self-sufficiency as well as her own. "When the self is ultimately invested in maintaining itself, and when a choice which reflects that self-system must be made, then this choice is clear—the self's standards must prevail" (Kegan et al., 1988, p. 20). In his doctoral dissertation on contextual thinking, Michael Basseches18 provides some empirical support for Klaus Riegel's original assertion (1973) that this

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contextual mode of thinking is a more encompassing, dynamic, and mature form of cognitive organization. Basseches identified twenty-four elements or "identifiable moves" in thinking that characterize mature thought. In sum, these moves mean bringing into one's frame of reference conflicting, contradicting, and/or new perspectives. Several of these moves—the "meta-formal schemata"—involve the person in examining how disparate, even contradictory, views or systems relate to and can be coordinated with one another (Basseches, 1978, pp. 108-10). For example, in Kohlberg's Heinz dilemma (see Chapter 2), subjects are asked how a judge should decide the case in which Heinz is tried for breaking and entering and stealing. Postconventional reasoning focuses on the principle that life is always of greater value than property is (Kohlberg, 1971, p. 69). Yet a contextual thinker might well focus on the apparent contradiction in a system that honors life over property, even bringing such a case to trial. "What kind of society," one might ask, "would allow a druggist to withhold a drug from a woman who is dying?" Basseches offers another example (1984, pp. 270-71). Imagine a situation in which one country—say, the United States—declares war against another—say, Nicaragua—but in which no one of appropriate military age is willing to risk his or her life. The government defines the war as essential to protecting the "national interest," and thus some people must be made to fight. From the principled point of view it appears that each individual has an equal claim not to have to participate in the military action. Some will have to serve, as the government decrees, and so the question becomes, What is an unbiased, generalizable principle for adjudicating this situation on which rational persons will agree? One such principle might be justice as fairness, holding a draft lottery that would determine by random choice which citizens would serve. This disinterested procedure would seem to give rise to a moral obligation to serve if one is selected. The contradiction that a war is in the national interest but that no one is willing to fight it might lead to the conclusion that the entire framework needs to be challenged. If Nicaragua is perceived as the enemy and yet citizens will not fight, then a way must be found either to reconceptualize the idea of "national interest" or, outside war, to eliminate the danger posed by Nicaragua—say, through some sort of diplomacy or embargo. In essence, the contradiction leads the contextualist thinker to call into question the entire framework and to avoid, at least initially, looking for a resolution of the conflict within that framework. Contextual thinking generates a need to achieve greater inclusiveness in one's perspective. Basseches argues that those using contextualism recognize contradiction and conflict as opportunities to develop and reshape their own positions and commitments. They recognize "at least the [theoretical] possibility of an integrative resolution of the contradictions" (1984, p. 186). Holding contradictions in tension, he reports, allows one to see one's own view as partial and limited, as in the case of Judy and her daughter, while also enabling one to find what is valuable and true in the positions of others. When an integrative view does not result, then the individual chooses a viewpoint, or a composite viewpoint, from within the context of the broadest and soundest understanding possible, namely, one in which disparate views and arguments have been presented. Thus even if an integrative view is not possible, the context of choice, the range of choice, has been expanded.

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Such an approach requires more than a simple toleration of opposing viewpoints. Basseches says that it includes embracing viewpoints, ideas, or attitudes that conflict with or contradict one's own. It requires both an open mind and an open self-definition—that is, both kinds of interdependence (1984, p. 191)—for every system or worldview is seen to leave something out. For contextualist thinkers, formal approaches are inadequate because they fail to account for the situations of and consequences for particular actors. Rather than separating form from content, as in formal approaches, one needs to see that particulars are shaped by the universals one applies to them (1984, p. 332). Thus laws regarding property rights may seem impartial, as they are applicable to all individuals with property. But the laws also define property, a definition that conceivably does not include as property what some persons might value. Thus its partiality is revealed, and content is seen as essential to the meaning of the abstraction. Contextual thinking is characterized, therefore, by (1) the recognition of, if not a search for, multiple viewpoints and mutually incompatible worldviews; (2) the acceptance of the necessity of contradictions in order to understand one's own worldview; and (3) an integrative approach to thinking about contradictory and conflicting views. Such thinking, writes D. A. Kramer in a summary of the research findings of various "contextualists," is fostered by encountering "different viewpoints and potentially incompatible roles and [by] the necessity of committing oneself to a chosen course from among a multitude of possibilities" (1983, p. 92). In brief, one looks to the context in which decisions or dilemmas arise, and from that context, one looks at the various and conflicting viewpoints that can arise. At the core of contextualism, above all its other aspects, is the attempt to integrate various views, the attempt to find an inclusive solution. All versions of contextualist theory, comments Kramer, comprise or imply "an integration or synthesis of contradictory [views] into an overriding, more inclusive whole." Psychologists Arlin and Sinnott call it "a pooling or coordination of observations taken from different frames of reference" to create one frame of reference (Kramer, 1983, p. 93)—a different way to describe the sort of exploration of values in which Judy and her daughter might engage. The integrative process is also the key to compound individuality, for although atomists find contradiction and conflicts intolerable, they are still able to recognize them. If self-interest could somehow outweigh the intolerability, then perhaps an atomist could grant a hearing to conflicting views, in the hope of using them to solidify his own positions. He could then instrumentally use those who express divergent views by selecting from them those views that suited his purposes, while ignoring or dismissing the rest.19 But what the atomist cannot do, without destroying his closed self-definition and the worldview he is bound to defend, is take up or embrace conflicting views. Indeed, Carmichael describes the integrative process as "the awkward embrace": the preservation and holding of "all available contradictory views and perspectives" and the attempt to generate from them one inclusive perspective (1966, p. 176). Consider how one political outcome might have turned out had the participants pursued a contextualist line of inquiry: The Housing Authority of Suffolk, Massachusetts, a small town outside Boston,

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had been trying to provide low-cost housing for elderly citizens. To build such housing the town needed financial assistance. In 1982 the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offered Suffolk a grant of $5 million, contingent on the town's building some low-income housing as well. In the town meeting the grant was voted down, for many townspeople feared the influx of the poor, ethnic families who would occupy the low-income housing. "Townspeople appealed to the unity and integrity of their tradition-rooted community to justify segregationist policies" (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 13), a rationalization that smacked of pure self-service, as Suffolk had for many years been less a "tradition-rooted community" and more a "bedroom community," a suburb of convenient commuting to Boston. According to one townswoman, the Housing Authority took no time to gather the views of any members of the community or of any other governmental agency. Instead "of working with townspeople to develop common ideas about how to provide housing for people [the poor and the elderly], the Housing Authority ... just went out and made their plans" (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 187). Instead of taking up everyone's concerns, the Housing Authority presented its plans as a fait accompli, which polarized the townspeople. According to the townswoman, no one ever considered limiting the number of low-income units to offset some of the concern of those who feared an influx of the poor, and no one ever consulted the federal government about what an acceptable limited number might be. What the town should have done, she argued, was to make a decision after holding public deliberations in which the different concerns and conceptions surrounding the proposed plans were fully aired (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 188). Yet full contextualism is stronger than an approach calling merely for a diversity of opinion, goals, and values. It is a call not only to hear divergent views but also to take them up and respond to them; to consider the basis and consequences of various positions; to attempt to integrate or accommodate these positions; and to make judgments and choices based on this integrative perspective. This is one way that other views, especially challenging views, can be taken seriously. For these reasons, contextualism is a way to move beyond individualism, for the atomist fears disparate views. The attempt to derive an inclusive perspective from conflicting ones requires him to take on the perspectives of others and to qualify his own worldview by accommodating, or attempting to accommodate, those of others. Even as a mental exercise this experience can collapse the walls that enclose the atomist's self-definition. An atomist would then experience what developmental psychologist William Perry called "the Trojan Horse phenomenon": Tempted from the fortress of his own attitudes, ideas, and ways of thinking, the atomist becomes curious about an intriguing figure (proposal, idea, angle, etc.) that he had not considered or seen before. Suddenly the figure opens up to him and spreads out before him an army of considerations, consequences, suggestions that capture his fortress and break new ground (Kegan, 1980, p. 379; and see also Perry, 1968). Consider how contextualism might be useful: In a small town in northwestern Vermont, which we shall call Ludlow, governance proceeds through the town meeting, much as it did in Tocqueville's time. At one meeting an issue comes up for discussion that has tormented the town on and off for some years. The town sewage

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pipe runs along the river that passes through Ludlow. At one spot not far from town, children hang on the pipe and swing into the river. The constant use over time invariably splits the pipe, causing sewage leaks and necessitating expensive repairs to the pipe and in the cleanup. In past years the town has paid to have a rope and, later, a swing installed at the swimming spot. The children continue to use the pipe, however, and again it has split. At the meeting the townspeople express exasperation about what to do, and they consider some drastic measures. Someone suggests pouring the sewage directly into the river to avoid the need of a pipe and to stop the swimming. This was noted but was well argued against. Most of the talk focuses on how to protect the pipe. One townsman suggests fencing off the pipe at the swimming hole; another suggests fencing it off with electrified wire (although this is immediately countered with a defense of animals and others who may wander innocently into the wire); a third suggests hiring security men, maybe college students, to guard the pipe. Finally the town curmudgeon stands and proposes reinforcing the pipe. Then the children can swing on it without damaging it, and the town can stop worrying about spills. It would require a one-time expense and should not, then, give anyone, including the children, any further trouble. The proposal is applauded, put into motion, and quickly passed. The curmudgeon's proposal did not reconcile the previous speakers' recommendations. Indeed, it did not deal with them. But it did drive below the surface to what motivated each of them—the desire to protect the pipe from damage. And it touched on or spoke to those whose perspective was not expressed and not represented—the children. The proposal thus sprang from the denominator common to all the recommendations—the desire to protect the pipe—and it brought together that denominator and the desire of the children. From this "awkward embrace" came a solution utterly simple but, in the heat of debate and narrow focus, easily missed. Yet most decisions, especially political decisions, are not usually like this. It is far more likely that a compromise will serve as the solution. Either the contending parties agree on a policy or action that no one thinks is entirely satisfactory but that each prefers to the ones the others want—you want to vacation in Greece; I want to vacation in Spain; and so we settle on going to Italy—or the parties settle on a compromise of alternatives—this year it's Greece; next year, Spain. Indeed, this whole notion of an integrative approach seems paradoxical. How can incompatible, and especially contradictory, viewpoints be reconciled? Opposites seem exclusive, providing no option other than choosing between them. Were the residents of Ludlow simply lucky to arrive at the decision they did? Would more such decisions be reached, without luck, if contextualist procedures were established? How, for example, can the issue of abortion be resolved when one side sees the issue as murder of the unborn, and the other sees it as the right of women to control their bodies? The integrative approach calls for attempting as far as possible to generate an inclusive perspective. To make such an attempt one must embrace or take up the viewpoints of others, see from the perspectives of others, and treat the perspectives of others as if they were one's own. The contextualist thinker may quite readily

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appreciate that in the case of abortion, for example, both sides have legitimate arguments and that the choices emanating from either one lead to substantial, even beneficial, consequences. This does not afford the contextualist the luxury of being able to choose either course willy-nilly. Rather, it underscores the anguish in any choice. One is torn between the two positions, both of which are persuasive. One knows that in the choice not made, as Alasdair Maclntyre said, one has left undone what should be done. To review, contextualists seek to solve dilemmas by combining principles and responsibility or obligations to others. But one can be pulled in one direction by his principles and in the opposite by his responsibility. As Mr. X said: "I violated my first principles, but 1 made the right decision" (Gilligan & Murphy, 1979, p. 96). The contextualist strives to keep these two in balance, to pool all the perspectives and to work through the consequences of each choice for all those involved. He attempts to forge from this awkward embrace a comprehensive, inclusive, or integrative perspective by building on the common elements when the views conflict and by transcending the views when they contradict. Transcending contradictions is, of course, exceedingly difficult. Consider, for example, that the ancients had water clocks but could not tell time. They attempted to divide the daylight hours into equal parts and, separately, to divide the nighttime into equal parts. But because day and night varied in length from season to season, they could not do it. Only when man transcended those separate categories and thought to divide up the whole twenty-four hours did keeping time become easy. To keep time the ancients would have had to step back from their categories, from their worldview, and to do so without an alternative to push or guide them. Contextualism calls for stepping out of one's worldview, but not into the void. It requires stepping into the worldview, embracing part of the worldview of another, but it does not require or suggest becoming an unencumbered self. The hope of this embrace is both psychological and existential—of breaking through the psychological barriers that insulate the atomist's worldview but leave him isolated, alienated, anomic, and alone; and of finding some common ground that might integrate these views or of finding a new perspective around which people might unite. As I shall argue in the next chapter, this could have significant political consequences, for more than establishing a marketplace of ideas, contextualism might be used to combine those ideas and generate from them a common good.

Practicing Contextualism Can the requirements of contextualism—especially the integrative approach—get us to the intimacy characteristic of compound individuality? If compound individuals use contextualism, does using contextualism engender compound individuality? Consider again the nature of the relationship of the complementary atomists and that of compound individuals. Each atomist brings a set of values, goals, beliefs, and the like to be shared in the relationship. Providing that the sets coincide, there is little problem. Yet if one of the atomists changes—for example, declares for

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bisexuality—or finds some new ideas or beliefs—for example, converts to a different religion—that conflict with those of her partner, then what alternative is there but to walk away when the sharing stops? It is unlikely that the man, who asserts and defends his self-definition, will accommodate changes that he does not initiate. But it is quite possible that the woman, whose own self-definition is based on this relationship, will acquiesce and modify, even abandon, her own set for the sake of the relationship. This, however, is not reciprocity but acquiescence, as the relationship is the source of the woman's identity. In intimate relationships commitments to each other breed obligations to accommodate changes in the relationship, but from the perspective of an autonomous self. The constant endeavor is to create new and larger contexts that can encompass the changes that one or the other is going through, with the intention of changing oneself as well. Thus the relationship and the identities of both parties are constantly moving; there is a perpetual exchange of points of view to arrive at a new shared meaning that neither partner dictates to the other. What is shared is not fixed or inflexible; it is derived from what Shorter calls a "hermeneutical back-and-forth" (1984), the search for a common perspective or shared way of life. Both persons come to the relationship as separate, autonomous selves, but neither looks at the other as a person with fixed traits. Rather, the relationship is mutually constitutive and mutually defining. It shapes the person I am just as I shape it. Both persons participate in joint actions to remake or redefine their mutual world. These relationships are "fully participatory," writes Stanley Benn, because it is their "joint enterprise" that creates a mutuality that "will flourish the more autonomous the partners."21 When trouble stirs, the response will not be to blame oneself or one's partner, but to ask how the relationship must change to adapt to the changes that have occurred in the participants in order for the relationship to continue. But does an intimate relationship really differ from that of a man who defines himself by his relationship, say, to his trade union or company? It does. The principal difference is that an intimate relationship is marked by reciprocity. Changes in one partner necessitate changes in the other, if only going so far as to try to create a larger context that incorporates the changes and lays out new positions that both can share. With a trade union or company, reciprocity would have to be demanded of the entire group rather than demanded of any persons in it. In short, the trade union or company would have to be willing to change to accommodate the changes or perspectives of one member. Trade unions and corporations do not function in this way. They operate, instead, by asymmetry rather than reciprocity. The flow of initiatives, changes, and adaptations is largely in one direction; that is, it comes from the governing board to the members or employees. This is for good reason, however; trade unions and companies are not in the business of generating intimacy, unless as a by-product of moves to effect greater productivity or efficiency. (Nor, it might be said, are strong communities, a point to which I shall return in Chapter 5.) If compound individuality is characterized by intimacy and if intimacy is in part characterized by contextual thinking, then promoting contextualism may well promote development beyond individualism toward intimacy and compound indi-

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viduality. If that is to be done on a large scale, then, as argued, social institutions must reflect and effect that development. To grow toward "interindividuality," or compound individuality, says Robert Kegan, the social institutions most in need of restructuring are places of work (1982, chap. 8). But restructured in what way? I have already stated that some social institutions, places of work in particular, are not designed to foster intimate behavior. Such behavior might even be counterproductive. And yet such restructuring will not be counterproductive if intimacy is its byproduct and not necessarily its goal. Direct democracy in the workplace, which some contend increases productivity and thus has appeal to the business mentality, could be the very conditions needed for fostering intimacy. According to Kegan, it is the atomist's very inability to face conflict and contradiction that can lead beyond individualism. As already mentioned, accepting mutually incompatible worldviews and contradictions as inherent features of reality would put a ponderous strain on an atomist's worldview and self-definition. And finding that situation intolerable, he tries to relieve the pressure by dismissing other views or discarding the contradictions. Kegan believes that these maneuvers could be frustrated, if not thwarted, by structuring contextualism into social institutions so that participation in deciding about work-related affairs required facing multiple, incompatible viewpoints. If confronted by views that conflict with his own, in a setting in which participation is in his interest, then, Kegan argues, an atomist might be pushed toward compound individuality. Although it is in his interest to do so, as otherwise he may not deal with the real problems that affect him at work, an atomist might not participate. This fear of divergent views may outweigh his desire or need to participate. Nevertheless, Kegan points out, introducing a forum for contextual thought into organizations could help bring about a personal transformation beyond individualism. Such a forum would require institutional restructuring that would include, but would not necessarily be limited to, the following: (1) sharing throughout the organization the employees' opinions and ideas regarding the organization's purpose and operations; (2) developing an open-communications policy among all employees, including disclosure, support, and confrontation; (3) evaluating the effects of each person's behavior on others in the organization and the effects of the organization on the environment and society; (4) directly facing conflicts in the organization and trying to find novel solutions and accommodations; and (5) trying to emphasize horizontal rather than vertical role differentiation, playing down hierarchy, and trying to create symmetrical rather than subordinate relations.22 Taken together, these practices could generate, says Kegan, "an institutional capacity for intimacy" (1982, p. 244). Bureaucratic organizations do not currently exhibit such structures and thus fail to promote self-development beyond individualism. Yet can the structural changes that Kegan proposes accomplish this kind of self-development? Granted, they do encourage persons to step back from the organization; to question its purposes, decisions, and structures; to participate in decision making and the management of problems; and to question their own views and themselves. But how do these procedures reflect and engender "an institutional capacity for intimacy"? Aside from the proposal to look for novel solutions to workplace problems, Kegan does not mention the need to integrate or accommodate

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various views. How then can this restructuring either fulfill contextual thinking, which Kegan himself says should bring into being "a more integrative judgment" (1982, p. 239), or otherwise prepare a participant for intimacy? If participation is limited solely to the airing and sharing of different views, as Kegan proposes, it cannot. There is no obligation to generate a frame of reference or context that holds various and contradictory views, a context from which might be derived a more inclusive, an integrative, or a common perspective. Intimate relationships carry such an obligation. As constitutive relationships based on reciprocity, they carry an obligation to attempt to accommodate one's partner's views and needs and desires. Without building this need to incorporate or integrate differing views into one common perspective, without, in other words, constructing a forum that requires complete contextual thinking, there seems little chance of nurturing intimacy and thus promoting compound individuality. But generating such an integrative perspective, as mentioned, carries problems of its own. The risk is that procedures for building an inclusive context may be diversionary or destabilizing. So I shall examine in the next chapter how the integration or accommodation of viewpoints, how even taking up or embracing divergent viewpoints, might be attempted; whether the attempt itself to forge an inclusive perspective, should the integrative approach fail, could be sufficient to lay the foundation for compound individuality; whether establishing an institutional capacity for intimacy can foster compound individuality on a large scale; and what forms of participation might be required to effect this. I shall look at this restructuring in the context of politics, for it is unlikely, given the risks of disrupting normal business operations and the demands on the time of the workers, that many workplaces would flock to contextualist procedures, even in the most economically democratic company. The onus for self-development on a broad scale, which is in the public interest, falls therefore, on politics. Before moving to these topics, given the partly communitarian context of this work, I must attend to an additional dimension to generating compound individuality. Beyond the empirical evidence he uncovered in actual dilemmas showing that commitment to a course of action can lead participants to maturity of judgment and responsibility to others, what interested psychologist William Perry (1968) was the social "sustenance" that most supported individuals "in their choice to use their competence to orient themselves through commitment—as opposed to using it to establish a nonresponsible alienation" such as hedonism. One such sustenance, of course, as we have seen, is an arena for confronting real-life dilemmas. Perry suggested that college and the armed services were two such common arenas, because they threw together people from disparate backgrounds. But the arenas that he found most sustaining, that were most effective in promoting commitment and responsibility, were those that fostered "a special realization of community," a sense of community that "seemed to derive from reciprocal acts of recognition and confirmation" (1968, p. 213). The need, as Perry described, was to be recognized as a distinct person from within a context of group solidarity. The relationships characteristic of compound individuality retain the parties' distinctness and autonomy but are also constitutive of their identities. Could such relationships serve as the basis for a special sense of Sandelian community? Foster-

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ing compound individuality through contextualism would not seem, on an initial impression, to guarantee intimate relationships, let alone a network of intimate relationships, of which community might consist. But could building contextualism into social institutions also build community? Could such participatory procedures also be community building? Is attempting to generate an inclusive or common perspective sufficient for generating shared values and goals, a shared way of life? Or does promoting the common good require, as Robert Paul Wolff (1968) argues, going beyond tolerance and pluralism toward homogeneity? This concern for both intimate relationships and community brings us back to where we started, with questions not only about community and individuality but also about liberalism and communitarianism. To overgeneralize, liberalism's concern for autonomy and individual rights associates it with individualism and the pole of differentiation at the expense of relationships. Thus communitarians such as Michael Sandel, Robert Paul Wolff, and Alasdair Maclntyre accuse liberals of pursuing freedom to choose values, goals, and interests without sensing a need for the harmony and the solidarity of ends that come from community. The loss of community, in their eyes, is too high a price to pay for autonomy. Their critiques of this liberal tendency serve as reminders of our need for community and for recognition of relationships as constitutive of persons. But from such reminders comes the communitarian association with attachments to, even embeddedness in, relationships at the expense of autonomy and individuality. Defenders of liberalism such as Amy Gutmann (1985), Stanley Benn (1982), and Ronald Dworkin (1985) accuse communitarians of wanting the harmony of shared values, beliefs, and ends without granting people the freedom to determine or choose which values, beliefs, and ends will be shared. From their perspective, the loss of autonomy is too high a price to pay for community. And so, in addition to building contextualism into organizational practices in the hope of laying the foundation for widespread compound individuality, we must also consider whether such a context can encompass the divergent views of these two political camps. Could a forum that balances the two poles of personal identity, that is also both participatory and community building, reconcile these liberal and communitarian views? Each speaks a half-truth, and, as we have discovered, the solution to personal identity lies with neither exclusively. It lies, instead, with compound individuality, a perspective that generates a larger context than either alone, as currently conceived. Communitarianism and liberalism should be seen in dynamic tension, in which the pull toward relationship does not eclipse the pull toward individuality. Indeed, they may well represent the two poles of the one process called mature social identity. In this identity, persons recognize that the social matrix is responsible for and essential to autonomy and individuality. And it is this social identity that might be educed through active democratic participation built on contextualism.

4 Political Participation: Self-development and Self-interest

In the last chapter I examined the composition of compound individuality and saw that it represents a better way of "being." It enables the person, for the first time, to be both independent and intimate, to be defined by personal autonomy and constitutive relationships. We also saw that social institutions play a significant role in fostering development to this new level of self, for the cognitive-linguistic structures that are its foundation—formal operational thought—have unfolded widely throughout our cultures. So why in our culture is there a paucity of intimacy, of compound individuality? The principal reason is that our culture emphasizes autonomy at the expense of constitutive relationships. Redressing that imbalance will require establishing conditions that actively foster compound individuality. Such conditions must include contextualism. Whereas schools and workplaces would seem likely candidates for restructuring, they have their own agendas: Schools, especially during adolescence, are "developmental," needing to focus on solidifying the formal operations that have recently emerged; workplaces are designed around operations of productivity, to which contextualist procedures could be disruptive and thus counterproductive. And so the task of self-development to the level of compound individuality falls to politics. Self-development through political participation is hardly a new idea. Indeed, it is an ancient one with a pedigree reaching back to Aristotle, who described man as a political animal not because of his abiding interest in "politics" but because he could realize his full capacities only in political participation. To be a full or whole or "perfect" human being was possible only for citizens, those who had "the right to share in the office of deliberating and judging with skill . . . who participate in judging and ruling . . . who share in the administration of justice and in the holding of office."1 The polis thus existed for the moral development and perfection of its citizens, and their perfection would create a perfect state. Yet participation as self-development also suffered a broken and checkered lineage. It became a threat not only to those in offices and on thrones who sought and exercised political control but also to those in cathedrals who pronounced on and guided spiritual development. In fact, the influence of this line of argument disappeared until its resurgence in Renaissance Florence as republicanism. Only then did the vita activa (the vivere civile) compete with the medieval preference for 96

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contemplation. But the modern form did not take shape until the liberal democratic formulations of John Stuart Mill.2

Participation as Cultivation of Character Mill adopted the self-development conceptions of German idealism, especially that of Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt. The "end of man," wrote von Humboldt, "is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole" (quoted in Mill, 1972, p. 54). Such development had two requirements: "freedom and variety of situations." Mill elaborated on both. Men must learn, he insisted, to think for themselves. To do that, to develop their mental and moral faculties—those of "perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference"—men needed to be given the opportunity of making choices in a social climate in which they were free from external constraints, could face "different experiments in living," and could give "free scope ... to varieties of character" (1972, p. 55). Mill had gone further than von Humboldt had in specifying the powers or capacities men needed to develop: Specifically, citizens needed to improve their intellectual capacities and political judgments. To accomplish this, Mill proposed political participation that would lead to an extension, a "largeness" of "conceptions and sentiments," which in turn would carry citizens beyond "the satisfaction of daily wants" (1972, p. 233). Participation would exercise the reasoning faculties while encouraging participants to consider subjects that transcended their quotidian concerns, as well as their personal points of view. Through participation, in the face of diversity of opinion, citizens would be introduced into a "range of ideas" that would lead to a development of intelligence quite beyond that of "those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a counter." Such development would enable citizens to protect their rights and interests, for they would be the best judges of both. Thus the true test of good government was whether it permitted the educative political participation necessary for judicious self-protection (1972, p. 224). A good government would use participation both to exercise the faculties already existing and to improve these faculties and develop them in others. But participation also had a third developmental function, to serve as "the first step out of the narrow bounds of individual and family selfishness" (Mill, 1963, vol. 19, p. 322). The citizen would then be able to act in a public role and to think of the interests of the community, not simply of his own interests, however expanded. Each is called ... to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private particularities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good. . . . [W]here this school of public spirit does not exist, scarcely any sense is entertained that private persons, in no eminent social situations, owe any duties to society.3

Participation could reorient motivations and interests.

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Given some role to play in public processes, citizens would develop both their intellectual capacities and their connections with their fellow citizens. As participation schools the citizen's mind, "the influences are constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest, [for] popular institutions are the great means of rendering general in a people." No means of nourishing patriotism is "so efficacious as free institutions—a large and frequent intervention of the citizens in the management of public business."4 For such significant developments, what precisely did Mill propose as suitable participatory institutions? He proposed (1) free speech and assembly so that citizens could deliberate before (2) voting, which Mill claimed was like a "verdict by a juryman," made after debating the facts of a public affair. In that spirit he also encouraged (3) jury duty and (4) local officeholding, in which information and issues were more comprehensible to those developing their mental, moral, and intellectual judgments. "If anyone supposes that this road will not bring [these] I call to witness the entire contents of M. de Tocqueville's great work" (1972, p. 300). Yet given his emphasis on the values of participation, aren't these proposals exiguous? They had to be, given the tension in Mill's view of participation: If participation is essential as a means of developing persons of national character to be competent to think for themselves, then they cannot be competent initially, and so their decisions will be irresponsible and incompetent. How can the experiences necessary for competence in political participation be supplied without simultaneously sabotaging by citizen ineptitude the very institutions that supply them? How can rational governance be maintained when those who are to govern are irrational or not yet rational? It can be done, thought Mill, only by limiting the arenas of political action and by ensuring that the competent and more intelligent had a greater voice in making decisions. Mill was much influenced by Tocqueville's writings on the tyranny of the majority. He feared, as Tocqueville did, that the uneducated and inept would dominate and tyrannize politics so as to undermine authority and individuality. Being ignorant and inexperienced, the uneducated would be susceptible to all manner of demagoguery and manipulation. Unable to judge for themselves, they would simply follow the herd: Thus the mind is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.5 Thus conformity or too much political power in the hands of the inept could dam the course of self-development, for not only are mental capacities not improved or cultivated, but those already in existence wither and starve as well. To remedy this, Mill proposed two solutions: to limit participation and to provide the competent and educated with plural votes. Although all citizens would make choices, they would not do so equally.


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In Mill's scheme the highest levels of policymaking would take place in a nationally representative assembly, and government administration would rest in the hands of experts. The educated would have an obligation to teach the less competent. Through debate and deliberation in the representative assemblies and discussion in public places, they would show others how to reason about the ends and means of politics. Whereas the educated would receive plural votes, the immoral and illiterate would be deprived of the vote altogether. For the sake of rational government, therefore, Mill rejected direct democracy in favor of plural voting and representative government. Of the two Millian pillars of government, the principle of competence bore greater weight than did the principle of participation. The primary locus of participation would have to be, as it was for Tocqueville, local politics.6 Though not his view when he wrote Representative Government, Mill wrote in his autobiography that universal education could make plural voting unnecessary (1924, pp. 153, 183-84). The reasons seem straightforward. Political participation, according to Mill, by requiring deliberation, judgment, and choice, stimulated the intellectual faculties while also widening the participants' horizons by "elevating the mind to large interests and contemplations" ("Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform," 1963). Universal education could perform these tasks more effectively. Certainly, telecommunications today widen a citizen's horizons far beyond anything political participation might do, though our universal education can be criticized for the extent to which it fails to stimulate intellectual faculties. Still, it might be sufficient to obviate plural voting. Yet, as we have seen, these were not the only values of political participation. It also shaped national character and generated "love of country," though arguably these, too, rely on intellectual development that leads one beyond narrow, selfish interests. Developing these "communal" capacities required that citizens work jointly, and nonpolitical endeavors might serve just as well as a requisite spur. Mill himself, following Tocqueville, mentioned work in voluntary associations. Therefore, under different social conditions, political participation might no longer be necessary for Millian self-development, though it would still serve the purpose of protecting individual rights and interests. Yet our focus is on developing capacities different from the intellectual ones emphasized by Mill. So perhaps political participation could have a significant role to play in our task—developing the level of selfhood we have called compound individuality. Both Representative Government and On Liberty provide strong defenses of and arguments for individuality and autonomy and for the role of participation in their exercise and development. Mill's works serve as a base for, if not a model of, liberalism. Yet often the quality of autonomy and individuality that liberals laud is, as we have found, the base for atomism. Our goal is to erect social structures that generate a new mode of self or individuality, in which the shape of autonomy that underlies and bolsters individualism gives way to an autonomy that effects and sustains a codetermined, coregulated, or "intimate" identity—an identity, as already emphasized, constituted by both relationships and autonomy. Therefore, the participatory structures that we need would take us beyond those recommended by Mill; they must encourage participants, especially atomists, to transcend, modify, or

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reveal their worldviews. They would have to be both the conditions for and the expression of that level of self, and thus we would have to treat participants as if they were already compound individuals. Having gone beyond placing citizens on juries and having them serve in parish offices as means of self-development, we need the participatory "institutions ... to be radically different, according to the stage of advancement already reached" (1972, p. 212). What might be required for development to compound individuality, then, would not be those participatory structures that Mill recommended for developing competence but popular participatory assemblies structured, with some emendations, like Mill's representative assemblies (1972, p. 259): An arena in which not only the general opinion of the nation, but that of every section of it, and as far as possible of every eminent individual [that is, of every individual] whom it contains, can produce itself in full light and challenge discussion; where every person . . . speaks his mind—not to friends and partisans exclusively, but in the face of opponents, to be tested by adverse controversy; when those whose opinion is overruled, feel satisfied that it is heard, and set aside not by a mere act of will, but for what are thought to be superior reasons . . . where every opinion in the country can muster its strength and be cured of any illusion. ... A place where every interest and shade of opinion in the country can have its cause even passionately pleaded, in the face of the government and of all other interests and opinions, can compel them to listen and either comply, or state clearly why they do not.

Mill's description begins to set a tone for our participatory structures, but our procedures would have to show three significant differences. First, and most palpable, whereas his participants were representatives, ours would all be citizens. Second, his procedures established a process of daunting debate requiring speakers of eloquence and verve. Although debate, discussion, and open exchanges of opinion would have to form the basis of our procedures as well, the emphasis would have to be not on attacking positions and scoring points but on sharing and joining perspectives. Third, Mill's procedures and his desire for a general cultivation of intellect called for the airing of diverse viewpoints. Developing compound individuality would require more than that. It would involve the actual hearing, even the embracing, of diverse viewpoints, for the purpose of the participatory procedure is to move the participant beyond or outside his own self-containment, his own exclusive, closed worldview. That requires compelling people who wish to participate to listen, not so as to comply or confute—as Mill suggested—but to take up as their own a divergent view. Exhortations to do so are not enough; this requirement would have to be built into the system. One way to do that is with something like the psychological technique called mirroring.

Mirroring: Habits of the Heart To review, compound individuality is an adult psychological state defined by three characteristics: (1) Problems are solved and dilemmas are addressed by contextualist thinking in which considerations of consequences for actual persons temper the


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principles by which one judges; (2) persons hold open their perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews and both tolerate and actively seek out conflicting or contradictory viewpoints that challenge their own views; and (3) personal identity is defined by reciprocity, an intimacy with specific others by which one establishes and understands who one is through the joint action or interaction with those others. Thus both one's autonomy as a separate person and one's sociality or relationship to another constitute that person's identity or self-system. William Torbert summarizes this level of selfhood as follows: Each person transcends himself in genuine intimacy with others, experiencing a new form of relationship, seeing himself and the other anew, and gradually in essence, through his fundamental encounters with others, reconstituting his world view and values. . . . The persons who develop intimacy discover/create a shared spirit permeating their different and changing ways of structuring the world. (1976, p. 146) Compound individuality is, therefore, a dynamic balance between the forces of integrity that seek to establish boundaries and those of intimacy that seek to expand those boundaries. We wish to do through institutional contrivance what Rousseau sought to do through the social contract, and that is to transform the self, in our case, beyond individualism. To do so means establishing some sort of psychological habit by which a person can take up viewpoints other than his own, especially ones that conflict or contradict, and thereby exercise capacities that leave open or make vulnerable his own worldview. St. Thomas Aquinas stated that justice—the giving to individuals their due "with constant and perpetual will"—is a "habit" (Summa Theologica, no. 2, pt. 2, quest. 58, art. 1). It is contingent on a certain disposition or state of mind. We seek to establish and build on a state of mind by which one opens and remains open to the perspectives of others by structuring into participatory procedures the conditions necessary for contextual thinking. The hope is that this habit or psychological state would not only operate during participation but would also carry over into one's daily relationships and interactions, thus making possible the move to compound individuality. How, specifically, would the procedures have to be structured? To explore that, we turn first to the research that informs this entire study—the empirical findings of developmental psychology. In research to determine how much and why participants changed their moral judgments, James Broughton studied an undergraduate "self-analytic" training group. He found little change in the participants' judgments and attributed this to the following reasons: 1. few moral issues were discussed; 2. participants made claims and expressed opinions but almost never gave reasons for them; 3. few participants had "enough air-time" to make their positions clear; and 4. people did not respond to what previous speakers had said, but preferred to issue their own opinions "de novo" (1982, pp. 369-71). Although our concern is not with changing moral judgments per se, each of these four conditions would have to be reversed in order to build full contextualist thinking into participation and to change the participants' psychological orientation.

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First, moral issues must be discussed. More than moral dilemmas, these must be real-life dilemmas with flesh-and-blood characters. These are the marrow of contextualism and also of politics. As Aristotle said, experience and not formal and technical knowledge is the essential ingredient in praxis. Political issues are those that require careful deliberation, judgment, and decision, for unlike hypothetical moral dilemmas that often conduce to unrealistic principled stances, political issues have real and significant consequences for actual people. Second, participants must both make claims and give reasons. Taking up the claims and opinions of others has the salutary expansive effect cited by Mill; it opens us to new perspectives and new relationships. The contextualist requirement, as we shall see later, is not simply to hear another's view but to consider as well that view as if it were one's own. By doing that, one comes to understand better or in a new way the person who has expressed the view. The goal is to have a "meeting of the minds," but this is not to be confused with what Michael Walzer calls "facile empathy," that is, trying only to feel with the person instead of joining intellectually with him by entering imaginatively into his situation, arguments, and choices (1970, p. 73). But imagining how it must be to be in another's place has its own dangers, as it can serve as a substitute for the actual concrete positions of the other. Thus reasons must be given for opinions and claims, for knowing the reasons "enables us to appraise particulars . . . and involves release from the confines of private subjectivity since we can support our judgments with publicly adducible reasons or grounds" (Beiner, 1983, pp. 8-9). Third, every participant must be provided sufficient time to present his views as some assurance that these views will be understood. This requires that the group be small enough to provide time for both presentation and interaction. Maria Jahoda notes that "one of the few valid empirical generalizations of social psychology [is that] direct experience is a stronger influence and a better transmitter of information than . . . lectures, written instruction, sermons or propaganda." To be effective, direct experience must involve two-way communication: "Every participant gives and receives information, even if he does not presumably speak up ... [for]participation involves the whole person in a contact experience [with others]. . . . Behaviour, gestures, facial expressions convey information central to forming rational judgements" (1979, pp. 212-13). Implicit in this and the conditions preceding it is the need for face-to-face participation. It is a commonplace now in critiques of participatory democracy that the size of our nations precludes face-to-face interaction. Although it is true that we cannot assemble the citizens of, say, Britain in one meeting place, there seems no reason that there could not be a pyramid of interlocking assemblies such as Thomas Jefferson proposed over 150 years ago. Given developments in telecommunications and computers, a system of Jeffersonian "wards" or neighborhood assemblies seems more feasible now than it would have been in the early eighteenth century.7 There is, at any rate, good reason for keeping the group small and face to face, for another valid generalization from social psychology is that the rate of participation declines sharply as an organization increases in size.8


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Size does not answer one major concern of participationists: the fear of participating. Jane Mansbridge shows in her study of two participatory systems that some people will not participate even when the groups are .small and the other participants are well known. Such people fear losing control, sounding foolish, making enemies, and—most of all—suffering criticism and ridicule (1980, chap. 6, esp. pp. 59-71). This seems especially true when the issues under discussion are contentious: "In the face of conflict, emotions turn sour. . . . [I]n face-to-face assemblies . . . some people do not attend because they know in advance they will get upset" (1980, p. 34). Such fears indict participation and must be taken seriously.9 Giving all participants an equal opportunity to voice their views may seem an assertion of equal worth and respect, but it can be such only if a participant feels confident that her colleagues will seek first to understand her position rather than to demolish it. This raises a critical issue: How can we dismiss an unsound opinion without dismissing the person who voices it? To pursue the answer to this I must look at how to structure the fourth condition for full contextualism: mirroring. Mirroring requires that each person who chooses to speak must be able to summarize or repeat the previous speaker's position to the satisfaction of that speaker. This "feedback" shows that each speaker has been heard and understood, if only by one other participant (at that point in the procedure). A participant must listen to the points of view of others and also must listen attentively. He cannot focus on only those parts of a presentation that corroborate or challenge his own positions or that are vulnerable to critique or ridicule. He must listen so as to understand, though not necessarily accept, the speaker's views. It may seem that this is demanding too much of participants. Yet if the size of the assembly is limited to a Jeffersonian ward of 150, and assemblies are held frequently enough so that citizens can garner the psychological benefits by participating only on issues of interest or meaning to them, then such a procedure should not be too taxing. Even so, not all present or all who participate will hear and understand all positions. But mirroring is to be built into the procedures. The effort must be made by any who wish to participate, because the series of presentations create the context for all speakers and set the limits of possible decisions (about which I shall say more later). Mirroring focuses participants' attention on the presentations of others rather than on what they themselves are thinking or wish to say in response. Thus any contribution is voiced in the context of those that preceded it and are not issued ex nihilo. Speaker A may thus demand of Speaker K a summary of A's positions, as K's own opinions seem to bear directly on those of A. This might proceed as a clarification of K's position: "How do you think your siting of the dam bears on my views about the endangered fish? Can you summarize my view and amplify your understanding of the consequences of your proposal?" Such an exchange might occur an hour after A has spoken, and so a participant cannot concentrate only on the presentation of the speaker immediately before him. Even if K needs to have A recapitulate A's own position—meaning that K did not hear it sufficiently the first time—K must then mirror back A's position, this time assuring A that he has understood. Similarly, some "third party" might want to know what A thinks of the possible consequences of K's proposal for A's position. To ask this question this

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participant would have to lay out briefly K's position, and to K's satisfaction. The procedure would move in this fashion, neither linear nor circular, but an upward spiral progressing while turning back on itself. Needing to take up the interests and viewpoints of others and mirror them back means that participants cannot fabricate from the interests of others caricatures, or strawmen, against whom to compete. Participants must at least indicate that they understand the other's point of view. Confident that his position has been heard and understood, a participant might receive a psychological boost, which, as we shall see in a moment, could be significant. But this still does not mean that his position has been taken seriously. To build in full contextualism, the mirroring technique needs that supplement. A closed worldview requires a lever to pry it open, even from the inside. As we have seen of the atomist, for whom the closed worldview is the characteristic state, once he has organized experiences and data into an acceptable interpretation and once he has established a meaningful identity, his project is to defend those patterns against assault or change. Thus new information will be discarded, ignored, or "read" according to the existing patterns. Mirroring might thus provide a wedge by asking each to take up the positions of others. But real leverage would come from an additional demand: that participants are to act on and build on those other positions, to consider them, no matter how offensive, as glimpses into a possible collective solution. In effect, every position is to be treated as a contribution, for even if rejected, it may redirect or modify a participant's, or the group's, responses or thinking. Thus participants are asked to scrutinize positions for useful or salutary elements and—to repeat—to probe for the arguments behind positions. This process of "pooling perspectives" may introduce motion or doubt into an atomist's stable worldview. (I shall take up this process in detail later in the chapter.) Having had his perspective understood and dealt with respectfully, a participant might then be in a position to hear what is unsound about his position without projecting those criticisms onto himself. Such a critique and the very taking up of alternative perspectives create the "cognitive disequilibration" that leads to the "reequilibration" fundamental to development (Broughton, 1982, p. 371). Critical views and different views can throw a person off his psychological balance, creating a situation in which vulnerability opens him to new possibilities, possibilities that might then be incorporated or integrated into a new equilibrium called compound selfhood.10

Empirical Support for Participation as Self-development Henry Kariel described participation in political arenas in which participants take up alternative views as one way to expand the self (1969), and what we have done is to propose a possible model for doing this, for expanding the boundaries of one's self as one expands, in Millian fashion, his perspectives. This model is an ideal representation, "derived from certain axioms concerning human behaviour" and is intended to convince people of "the virtue [and premises] of the model" so that they


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"may try to alter the political system so that it approximates more closely to the model's requirements" (D. Miller, 1983, p. 136). In addition to being ideal, the model is also admittedly speculative, as it is extrapolated from behavior that is far from prevalent. There is, however, as we have in part already discovered, empirical evidence in support of compound individuality that can lend support to our model. Thus Damon and Killen, for example, concluded from their developmental studies that experiences of strict disagreement retarded developmental change. The subjects needed to hear conflicting viewpoints but needed to handle them through "collaborative co-construction" trying to bring these disparate views together.11 Similarly, Berkowitz and Gibbs found that the quality or structure of the interaction rather than the amount of interaction predicts developmental change. One of the qualities most conducive to change is "active, analytic engagement with the other's reasoning" ("Transactive Communication as a Condition for Moral Development," cited in Broughton, 1982, p. 373). Although these researchers studied children and adolescents, John Broughton argues that appropriate conditions stimulating developmental change need to be built into the participatory structures of adults.12 Most of the empirical studies on political participation focus either on voting patterns and behavior or on the development of political attitudes and party affiliations.13 By and large, liberal democratic politics provides little else to study. Students of political psychology, thus wishing to know who participates and why, approach the relationship between personality and politics by examining how personality traits affect political orientation, beliefs, and voting. But we wish to know, on the other hand, how participation and specific participatory procedures affect personality. One study that follows the well-traveled path but also offers some discussion of participation as self-development is Paul Sniderman's Democratic Theory and Personality (1975). A look at this work will provide some insight into the general criticisms of participationist positions. Sniderman disputes the claims of such participation theorists as Carole Pateman (1970) and Dennis Thompson (1970) that participation leads to important changes in the basic character of citizens (1975, p. 316). His short answer is "that participation in politics offers no unique advantages in dealing with specific psychological needs or conflicts" (1975, p. 265). Whether and why the advantages would have to be unique to win his approbation, Sniderman does not say. But though it is true according to his own evidence that those who participate "have a stronger sense of efficacy, less anxiety, more self-assurance, and higher self-esteem," participation does not effect these changes because persons bring these qualities to participation; they do not develop them in it. Participation thus has "only a limited power to change self-attitudes." It is not powerful enough to affect how worthwhile a person believes he is (1975, p. 317). This seems wondrous strange, as Pateman cites Lewin's small-group experiments in the 1930s that showed democratic procedures to be more effective than either "laissez-faire" or "authoritarian" procedures, precisely because participation produced significant psychological effects: enhanced self-images and group morale, greater interest and satisfaction in the tasks to be performed, and so forth.14 The

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depth of Sniderman's position becomes apparent when one considers his description of participation: "supporting a candidate by displaying a sign on one's car or wearing a button, voting, attempting to persuade family and friends to turn out or to support a particular candidate, writing a political leader, joining a civic association, attending a political meeting and the like" (1975, p. 262). One does not need to propose, as Sniderman does, low self-esteem as the reason for not participating; boring and ineffectual procedures would do just as nicely. It is no wonder that Sniderman finds political participation ineffective in causing any significant psychological change. His description carries no mention of discussion of or deliberation on political issues. He sees participation as having only limited power to change self-attitudes because he sees participation only as it is currently structured, and then only in truncated form. We can thus agree with his proposition that self-esteem is "the cause and not the consequence of participation," but only because participation has not been structured to serve as the cause of changes in self-esteem. Sniderman could accept such criticism with the retort that though accurate, it does not matter. Participation cannot affect self-esteem because the data show that political leaders, those most deeply involved in participation and thus most receptive to change through it, first come to politics with high self-esteem. "To sustain the claims of participatory theorists," he writes, "evidence must be amassed showing that the higher self-esteem of political leaders appeared after and not before they became involved in politics" (1975, p. 317). This cannot be done, as "there is no relationship between degree of activity and level of self-esteem" (1975, p. 318). In short, it does not matter how deeply one participates, Sniderman contends; it is not going to bolster one's self-esteem. Yet we have already established that current political participatory structures, especially those mentioned by Sniderman, are not designed to effect changes in self-esteem and thus will not do so. Participationists, however, argue that it is the kind of activity, not the degree of activity, that effects psychological change. They, and we, do not dispute the evidence that only persons with high self-esteem run for office; that is what today's politics requires. Nor do they, or we, dispute the evidence that there is no correlation between degree of activity and self-esteem. Participation as currently constituted appeals to and reinforces certain attitudes, traits, or norms; it is not designed to challenge them or change self-attitudes. We can appreciate Sniderman's perspective all the more by looking more closely at his notion of self-esteem. Sniderman inquires into how a single personality trait, self-esteem, influences one's attitude toward and approach to democratic values. He concludes that persons of low self-esteem have a negative view of politics and will not participate. They have a low opinion of themselves, of politicians, and of their fellows. They see the world and others as confused and threatening; seek ready-made explanations of the world; fix blame on easily identifiable causes, groups, institutions, or persons; and look in general for simplistic solutions.15 Sniderman then contrasts such types with those of high self-esteem. These people's "superior capacity for social learning" enables them to learn and accept the norms of their political culture and leads to the active support of and participation in politics. Yet does their superior capacity help them grasp the cultural norms whatever they are? If their culture called for a negative view of politics, for an easily


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grasped and rigid explanation of how the world works, and for simplistic conspiracy theories as causes of world crises—say, a nation of religious fundamentalists with a Manichaean worldview—then presumably those with low self-esteem, as Sniderman concludes, would deviate from the social norms and become democrats. As farfetched or bizarre as this sounds, Sniderman acknowledges that it might be true: "High self-esteem ought to drive individuals toward accepting the norms of their political culture, whatever those may be" (1975, p. 221). According to that view, then, all Soviet dissidents had low self-esteem. Any administration can find in this view the apologia for focusing on the psychological profiles of dissidents while ignoring the content of their grievances. What about Sniderman's definition of self-esteem? Can it do the work he requires of it? It is, from other vantage points, a one-dimensional definition. Nathaniel Branden, for example (1969), sees self-esteem as the dynamic interrelationship between self-worth and personal efficacy. The sense of efficacy issues from the recognition that one has the capacities to cope effectively in the world. Political participation might then serve only to underscore one's lack of the necessary capacities, which would reinforce one's low self-esteem. Yet self-worth, according to Branden, is not a matter of comparing one's capacities with those of others but is derived from holding a set of ethical standards that one feels is worthy of respect. In that case, participatory procedures that required sincere and respectful treatment of participants' positions and interests might enhance one's sense of worth. They might also give her the confidence to open or change her perspectives and to accommodate a different, and more worthwhile, set of standards. Contrary to what we might expect, given all that we have said about his study, Sniderman does not end with the facile conclusion that "a lack of self-esteem inhibits the tendency to participate." Rather, he claims that if low self-esteem is combined with "psychological inflexibility," then there eventuates "a catalytic reaction: These traits, in combination, potentiate rather than inhibit involvement in democratic politics" (1975, p. 322). Here Sniderman has shifted his focus away from the interaction between personality and social conditions and toward the interaction among psychological forces within the individual. This internal combination of rigidity and low esteem is part and parcel of our definition of the atomist: choosing one psychological pole or orientation over the other and holding tenaciously to it, thereby creating a worldview inviolate. If Sniderman is correct that this combination potentiates participatory involvement, then he answers one lingering question: how to encourage atomists to participate. Depending on how the participation is structured, they may not need much encouragement. It is unfortunate that Sniderman never raises the question—in any context in his study—of how participation is to be structured, or the question of why rigidity and low self-esteem propel rather than repulse participation. How strong a case, then, can be made for participation as a means of selfdevelopment, and can it be relied on? Is participation's only function to serve a private end; is it simply to enhance one's self? In addition to enhancing and possibly transforming the self, the contextualist characteristics that we have attributed to participation have another property: treating people with respect. Even without such characteristics in their theories, no participationist would suggest that participation

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serves only a private end. All would at least subscribe to the Marxian view that the participatory development of one ought to lead to the participatory development of all. All would also agree that one purpose of participation is to enact good policies. Beyond this, participation has another public end to which communitarians, at least, seem strongly to subscribe, namely, that the outcomes of participatory procedures should reflect a collective effort to move beyond self-interest and to generate the common good.

Outcomes: Generating the Common Good The issue under question is this: Does the prize of self-development through political participation come at too high a price? Although people may gain psychologically and personally from participation, isn't there a trade-off in poor decisions, as Mill suggested, and ponderous procedures that bog down the system so that little is accomplished? In short, aren't the practical consequences too great to justify participatory democracy? Participation theorist Peter Bachrach maintains that classical participatory theory rested on the idea that the quality of the public interest was determined by both the personal benefits derived from participation and the outcomes of the procedures. Thus participation benefited both the individual and the community (Bachrach, 1969, p. 3). The contextualist procedures proposed earlier seem to speak to the first benefit, but what about the benefit to the common good? The common good or public interest is frequently identified with the natural harmonizing of interests within a political community so that the formulation and execution of policies on behalf of the public can proceed without complication. Yet the heterogeneity of many modern democracies militates against this view. How do we account, therefore, for unity or harmony under conditions of diverse and conflicting interests? To do so, many communitarian-oriented theorists claim that citizens ought to share actively in shaping the public interest, that the common good ought to be created or made from citizens' joint action. The purpose of such a proposition is twofold: (1) to defuse the highly charged complaint against communitarianism that the common good is imposed by and not derived from the collectivity and (2) to offset or counter the liberal, or libertarian, idea that the pursuit of self-interest makes or creates the common good. The immediate problem lies in how communitarians propose exactly to create this good. Consider two examples: In "Returning the Social to Democracy" (1983) David Harris states: "There may be no set of public purposes waiting to be discovered. If they exist at all they may have to be actively created." Harris continues: "If a society wishes to avoid [values determined by power or luck] it needs to create a statement of a set of public purposes, adopted by this community because it is this kind of community." This Harris calls creating "a collective act of self-definition through democratic processes" (1983, p. 233). He does not, however, say precisely how these public purposes are created, nor does he provide one essential piece of information: Can the self-definition itself change, and if so, is it done through the same democratic processes? Unless Harris pursues this line of inquiry, we are free to assume either


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that the self-definition does not change or that it changes by some means other than fully democratic ones. In a similar vein, William Connolly suggests the establishment of the common good as a boundary or barrier within which claims or interests are legitimate and beyond which they do not deserve consideration. The common good is "a set of purposes, priorities, and limits which deserve the allegiance of the citizenry ... a set of shared purposes and standards . . . fundamental to the way of life prized together by the participants" (1981, pp. 2, 91). What is this set of purposes and standards, and how is it determined? The set comes with the collective life into which we have been born and raised. The shared ideas, ideals, and practices of that collectivity are constituted by language and constitute our world, our range of criteria. "To participate in a way of life is to carry an enormous load of settled criteria of judgment, standards of appraisal, and beliefs." That seems evident enough. Then, however, Connolly adds, "In sharing a language, we share, even if incompletely or imperfectly, these pre-understandings" (1981, p. 110). But this does not follow. We can imagine, and in fact document, myriad ways of life, in radical opposition, within the same language. Sharing the same vocabulary—to say nothing of the same language—of "common good" and "virtue" still leaves wide open the interpretation of these concepts. The importance of sharing language lies not only in reinforcing a similar way of life but also in coming to some understanding or appreciation of the other's different interpretation or point of view. Our sharing the language that gives form, expression, and definition to a certain way of life in no way commits us to sharing or even understanding that way of life. A common vocabulary does not necessarily presuppose a common meaning to the concepts shared, nor does a common language necessarily presuppose common preunderstandings of judgments, standards, or beliefs. When Connolly looks at "the materials from which a sense of the common good can be constructed" (1981, p. Ill), he finds the shelves already stocked with preunderstandings, "shared distinctions, standards, and purposes" out of which "a sense of the common good might crystallize." Connolly acknowledges that "some segments of the populace may militantly repudiate a collective good fervently endorsed by others" (1981, p. 113), but he asserts, reverting to his earlier position as if to disqualify what he just stated, "Most citizens much of the time identify with a set of common standards and purposes; the standards are flexible enough to allow space for political dialogue over their proper deployment in particular settings but determinate enough to play a creative role in reaching political solutions and compromise" (1981, p. 113, emphasis added). The constitution and scope of the common good itself, however, are not open to dialogue. Rather, dialogue and debate, in Connolly's view, pertain to the institutions and means of expressing, applying, and sustaining the common good, not to creating, critiquing, or changing the common good. The communitarian theories of generating the common good are all too often like these examples, either imprecisely defined and developed or not defined and developed at all.16 The invocation of the idea must therefore be to arouse feelings of solidarity, security, and significance without risking alienation. To define the com-

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mon good would entail establishing its character and boundaries. That would require determining what to do with those who will not or do not conform to it, thus jeopardizing the feelings just aroused. We may agree that the common good is a set of values, purposes, and standards that persons share collectively, but we want to know how decisions are made about this set and who decides which values, purposes, and standards are to be shared. The difficulty lies here: As communitarians such as Maclntyre make clear, the common good is no longer divinely delivered or cosmically derived (following from a rigid or limited worldview), as it was in the Greek polis. Then the citizens' instant understanding of and "instinctively" correct adjustments to what was needed flowed from intuitive behavior that obviated exact descriptions or elaborate discussions of the issue or situation. But when participants ceased to share common values and experiences, as happened when Alexander extended the empire into the territories of the barbaroi, then the necessary and correct adjustments could no longer be assumed. What the Greeks could take for granted we would need to build into our participatory procedures, and propositions for creating a new harmony could not rest on only the strength of felicitous phrasing. Though it is now a commonplace to find communitarian theorists calling for the creation of the common good, it is equally common to find that their ideas consist of rhetorical flourishes with little argument or evidence. Yet there is good reason that communitarians remain vague about creating the common good, and it is, to put the matter simply, that there appear to be no mechanisms, no alchemy, for transforming self-interests into common interests. There might remain, then, only two choices for creating the common good: Either limit, or even eliminate, private interests and diversity by imposing a set of priorities or standards by which to judge what is in the public interest and then institute citizen participation in decision making, but within the limited range permitted by the imposed set; or open up the range of options but limit those who can make decisions to the "best and brightest." This latter position was set out eloquently by Walter Lippmann: I am far from implying that the voters are not entitled to the representation of their particular opinions and interests. But their opinions and interests should be taken for what they are and no more. They are not—as such—propositions in the public interest. . . . [T]heir opinions need to be confronted by the views of the executive, defending and promoting the public interest. . . . The public interest is mixed with, and is often at odds with, their private and special interests. . . . [I]t may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently. (1955, pp. 41-42)

The first choice both jeopardizes individual autonomy and raises questions about who selects the set of standards and by what process—the very questions about a community's self-definition that Harris did not address. The second choice raises questions about who becomes an executive and by what process. Why does Lippmann assume that executives are free of the "private and special interests" that prejudice choices? Identifying those who see clearly, think rationally, and act disinterestedly and benevolently—especially in the face of political power and privi-


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lege—is formidable, as Mill discovered when attempting to identify the most competent. Both positions elicit the perpetual participationist refrain: Quis custodiet custodes?17 We can postulate what might constitute a possible third choice. If participation could foster compound individuality, thus enabling people to become open to different worldviews, then perhaps their interests as well as their selves could be open to transformation. If their interests could be expanded or extended, then by pooling their own specific ideas, viewpoints, arguments, and opinions and by deliberating together on issues, citizens might be able to derive from this pool a common good. This would be a procedure based on and utilizing full contextualism. Going beyond what we have already established with the mirroring technique, participation built on full contextualism would require something like the following four-stage "generative procedures": (1) a pooling of all participant perspectives, (2) submitting those perspectives to scrutiny, (3) attempting to combine or encompass or transcend the perspectives, and, finally, (4) taking a vote to reach a definite decision, opinion, or policy. Let us examine each stage more closely. Stage 1: Pooling Perspectives The first stage we have already discussed to some degree. It is the initial participatory imperative that all participants have their say and are understood. Every contribution then goes into the pool of perspectives—what has been referred to in contextualism as "the awkward embrace"—no matter how contentious, bizarre, offensive, or irrational.18 Not all positions will be incorporated into a decision, as they all will be subjects of critical scrutiny in the next stage, but all are to be understood. This, following Ronald Beiner, is what we might call the stage of "hermeneutical judgement," which involves understanding rather than explanation or analysis. The mode of inquiry attached to it tends to focus on the implications for and consequences of a position. As Beiner tells us, the hermeneutical participant opens "himself to the phenomena. . . . [H]e seeks to penetrate into the actual experiential horizons of those involved in a situation, to gain hermeneutical appreciation of the agents' own understanding of the situation" (1983, pp. 159-60). Yet surely there are interests that are not to be taken seriously. Why should anyone honor those that are palpably misguided, malformed, or irrational? Because those so shown will be overridden. Though we may come to understand the positions, to treat those positions sincerely and the speakers with respect, we may never accept any aspect of the viewpoints of, say, a neo-Nazi on control of the black and Jewish populations. But if we are not willing to admit his perspective into the pool, then how do we argue against participants who might oppose the viewpoints of those groups that we view more sympathetically, perhaps homosexuals or drug addicts or ex-convicts? Nor can we predict how flamboyant or offensive ideas may affect the thinking or views of others. Such ideas may not only disrupt a participant's cognitive equilibrium but may also provide the spark that kindles a conceptual breakthrough that transcends or incorporates divergent views. There is a place for scrutiny and critique, when positions and interests must be critically examined, and it constitutes the second stage of the generative procedures. Yet to accommodate

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full contextualism, even this stage would have to have a structure slightly different from the usual methods of settling arguments.

Stage 2: Scrutiny Politics is characterized by argument and debate. Political argument as a mode of discourse and decision making is adversarial. Both sides lay proprietary claim to their positions: "This is mine; that is yours" and then look for the areas in the other's position that are weak, inconsistent, or wrong. These are attacked to expose the vulnerability of that position and to underscore, if only implicitly, the superiority of the attacker's position. The message sent out to other participants is "think about what you will say, for it is going to be fair game for attack." It is the sort of message that either engenders the fear of conflict and participation that Jane Mansbridge described or that convinces participants to waffle with vacuous generalizations that neither expose them to ridicule—or attack—nor succeed in conveying precisely what the speakers mean. Winning and not losing, looking strong by showing up others as weak, and being right and never wrong become paramount. Lawyers, the exemplars of this mode, soon predominate, as in the United States, in the seats of government. Argument follows such a line because its central operating mechanism is logic, and logic demands consistency. Positions that conflict with or contradict one's own are unsettling because they point to one's own vulnerabilities. To be solid, one's worldview must own no contradictions. Although it is true that some conflicts can be resolved by having the differing viewpoints converge—as in the example in the previous chapter of the water-pipe controversy in Ludlow—many reduce to contradictions that offer no convergence—was he helping the old woman up, or was he pushing her down? Logic forces us to fall on one side or the other, for two mutually exclusive propositions cannot both be true. Contradictions, simply put, cannot be resolved, and so in political arguments we press for some decision, for some form of compromise. Each side picks out of the other's position what it can live with—if not take advantage of—and tries to leave behind all the rest. There is no motivation to pick out the best—as opposed to the most exploitable—elements or propositions in the other's positions. Without that motivation, synthesis becomes Mill's classic compromise—"splitting the difference"—or some alternative arrangement or, at worst, a standstill.19 The purpose of the pool of perspectives, however, is not to hammer away at your opponent's positions while remaining intransigent about yours, but to try to accommodate both sets of interests. But neither is the purpose to resolve or reconcile contradictions. Rather, in the process we seek to bring perspectives together, to examine and explore them to discover possible nuances and implications and to set the boundaries of any decision. Exploration is the key concept in this stage of the generative procedures. We scrutinize positions not just to dismiss them but to see first whether there is anything beneficial or "salvageable" in them before we salvage them. The neo-Nazi may have an execrable view on the population control of minorities, but by probing his perspective we may find some element on which to build, if only as a tocsin of how not to structure the decision. Breaking down a


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position instead of dismissing it out of hand may not produce results in all cases. But as with mirroring, it may engender an attitudinal change, a different frame of mind. That may lead us to think about and to accept, individually and collectively, new directions. When they come to make a decision on an issue, the participants will judge for themselves the cogency and utility of any perspective. Although contradictions cannot be reconciled, they can sometimes be transcended, that is, taken up by a higher or more encompassing perspective that accepts the contradiction. Thus light is both particles and waves, depending on how one observes it. This transcending or encompassing perspective is the ideal goal of the generative procedures, a compound common good made up of or inspired by the various, diverse perspectives offered by participants. Though rare, it introduces and utilizes an attitude or frame of mind that encourages building on positions and not simply winning at all costs.20 This does not, however, bring us any closer to understanding why any individual would do this. Why should you forfeit part of your position for the sake of a common position, especially when yours seems clearly the best? In such a circumstance what one must do or be willing to do is to demonstrate through participation that his position is more suitable, more salutary, more substantial than others also presented or constituted. To do that he must be willing to face public scrutiny of his position, to submit it for consideration, and to argue for it in the face of opposition—creative, constructive, and hostile. He will need to defend his position in the context of considering how it relates to, negates, or supersedes those of the rest. It is a dialogue in which the participant tries to understand the positions of others as she defends her own.

Stages 3 and 4: Making the Decision Having explored the various perspectives offered, the assembly would then move toward decision making, the third and fourth stages. The third stage might not add significantly to the scrutiny stage, but it would add immeasurably to the dialogue. The ward or assembly would divide into small groups of about fifteen participants. The task of each group is to consider the propositions and interests they have heard and pooled and to try to draw or create from them a position or decision that generates a common interest or common good. Research shows that the smaller the group is, the more likely that the participants will speak, will focus on the topic and follow the discussion, and will show initiative, cooperation, and interest in influencing others and offering solutions.21 Finally, these small groups would reconvene to present to the plenary group the results of their deliberations. Further discussions would ensue, in which the recommendations of various small groups would be scrutinized. Then through private ballot, show of hands, or other mechanisms decided by the ward, the entire group would reach a final decision. Although one position becomes the group's policy, the decision does not necessarily resolve the issue, anymore than the procedures resolve the contradictions. When abortion is the issue, no ward will determine definitively whether it is murder or a woman's right to control what happens to her body. Both those positions may be held with equal conviction and may be considered equally

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legitimate. And though both will be part of the pool of perspectives that defines not what is out of but what must be in the deliberations, the ward must endorse one position, or a composite, as a public policy. One advantage of the generative procedures is that the dialogue therein encourages both sides to see, citing Maclntyre again, that fulfilling one side leaves undone what also ought to have been done.

Transforming Self-interests These decisions constitute the common interest because they issue from a participatory assembly viewed as comprehensive, comprehending, open, and fair. Choices are not made within a static set of standards or from a limited slate of candidates but within an everchanging composite of perspectives compiled on each issue by the participants and through deliberations and dialogue that seek to understand each perspective. From this context the participants try to build or generate a collective common position or interest, to arrive at a position that is not simply tolerable but is beneficial to each and all. This takes us beyond the psychological properties associated with participation and leads us into the nature of its outcomes. The outcome we seek, based on procedures designed around the contextualism associated with compound individuality, is a "compound common good," so called not because it is a compound made up of or out of all available perspectives but because it is made from all and is contributed to by all. From all the stones available we build a bridge, but it is not a bridge built of all the available stones. Furthermore, such outcomes are not the aggregation of private interests, the "will of all," or a sum of particular wills. Nor are they necessarily the fulfillment of all interests. Because some wills or interests will conflict and contradict, the common good cannot be composed of all of them. Yet in what sense is the good thus common? In the sense that all wills and interests create the pool of perspectives from which any composite is made or drawn. All deliberations and decisions are reflected in that pool, and each perspective contributes to that reflection. This is an ideal procedure. The compound common good is approached, though not necessarily reached, in every case. It reflects the ancient Greek ideal of homonoia, being of one mind. On one level, such "unanimity" means that men will have the same opinions about what is in their interests; it is the ideal of a single perspective that incorporates all positions into one and, as Aristotle said, makes it "possible for both or all parties to get what they want" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1167a, 26-28). This seems, as we have suggested, rarely achievable. Yet there is a second level that is more realistic and accessible. On this level, men "choose the same actions and do what they have resolved in common." The force of this is different from that of the first, for as Aristotle describes the second, men accept decisions made in common, through common and equal procedures, even when they have spoken or voted against those decisions (Nicomachean Ethics, 1167a, 26-28). Men can accept the decisions because they are made fairly and because as a substantive end or good a decision is temporary. The issue is not necessarily resolved and may still be contested and opened again. Thus conflict and controversy are at the heart of this participatory process, for as Ronald Beiner avers,


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At no point are we justified in terminating an unresolved argument, for ... the next stage may yet bring an enlargement of moral vision to one of the contending parties, allowing this contender to integrate the perspective of another into his own in a relation of part to whole. Therefore at any point there remains the possibility, though not the guarantee, of resolving deep conflict. (1983, p. 186)

This is not to suggest interminable deliberations, for in politics, for example, judgments and decisions are necessary in matters requiring public policies. But such policies do not always or usually resolve controversial issues, and thus these can be opened again. The goal of the generative procedures is thus twofold: (1) to encourage individuals to take up the perspectives of others as a way to open and expand their own worldviews, and thereby to expand and transform themselves; and (2) to structure a process in which the intention of role taking is to create a composite or compound common interest that is not a zero-sum interest in which one party succeeds at another's expense. However promising or hopeful such procedures are, they are still contingent on a problematic conditional: If these procedures can generate a "habit" or frame of mind that opens one's worldview and one's identity, then compound individuality and the compound common good can ensue. The problem is that the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. The generative procedures may be capable of transforming conflict and transforming the self but still not produce a compound common good. Compound individuality refers to identity that is coregulated; personal identity is based on both autonomy as a separate self and intimate relationships with another. But that other is not all others. Intimacy is restricted to special others and special relationships. So even if the idea of "self" in self-interest is expanded to include another or some others, it cannot be assumed that self expands so as to include a ward or collectivity. Self-interest might still be my motivation, even in the face, literally, of other interests; and even though "my" self is now constituted by more than just me, I might not wish to include the interests of those in the collectivity I distrust or abominate. In pursuit of my selfinterests I may still be willing to override yours. In other words, I might be willing to cooperate in the generative procedures to play the game, but at decision time my coalition can drop the pretense and fall back into our exclusivist position to override, by outvoting, all other positions. So we are back to the original dilemma: The generative procedures may create a compound common good if participants approach interests and issues in the proper, or "public," frame of mind. But how is that frame of mind instilled? Can the procedures themselves transform my interest from narrow concerns about me— even when "me" includes another—to those about "us" as a ward or public or collectivity? Consider the following example offered in a different context by Peter Jones (1983, pp. 167-68): Residents control and pay for a street, its use, its improvements, and its repairs. Each resident has one vote in making decisions about the street, and the vote of the majority is always decisive. The residents have on this occasion three issues to decide, each of which they consider equally important:

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Beyond Individualism 1. Whether sidewalks should be asphalt or paved. Asphalt is inexpensive but ugly; paving stones are visually pleasing but more expensive. 2. Whether the street lights should be kept as gas lights or changed to electric lights. Electric lights, though unattractive and stark, provide the same lighting as gas does but at less cost. 3. Whether to improve the street's appearance by planting trees or to save money by planting none.

When votes are taken on these issues, the economizers on the street, constituting two-thirds of the residents, win all three votes. The aesthetes lose all three. From the vantage point of the economizers, there is no point in compromise. They have sufficient votes to secure their interests on all three issues: asphalt, electric lights, and no trees. The aesthetes could not have fared worse with a compromise, but their attitude toward it is unknown. From the perspective of the compound common good, we want to know whether some other outcome might not have served as a mutually satisfying, common good. Could electric lights be used in the existing—though converted—lamps, thus maintaining the character of the street? Must the issues be considered separately? If electric lights are used, could the money saved then be used to plant some trees? If no trees are planted, could the money saved be used for paving stones rather than asphalt? Could there be a mix of asphalt and paving stones? The street economizers are willing to spend some money, but as little as possible. Any bargain would compromise their position and is therefore unacceptable, for on no single issue do they need to bargain to get what they want. Indeed, the economizers may think their positions to be the common good, as they wish to save money to everyone's advantage. That attitude, however, requires them to ignore the conflicting positions of the street aesthetes. Therefore none of the questions we have asked addresses the central issue. The generative procedures may be able to create common interests from a pool of perspectives, but only because the participants come already thinking about or already concerned with the common good. What can be done with those concerned only with self-interest? Can participants be encouraged to move from "I" to "we" thinking? Only if the generative procedures can induce a shift from self-interest to common interest can contextualism and participation effect a compound common good. Communitarian theorists, not surprisingly, are concerned with inducing "we" thinking by transforming self-interests. Yet they manifest the same problem in describing the transformation of interests that they show in describing the generation of the common good; namely, they are long on rhetoric but short on argument. Transforming self-interests into public interests is a centerpiece, for example, of Barber's Strong Democracy (1984). It is crucial, he writes, that participants "imaginatively reconstruct their own values as public norms through the process of identifying and empathizing with the values of others" (1984, p. 137). The key to doing this is "public talk" on contested political issues. Deliberating together on such issues "leads men and women to modify and enlarge options as a consequence of seeing them in new, public ways. . . . The test of legitimacy is


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whether an individual value has been changed in some significant way to accommodate large—that is, more common or public—concerns" (Barber, 1984, p. 136). An individual value that remains unchanged in this way must be illegitimate, and what are we to do about them, especially if held by a majority? The transformative strength of the Barberian deliberative process is role playing. In public discussions we take the roles of our fellow citizens to see the world through their eyes. Enlarging our perceptions in this manner increases our understanding that we live together in a public world with public norms that we jointly establish and live by. Thus "participation is a dynamic act of imagination that requires participants to change how they see the world." Rather than suiting individual tastes, participants work jointly "to create a public taste that they all can share" (1984, p. 137). Active citizenship thereby "transforms interests and reorients identity" (1984, p. 209). Barber manifests tremendous faith in role playing, but he produces no evidence that this mode of participation, especially as outlined in the second half of his book, can have a transformative effect. Nor does he explain why the participants, raised as self-interested atomists, would suddenly, or gradually, develop communal concerns to override the private pursuits that they may think all the participants ought to hold. Does Barber assume there will be psychological or social pressure to conform, to please friends and neighbors, or to avoid ostracism and ridicule? Are participants made clear-eyed by public talk and thus able to identify and ready to side with superior arguments? Does simply talking together make participants sympathetic to the positions of others, even to positions they oppose and abhor?22 Before reverting to some empirical evidence on the effects of participation, we should examine the insights of an earlier political theorist for whom political participation, self-interest, and the common good were paramount concerns. It was Rousseau who sought to devise a system by which to transform men into citizens and to guide politics according to the general will beyond self-interest.23 Perhaps Rousseau can provide some insight into transforming self-interest from a private vice into a public virtue.

Rousseau's Self-interest Properly Understood "Good social institutions," wrote Rousseau, "are those which best know how to denature man, taking away his absolute existence in order to give him one that is relative, and transporting the self into the community [transporter le moi dans I'unite commune] so that he no longer regards himself as one, but as a part of the whole, and is conscious only of common life" (1957, p. 7). The social contract was the means by which man could thus be transformed. He proceeds from the state of nature to the civil state, from instinct to justice, from impulse to morality; "instead of [being] a stupid and unimaginative animal," he becomes "an intelligent being and a man"; instead of having "natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting," he receives "civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses" (1973, bk. 1, chap. 8). Through the social contract, men are brought into association with one another, in which having surrendered their rights to the whole community and not to any single individual or group they give themselves to no one but to all. Having united himself with all, a man "may

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still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before" (1973, bk. 1, p. 174). To exercise this autonomy in community, citizens gather periodically in assemblies to pass laws that they "prescribe to themselves." Only laws struck in the common interest, as expressions of the "general will," are laws so prescribed. To ascertain the general will while in the assembly, a citizen must have the proper frame of mind, must ask the right question: Is this proposal in the general or public interest, and is it for the good of all? Only by adhering to the general will can a citizen be virtuous while being autonomous, as "virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills with the general will" (1973, p. 128). "To establish the reign of virtue, men will have to be compelled to obey the general will, and in this manner will be 'forced to be free' " (1973, p. 177). Of course, our concern throughout has been with how the citizen comes to have the proper frame of mind and how self-interest is transformed into or transcended by the common good. Although the citizen asks questions about the general or public effect of a law on the community, in Rousseau's view he is actually pursuing selfinterest. Even in the context of the whole group, he can think only of the issue as how it affects him: "There is not a man who does not think of 'each' as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all." Thus "each wills the general good in his own interest as strongly as anyone else" (1973, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 187). To prefer an answer that favors the general rather than the particular his self-interest must be seen to lie with or to be served by a choice for the general. Yet how is it that what is best for the collectivity is always judged to be best for him? How is it that autonomous choices can be made to coincide with the general will? It can be made so when the "self" in self-interest is a collective or common self. Rousseau modeled his ideal republican citizen on his romantic versions of the citizens of Sparta and Rome. Like the citizen of Rome, who was "neither Caius nor Lucius, [but] was a Roman" (1957, bk. 1, p. 7), Rousseau's ideal is to have the citizen completely dedicated to, if not absorbed in, the community. As Judith Shklar wrote, he is a man without internal conflicts; "an undivided self is the mark of the citizen." He is the one who "finds that his duty is also his inclination. He is internally whole because he lives in a social environment in which his interests are perfectly served" (1985, p. 182). More than that, his interests and his conscience, and thus his autonomy, reflect communal interests socially formed. "To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children." All children should be educated in the same way and equally, proposed Rousseau. If children are brought up in common in the bosom of equality, if they are imbued with the laws of the state and the maxims of the general will, if they are taught to respect these above all things . . . then they will surely learn to cherish each other naturally as brothers . . . and to become in time defenders and fathers of the state whose children they will have been for so long. (1973, p. 136) The task of this education is to reproduce society in the citizen. The pupil interiorizes the culture so that his conscience reflects the culture. When the citizen thus consults his conscience, he will be led to act according to the general will, in the common interest, on behalf of equality and virtue.


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The citizens' very lives are then "devoted to the state." This devotion is not in recognition of or appreciation for what has been permitted but is the result of what and how citizens have been made. The kind of law that "forms the real constitution of the state" is written in "the hearts of the citizens . . . , keeps a people in the ways it was meant to go, and insensibly replaces authority by the force of habit. I am speaking of morality, of custom, above all of public opinion." This is a power "on which . . . success in everything else depends" (1973, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 206). Education is only one means of instilling this force of habit. Another is civil religion, through which society receives its social cohesion. The sovereign authority determines what the faith will be and has a right to fix the articles of that faith "as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or faithful subject." The civil religion enlarges or encourages social spirit and can make "the country an object of the citizen's adoration. . . . [I]t teaches them that service done to the state is service done to its tutelary god. ... To die for one's country becomes martyrdom" (1973, bk. 2, chap. 4, pp. 272-73). This may be going too far for some sovereigns, but every citizen, says Rousseau, needs a religion to "make him love his duty" (1973, p. 276). The state cannot compel a man to believe in the articles, though it can banish those who do not, not on the grounds of impiety, but for antisocial behavior, for being "incapable of truly loving the law and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty" (1973, p. 276). In addition, Rousseau recommends inflaming social sentiments through public festivals and ceremonies, games, theater, patriotism, and military parades. The point of it all is to build through participation a strong sense of duty and devotion to one's country and of solidarity among the people. No wonder Rousseau looked to Sparta as his model and not to Athens. But is the self as a common self developed in participation, or is it brought to and reflected in participation? Do the autonomous choices of citizens generate the general will or reflect the general will? Is the common good prior to or derived from participation? The self is both developed and expressed in participation in activities that are highly orchestrated. Education, for example, is not simply a system of values inculcation. It is also a grand design to give the pupil the illusion that he is spontaneously satisfying wants of his own, when all along the tutor has planned and planted the objects of his desires. Thus the pupil thinks he is doing only what pleases him. When these are put together—fulfilling one's desires and doing only what pleases him—the pupil experiences what Rousseau calls true freedom. In Emile the tutor says: "There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom; one thus enthralls the will itself" (bk. 2, p. 84). The purpose of political participation is to express or exercise this enthralled will. If the education has been proper and if the civil religion, public ceremonies, and patriotic festivals have established social sentiments, then determining the general will should be virtually perfunctory. The solutions to problems will quickly and easily arise within a range of options limited by the internalized framework of common values, customs, and opinions. Citizens restricted to "the simple act of voting," without deliberation or communication, decide such issues as whether to retain the present form of government (Rousseau, 1973, bk. 3, chaps. 5, 13, 18).

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Citizens legislate acts of law (acts of sovereignty) but do not commit acts of execution and administration. More important than this, the votes cast do not determine the general will; they can at best only express it. The general will exists prior to and independent of participation. With the proper social spirit and social frame of mind, citizens do not need to deliberate but only to search their own conscience. The general will is thereby expressed, in Durkheim's phrase, through the "spontaneous agreement of wills" (1960, p. 132). Cultivation of social solidarity results in selves as a collective self. Thus the state is not so much armed "with a coercive power sufficient to overcome resistance as to shape men's minds in such a way that resistance does not occur" (1960, p. 137). Every citizen is autonomous in following the dictates of his conscience, obeying only himself, but each conscience is designed according to a social content. Of course, the system is not perfect. Men will disagree because citizens, being unequal, will take to the system differently. There is within each decision a range, though limited, of possible options from which to choose. In some cases, therefore, citizens might will improperly and thus need to be compelled to adhere to the general will. They might have to be forced to be free. "This is the condition which by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the most frightful abuses" (Rousseau, 1973, bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 177). Such abuse is mitigated, even extirpated, because the enforcement of obedience is really compulsion to be free. Those citizens who do not recognize that the general will is not simply in their own best interests but is their own best interests must be brought to that realization. Only in that way will a citizen surrender his particular interests and individual self to the collective self. But is this really a "surrender"? That is not precisely what Rousseau said. He did not write, "each citizen gives himself to his country." Rather, he wrote that the compulsion to obey gives each citizen, presents each citizen, brings each citizen, to his country. The country is the collective self that precludes dependence on any individual self or particular will, including one's own alone, and creates in place of the individual self one constituted of and by the whole. It does so by becoming the individual's own higher, or true, self. "In place of the individual personality of each contracting party, the act of association creates a corporate and collective body" (1973, bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 175). To force him in this direction, to make his interests the common interests, is to set him free, to lead him along the path of virtuous conduct and in accordance with his own true nature. To internalize the mores, opinions, and purposes of society is to know society's laws without need of deliberation and is to prescribe laws to oneself in accordance with the general will and independent of the judgments of other men. It is the essence of Rousseau's autonomy that when men act freely, private inclinations and interests converge with public duties and common interests. When one's conscience is the general will, then men are truly free; then does virtue reign.24 Here is Barber's reconstruction of personal values as public norms, but unlike Barber, Rousseau explains how such a reconstruction is performed. He solves the dilemma of self-interest: "I" thinking turns into "we" thinking when the "self" in


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self-interest ceases to be a particular self and becomes a collective self shared by all individuals, when the individual conscience is the same as the collective conscience. Such a transformation, effected through the social institutions already adumbrated, must begin with the legislator who provides the initial, inviolate, and infallible laws and mores that guide the collectivity along the path of virtue and that serve as the foundation for the social system. The legislator's mission is to "take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him" (1973, bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 194). In this fashion each individual is made "into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being ... [in which] each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest."25 The self as a potentiality, "something yet to be attained," is, says Marshall Herman, Rousseau's radical contribution to political theory (Berman, 1971, p. 86). But it is a potentiality with a concrete or specific end point: the interior miniaturization of the culture. If we think of the self only as a potentiality to become something, an end product or self-definition or state, rather than also being a process of identity or agency, as we had earlier explained, then we can embrace the ideas of a true or real or authentic self. Then criteria for that authentic self can be adduced, and selves that do not conform or live up to the requirements of authentic being and that may masquerade as our true selves are to be stripped away, suppressed, or destroyed to reveal, or enable us to attain, "the self."26 But is it possible, as Ellen Wood proclaims in her book on socialist and liberal individualism, Mind and Politics, that the general will represents not a substantive criterion or set of standards, mores, or purposes but a process for determining them? As unlikely as this seems, given all we have said about Rousseau's theory, it may be that such an interpretation, though not true to Rousseau's entire corpus, may lie within the ambiguities of his conceptualization of the general will and thus offer some additional insights into how participation can generate the common good.27 In reading the general will as a procedure, our emphasis must fall not simply on the institutional framework of participation but also on the attitude or cast of mind with which citizens participate. An individual's particular will is the general will when the person wills correctly, that is, when she asks the right question and seeks its answer—Is this proposal for the welfare of all? The general will differs from a majority will and even a unanimous will, because it does not take private interests into account: "Take away from these same [particular] wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other ... the general will remains as the sum of the differences." Remove the zero-sum element and what remains are the possibilities for the common good and the proper cast of mind for evaluating them. It is this proper cast of mind that enables the expression of the general will, for although there will always be "small differences" among the citizens in their thinking about the remaining possibilities for the common good, if the right questions are asked, "the grand total of these small differences would always give the general will, and the decision will always be good" (Rousseau, 1973, p. 185). No longer being able to pursue those private interests that must eventuate in the loss of others' interests, participants combine the remaining "small differences" into a "grand total" or "sum" that is the common good. The "political act" is to blend together, to total, the differences, that is, to forge into a common interest the differences that surface or remain after proper

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willing. Thus can we have generative procedures for creating a compound common good. Our participatory procedures then serve as a substitute for Rousseau's "legislator," for they might be equally capable temporarily—for the span of the participation—of "changing human nature, of transforming each individual [while in the procedure] . . . into a part of a greater whole ... of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it" (Rousseau, 1973, p. 194). Strengthening his constitution means encouraging him to see himself in the context of the whole, in the context of the conflicting and contradictory viewpoints that he must try to work with, accommodate, temper, and embrace. That effort strengthens the individual's and the group's constitution. Each person gives to himself and to others "new resources alien to him," which are "incapable of being made use of without the help of other men" (1973, p. 194). In our terms, a citizen's own perspective is metaphorically and temporarily annihilated or transcended as he takes up, and perhaps takes on, the viewpoints of others that now modify, or are modified by, his own. This new perspective is "greater and more lasting," being a compound of his and others' thinking. Thus does legislation approach "the highest possible point of perfection" (1973, pp. 194-95), and thus is each individual still a "complete solitary whole" transformed "into part of a greater whole." As ingenious, if contorted, as this reading might be, it still fails to resolve our fundamental dilemma: How do we induce the right cast of mind? Rousseau provided an answer: It is taken care of prior to political participation, through the extensive network of educative social mechanisms. But short of his authoritarian and chauvinistic measures, how can we guarantee it? As Rousseau discovered, we cannot, even with draconian tactics. We can at best encourage it, perhaps through participatory procedures that operate by and elicit the "reciprocity phenomenon."28 But can our procedures be an alembic for transforming desires for private advantage into concerns about public interest and the common good? Perhaps by looking at some additional empirical findings on participation and the reciprocity phenomenon, we can ascertain whether Barber's prodigious faith in public talk has some foundation.

Transcending Self-interest Brian Barry adduces a possibly useful bit of evidence. "It is a commonplace," he writes, "that trust and cooperation are facilitated by communication," so much so that "it has been found that letting people talk together—about anything—before playing an n-person prisoners' dilemma game increases cooperation" (1983, p. 137). Cooperation is certainly a value necessary to generating a compound common good. It is clear that the street economizers in our example, for instance, would be unwilling to cooperate with the street aesthetes to derive or create a common good. Both may be willing to cooperate to play the game, but when a decision must be made, they would fall back into exclusionist positions. Without cooperation at this stage, the procedure is reduced to aggregating interests, which depends solely on the addition of more such interests and not on the modification of interests. Talk can


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facilitate cooperation, but how far can that generalization be extended? Does more talk engender more or greater cooperation? What effects does structuring or channeling the talk in specific ways have on the nature of the cooperation? Is the evidence in support of cooperation in a hypothetical game applicable to our procedures and to political, real-life dilemmas? How deeply can talk, and what kinds of talk, affect cooperation? Enough to dislodge one's thinking from self-interest alone? According to Dennis Thompson's 1970 study of "citizenship theorists"— among them John Dewey, A. D. Lindsay, Graham Wallas, and G. D. H. Cole— discussion is an essential, if not the essential, ingredient in making participation meaningful. It has two valuable functions. First, it helps citizens recognize their own political interests, and second, it fosters the creation of common interests (1970, chap. 4). Evidence from research on these topics neither refutes nor confirms the first contention (We have already discussed the problems associated with, and the absence of data or evidence for, the second contention.). Using data on opinion formation, Thompson argues that an individual's opinions and interests are often formed around those of coworkers and associates.29 Through discussion the person comes to see the importance and value of various positions and the strengths of arguments for and against different points of view. In this way discussion contributes to a citizen's recognition of his political interests.30 Because we rely on the opinions and views of those we trust when we form our own opinions and interests, the process can be more emotional and habitual than reasoned and reflective. Political participation with those we know less well adds a dimension of reflection as one encounters different views and hears the arguments for and implications of those views against one's own. This could be a significant addition. Research shows, says Thompson, that within groups of all kinds "a group interest does in fact emerge from discussion and activity" (1970, p. 99). Thus unless these groups are homogeneous to begin with, or predisposed toward homogeneity, it appears that discussion can generate something like a compound common good as people modify their positions, or their willingness to hold fast to them, in light of differences. But homogeneity is a key factor. Thompson looked at research on discussions and discussion groups that operate in our liberal democracies as currently structured and not in a setting that permitted participation. In these groups "discussion is mostly with like-minded people. . . . [I]f people are left to arrange their own discussions, most will talk to people with whom they agree and whose socioeconomic status is the same as theirs."31 What would happen if we had political structures that brought citizens together to participate actively in something over which they might disagree? When "people discuss politics with people with whom they disagree, [they] are more likely to change their minds."32 Can we rely on such evidence to make our case for expanding or deepening participatory procedures? All the research to which we have referred points to participation, deliberation, and discussion engendering the creation of common interests and pushing us a step beyond self-interest, if not a step into compound individuality. But the evidence remains sketchy, if only because participatory opportunities are sparse. Though insufficient to produce any firm conclusions, the evidence and arguments do suggest that procedures structured to effect psychological

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changes toward compound selfhood, procedures built of dialogue and contextualism, would seem to offer the strongest likelihood of transforming attitudes beyond self-interest. This is the problematic conditional: If participants take up the perspectives of others, to understand those perspectives, then in coming to terms with those others, the participants may become sensitive to the needs, interests, and positions of others. But the transformation from self-interest to public interests is still problematical and not, as Barber intimates, guaranteed. But a guarantee is not what is sought. When generating a compound common good, the generative procedures rely on neither the transformation of interests nor the transformation of self into compound individuality. Instead, they rely on dialogue and contextualism. The generative procedures function properly when people attempt to take up the positions of others in order to understand and embrace them, in order, that is, to move toward a compound common good. This goal is, as stated, often unrealizable, but it has the effect of getting people out of or beyond their own interests by considering how conflicting interests might be reconciled with their own. Thus participants are not asked to transform their interests but to transcend them temporarily. Participants may exit with the same interests they had when entering, but while in the procedures, participants try, first, to forge a common perspective and, second, to arrive through dialogue and perspectivism at the best decision possible. That decision will be the most reasonable, for when politics proceeds through dialogue, as David Miller points out, "arguments are trumped by better arguments."33

Why Obey? But unless the procedures do generate a comprehensive or compound common good, people are not going to agree on the substance of the decision. Clearly, some interests will be served while others are put aside. Under what circumstances, therefore, will participants accept as legitimate a decision they oppose? More than the substance of the decision, it is the process or procedure that prompts acceptance. At issue, therefore, is not whether all accept the substance of the decision but whether all can endorse the decision even in their opposition. If the procedures are recognized to be open, comprehensive, and fair, then people will go along, not because all agree that the specific law or policy is just, but because all agree that the system is just. We accept the decision because we perceive "that the procedure has been used properly, that is, that those who were in the majority [for example] were attempting to answer the right question in a disinterested spirit."34 In our own case, this means that participants attempted through the pool of perspectives to forge a comprehensive perspective and, when that fails, to reach a decision through reasoned arguments. Should a participant feel morally bound to disobey the policy or law, even though he played a part in making it, then, as Michael Walzer suggests, he will choose to do so through legitimate channels of political dissent (1970, p. 47). Selfinterest is not transformed by participation, but when trying to forge a compound


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common good, it is suspended. If no such good is engendered and a participant's position is then voted down, the participant's self-interest wili then rise. While remaining unpersuaded by the arguments for a certain position, the participant will go along with the final position because she accepts the procedures and because the issue can be reopened, and also because she hopes one day, when the issue is raised again, to be in the majority. This is part of Tocqueville's idea of "enlightened selfinterest."35 There is a danger, however, in interpreting the common good as a process rather than, or more than, an outcome. The common good then becomes a mere abstraction that does not commit or confine us to any substantive ends. Although it is true that the very norms and practices that constitute the procedures are held in common, the ends can remain private only while the procedures have a foundation in agreement. But the generative procedures confine all dialogue and deliberations to the pool of perspectives offered by participants. Moreover, dialogue requires that all private ends pursued within the procedures be submitted to public scrutiny. That will entail defending them with reasoned arguments. A benefit of dialogue built of public reason is that when the participants understand the reasons behind positions, they may more readily accept the substance of decisions based on them. The advantage, then, of the dialogic procedure is that adherence to the final outcome is based not on bargaining over or aggregating interests "but on the strength of the arguments that have been offered for it" (n. 33, p. 202, this volume). If the dialogic procedures for decision making are judged to be fair, then the decision will generate a consensus, a general agreement. In a liberal democracy based on majority rule, a procedure would be deemed fair if it had some combination of the following characteristics: 1. 2. 3. 4.

All citizens are equally free to deliberate and vote. All citizens are granted equal protection and due process. All are permitted some channels through which to dissent. All have the right and access to procedures by which to redress or reexamine the decision.

These constitute fairness in a system in which the hardest question, according to Michael Walzer, is "Why obey?" (1970, p. 46). Why, that is, should a minority obey the decisions of the majority? If such protections and guidelines are built into the procedures, then they ought to obey. What I have described in the generative procedures is, of course, not dissimilar, though I ask why the majority should attend to the positions and interests of the minority. The simple answer is that the entire system depends on it. If the results of our procedures are to be deemed fair, then the majority must adhere to the requirements or criteria of the procedures. In the attempt to forge a compound common good, the majority must seriously consider the positions offered by the participants, by treating these positions as if they were one's own and as if they were to be part of the final decision; and failing that comprehensive perspective, to attempt to generate a consensus by examining the arguments behind and for the positions. Consider how a decision on the issue of legalized abortion might be made: Because of the change in the composition of the Supreme Court and given the recent

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decisions of the Court in cases relating to Roe v. Wade, the debate over abortion has intensified. The lines of opposition are clearly drawn: Some think of abortion as murder of the unborn; others, as the right of a woman to control her body. This issue is more a question about rights—the right of the woman to control her body versus the right to life of the unborn—than a question about the common good. But in such a clash of rights, the question of the common good surfaces: If both have rights, but they are mutually exclusive in this particular case, can we and how can we find some policy to reconcile these two diametrically opposed camps? Can there even be talk of the common good within such a divisive issue? Such an issue underscores the problem in finding through political debate any convergence of viewpoints. What position could possibly embrace the opposed camps? How might such an issue—whether to legalize abortion—proceed through the generative procedures? The first difficulties encountered would be those in which the participants of opposing views, in order to participate, must consider the positions of others and mirror those positions back to them. The "pro-life" advocates, those opposed to abortion, will need to take up the perspective, say, of a feminist who does not even wish to discuss the ethical implications of abortion, as she sees it as a political and social, not a medical or metaphysical, issue about who has the power to make decisions about women's bodies. In the process of building up the pool of perspectives, participants will hear and take up many different explanations and arguments for the two essential positions, pro-choice and pro-life. As the participants struggle to find a common perspective, one that can transcend or accommodate these two positions, they find themselves offering questions that probe the reasoning behind the positions. To pro-life advocates: "If you can accept capital punishment (as surveys indicate many can), then you acknowledge that in some circumstances lives can be taken. Are there circumstances—rape or incest—when abortions are called for or are permissible? If you can accept those circumstances, where and how do you draw the line? If you defeat this proposition for abortion rights, are you willing to lobby and legislate for relaxed adoption laws to deal with unwanted babies? Are you willing to lobby for and legislate greater aid to women with dependent children, greater day care, greater aid for emotional and psychological support to teenage mothers?" To pro-choice advocates: "Why do you think of a fetus as private property, to do with as you please? Do you see no difference between a fetus and real estate? Is pregnancy really a matter of cost-benefit analysis? If you as the mother have the power to decide whether the fetus should live or die, and you decide to give birth, then can you demand support for the child from the father if he did not want the baby? If it is your property, why should the state give you a subsidy by providing, say, day-care facilities?" If a matter of individual rights, do we decide to honor the mother's rights or the fetus's rights? If a social issue, do we decide to introduce many unwanted babies into society each year with the concomitant of increased welfare expenditures? Responses to all such questions might redirect the participants' thinking, on both sides. But the attempt to forge the comprehensive perspective fails. Those who see the


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fetus as an unborn human being cannot accept the social and political arguments that a woman's reproductive freedom is the central issue. Likewise, pro-choice advocates find unconvincing the position that the fetus is an unborn human being. Yet the various arguments and questions have led to some intermediate positions between absolute abortion or absolutely not. Some may be moved by those special circumstances when a human life, even that of an innocent fetus, should be forfeited; others may come to question the wisdom of abortion when we do not know whether the fetus is a human being. So this ward decides that abortion in limited cases is acceptable, limiting it to the first trimester of pregnancy in cases of rape, incest, severe physical danger to the mother, or demonstrable handicaps in the fetus; and in cases in which the mother is under thirteen years of age or is mentally retarded. The ward does agree that abortions are deleterious to both mother and fetus and that the proper focus is to work to have the fewest abortions possible. Most likely, the only sense of victory in a decision in which no party gains what it wanted is that both sides have come to appreciate the complexity of the issue and some of the positions of the opposition. All of the efforts go into trying to reach a decision the substance of which all can agree to and, at the very least, into creating a situation "where each person [can] identify with the body making the decision in such a way that, while dissenting from particular outcomes, he still regards the resulting order as one that he has helped to create" (Miller, 1985, p. 5). A lawyer, for example, does not applaud every verdict, yet any lawyer active in a trial regards the judgment in that trial as one he has helped make, regardless of the outcome. Citizens similarly active in the generative procedures, by feeling a part of the decision-making process, can support the decision. The generative procedures will be recognized as legitimate only if the participants are seen to be attempting to generate a compound perspective and to be arguing for and against various positions on the basis of reasons. Otherwise, a minority would be under no obligation to obey or agree, as the decision would be judged to have been made unfairly. Then the entire system is in jeopardy, and the majority—even if operating only out of self-interest—will see its interests, in whole or in part, in jeopardy as well. Therefore, we have added to the other requirements for a legitimate procedure one more requirement: the attempt to generate a compound common good. This is not an exhortation to "think about the common good," nor does it imply a proper frame of mind. Rather, it is a palpable procedure to try to create a perspective that embraces everyone's interests, and those interests not embraced will be rejected on the basis of argued reasons. Building this into the procedure is no more suspect than building in individual civil and political rights such as due process on the grounds that justice must be guaranteed even against a majority decision. Our requirement for the generative perspective is a guarantee that each participant is assured that every view is "taken exactly as seriously as that of anyone else" (Ryan, 1983a). Behind the attempt to forge the compound common good, behind any decision reached in the procedures, is a necessary commitment, as part of the requirements of participation, to take up the viewpoints of others and, in explaining or supporting or refuting them, to look for and argue from reasons. If the procedures move along properly, then even a disgruntled participant, "by participating in the process,

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knowing in advance its regular course and the possibility of an adverse outcome, [agrees] to the legitimacy of the eventual outcome."36 The force of the generative procedures is to encourage participants to move beyond individualism and to derive, not impose, a common good. But they also have the effect of underscoring sociality: Any pursuit or goal, however private, exists in a social context and is therefore not the business solely of the agent in pursuit. The efforts of joint or collective decision making might then lead to a sense of social cohesion or solidarity. These procedures may also serve to confront the task that Mansbridge sets out in Beyond Adversary Democracy, that is, "to knit together two fundamentally different kinds of democracies into a single institutional framework" (1980, p. 7). One kind, "adversary democracy," is interest aggregation, criticized by communitarians for emphasizing individual rights over the democratic decisions of the community. The second, "unitary democracy," is criticized for being sentimental and unrealistic—assuming politics to be an activity of "friends" who seek harmony or unity of interests in the face of diverse and divergent interests. Mansbridge insists that the proper political framework must be dichotomous: one set of institutions for conflicting interests and one set for common interests. My proposal, however, proposes a single set of institutions for advancing common interests by transcending or building on conflicting ones. The means for forging a common interest—dialogue and contextualism—can then also be used to make decisions in the face of conflicts. This, however, is not our only task. If the generative procedures can encourage movement beyond individualism, if they can also approach by the same methods the creation of a compound common good or socially acceptable outcomes, do they at the same time build community? If shared values, standards, and purposes can be derived from participants and not imposed on them, then can the procedures for doing so serve as the foundation for community? Can community thereby be built out of, and thus established on, autonomous action? Does participation therefore help reconcile liberalism and its emphasis on autonomy and individual rights with communitarianism and its focus on the social self and collective requirements for a meaningful life? These will be the topics of the next chapter.

5 Veneration of Community Participation in the generative procedures, which we might abbreviate as "generative participation," assumes a willingness to take part in making decisions that affect not only one's own life but also the shape and future of the lives of others and of the life of the community. It cannot be the simple pursuit of private interests. This participation opens up the possibility of intimate relationships, as it promotes a habit of considering disparate views and incorporating them into one's own worldview. And it does more. The group or community is opened to continuous democratic deliberation about its general will or common interest, just as the individual is similarly opened to the recasting of his worldview. Neither the general will nor a particular worldview is imposed; both are derived from the interactive relationship among citizens/members actively engaged in the common democratic enterprise. From the theoretical perspective developed so far, it may make little difference whether the participatory setting is political, is the workplace (obvious problems apart), or consists largely of generative participation in professional, voluntary, civic, or religious organizations. Certainly nothing suggested so far argues that such participation must be political. The active participation required to motivate persons beyond individualism and to create a compound common good might be made available in exclusively private settings. Yet if generative participation is viewed as a social need, then its setting would have to be public.1 Given the liberal-communitarian context of my perspective, we also want to know whether, as C. B. MacPherson phrased it, participatory democracy "brings with it a sense of community" (1977, p. 99). Such an inquiry is important, moreover, to the theory of compound individuality, for at least two of the developmentalists that I have cited contend that the self at each level of development is grounded not merely by sociality but also by community.2 To pursue the possibility of generative participation's bringing or building community, three additional areas need to be examined: first, the nature of community: How is it defined and described, especially by the communitarians that I have discussed? I have established through the theory of compound individuality that every level of self requires relationship or sociality. Does this essential sociality constitute a kind of "community"? Second, the relationship between participation and communitarian concerns: If generative participation does not itself serve as, or does not generate, a sense of community, does participation at least speak to some of the communitarians' principle concerns? Does it fulfill the conditions for meaningful living as outlined, or hinted at, by contemporary communitarians? Third, the 129

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implications for the liberal-communitarian logomachy: Does generative participation, in conjunction with what we discern here about the nature of community, clarify what separates liberals and communitarians?

What Is Community? Whether defined with technical precision or left as a notion that floats through the pleasure centers of our psyches, community is something that people believe in, believe they need, or believe they already have. As a term it encapsulates an entire range of meanings, and thus most authors are content to leave its precise meaning opaque, allowing the reader to find at its heart their own predilections. As we found with the terms self and common good, communitarians often share the use of the term community without sharing a compatible meaning. My approach here will be to define community in its paradigmatic or richest sense, for in that sense alone can we distinguish adequately between community and the terms that describe liberal social groupings: societies, associations, corporations, and the like. In doing so, I shall show that community in this paradigmatic sense can exist, but at a price that seems too high for most of us, even for communitarians, willingly to pay. Defining community may seem not only feckless but nearly impossible. A. H. Halsey wrote that community "has so many different meanings as to be meaningless" (Plant, 1980, p. 205), and George A. Hillery, in his 1955 survey, listed ninety-four definitions and found that the only common link among them was that each mentioned people. But defining community in its richest sense allows us to avoid wading through endless definitions, each with its own purpose. Therefore I shall confine myself as far as possible to examining distinctions between the idea of community and that of association. I shall do this for two reasons: First, on the definitional side, community and association share, or can share, many of the same properties, as it were, whereas on the common-sense side, few mistake associations for communities. We can easily find distinctions in our minds for separating them, thus implying that strong distinctions may be easy to come by. Second, these distinctions may be easy because of work in this area that has gone before, especially that of Ferdinand Tonnies (1957) whose classic rendition, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, is the best place to begin. Communitarian critics of modern society lament the absence, some would argue the eradication, of community. They see in the rise of commerce and industrialization, and the concomitant specialization, the decline of a way of life characterized by constitutive relationships; cooperation; residential propinquity; common values, purposes, aspirations, and beliefs—in short, a life held in common that gave meaning and identity to persons. The organic social grouping that centered on this common life Tonnies described as gemeinschaft, or "community." It expressed a total way of life and not simply the means to some end. Its basis was natural will— the unfolding and flourishing of traditions and folkways—founded first on the natural bonding of family and kin. In contrast with "community" Tonnies described gesellschaft, the "transitory

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and superficial" (1957, p. 35) way of life found in cities and, more generally, in modern society. Whereas gemeinschaft was "the metaphysical union of bodies in blood" and bonds of "field and soil" (1957, p. 258), whereby humans relate to one another as "natural members (or parts) of the whole" (1957, p. 192), gesellschaft— translated as either "society" or "association"—required and spawned relationships of separated, isolated individuals, all in tension with one another. The cement of these relationships and of the society was the contract, an impersonal, abstract, and formal system that demanded not flesh or solidity but quid pro quo. Common values did not exist as in gemeinschaft but could be brought about through fiction, the inventing of a "common personality and his will, to whom this common value has to bear reference" (1957, p. 65). Individuals in interaction while in this fiction were engaged in "transactions." Society or association is, then, an aggregation of contracts and transactions. Tonnies summarized the distinction in this way: "In Gemeinschaft [people] remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in the Gesellschaft they are essentially separate in spite of all uniting factors" (1957, p. 65). The contrast was sharply drawn and to good effect. As a communitarian deposition it has served a useful purpose: to point out the ills at the base of modern society while simultaneously pointing up the restoration of community as the proper antidote. Yet for our purposes Tonnies provides even stronger material for distinguishing between community and association. "A higher type of social bond," higher than love alone, which cannot bind unless requited, develops out of the natural social relationships of mutuality found in gemeinschaft. This bond contains reciprocity and obligation. Not the existence of obligation but the kind of obligation differentiates community from association. Few associations exist without obligations, but these obligations are fully described in the bylaws, charter, or contracts of the organization and are formally recognized by the members. Obligations in associations, in other words, are spelled out, whereas those in the community are implied. Associations are organized for some special purpose in which members voluntarily join to share or develop an interest. Whatever the basis—be it a value, aim, cause, or whatever—associations are groups formally organized and with a limited scope. Obligations as well as rules, regulations, and privileges are clearly defined and circumscribe the interactions of the group. The implied obligations of a community, on the other hand, arise not out of formal agreement or organization but out of the natural bonds of kin and the relationships of neighbors. Thus in a community, relationships precede obligations, whereas in associations, bylaws and formal obligations determine the kinds of relationships that members have. Communal obligations arise out of the members' concern for the welfare or well-being of all other members, and that concern arises out of the members' own sense of identity. But concern alone is not enough; obligation requires that the concern be acted on. A community member has an obligation to do what he can to improve the well-being of any and all members. But let us assume that I am in the community not as a member but as a social

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worker. I have relationships with most, perhaps all, of the members. Let us also assume that the basis of most of those relationships is not professional concerns but emanates from my concern for the members' well-being, not just the well-being of those whom I know, but of all members. But because I am not a member of the community, am I under any obligation to help? There is no recognition within the community of any membership obligations that come with the role I play in relation to the group. What if the community demanded some form of assistance from me that I did not want to give? Suppose that they wanted me to sell my house to defray expenses for a community project I could not support? Conversely, could I demand that the community assist me? In the first case, I may feel a concern that I need not act, or I may feel an obligation to the members but not to the community, because the persons are not related to me as members, as I am not one. In the case of my making demands of the members to assist me, they are under no obligation to do so because I am not a member. Obligations to be communal must be reciprocal but not defined as in a contract. Reciprocity, as Tonnies tells us, arises from the kind of relationship: one in which the parties not only share a common and total way of life but also identify with it. The communards might rightly ask of me: Why aren't you a member? Without the requirement of reciprocity, the silly but possible situation could occur in which a person thought of himself as a member of a community when the community did not. Making donations to charities, for example, is not forming a community with the recipients, even if the action expresses and springs from obligation and concern, because there is no reciprocity. In fact, there could not be reciprocity, for the donation establishes no personal relationship with the recipients. Charity flows not from me to them but from the organization to them. This organization is, for the donor, at best an association. In community, reciprocal obligations flow from personal relationships. I may have some obligations to all human beings as human beings, as we saw with the autonomous self, or to all fellow citizens of my republic, but those are not obligations from me to definite others. They exist whether or not I know the person. Yet community obligations cannot be to places in the community; rather, they are to members as persons. Thus we have to clarify Tonnies's distinction by adding the Platonic and Aristotelian idea that community must be limited in size. We might distinguish family from community in just the opposite way. Societal or universal obligations cannot rest on reciprocal relationships, and familial obligation need not rest on reciprocal relationships. The intimacy of family relationships may entail obligations without reciprocity. I may provide for a sister in trouble, even though she detests me and feels no concern for and no obligation to me. My obligation is therefore unconditional. Such obligations may be construed as one vital aspect of the intimacy of family, and perhaps kin, ties. In conjunction with Tonnies's distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, we can now cite four criteria for paradigmatic community: 1. It must be sharing a total way of life and not just sharing interests or associating as a means to an end.


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2. It consists of face-to-face relationships (our way of ensuring a certain size) that spawn the following: 3. Concern for the well-being of all members and reciprocal obligations to do one's all in fostering well-being. 4. Centrality of the community to one's identity. The relationships, obligations, mores, roles, ethos, and traditions are not just important to me but also help make me the person I am. Each of these criteria is necessary for community, and taken together they are sufficient for defining it in its richest or strong sense. As I shall argue in the following discussion, dropping any of the criteria creates difficulties that will lead us out of community and back into association. Using these criteria, we can see that other definitions of community may be both limited and wrong. John Ladd (1959), who thinks that the very idea of defining a Protean concept such as community is a fruitless endeavor, insists that all we can say about community is that it is "an aggregation of individual human beings." But a crowd or a mob is also an aggregation of individual human beings. Ladd is not telling us what property or quality of community separates one aggregation from another. To return to our original example, how could Ladd distinguish between an association and a community? When would an association become a community? In his article "Community Within a Community—The Professions," W. J. Goode (1969) contends that associations of professionals can be considered communities because the definitions of both use the same criteria: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Members are bound together by a sense of common identity as professionals. Members share the same professional values and interests. Few members leave their professional associations. Members speak a common language—professional jargon—that outsiders can only partially understand. 5. The association has some authority over its members and supplies the rules and standards guiding behavior within the profession.

From the criteria for community already established, this definition falls short. Goode's criteria pertain only to the structure of the organization and in no way pertain to the relationships of those involved. Obligations may arise, but only out of the articles of organization. Yet within the "community," as Goode describes it, there are no obligations to persons, only standards and rules for professional behavior. Identity is with the profession, not with others who are in that profession. Thus one could have an obligation to uphold the reputation and standards of the profession in his own practice but have no obligation of any kind of any other practitioner. Goode's criteria are simply too easy to meet without generating anything that we would agree is a community. Consider two examples. Imagine an association of anticommunity scholars or writers, a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts dedicated not only to individualism but also to the eradication of community. They meet together as professional scholars only to share their knowledge and interests as specialists. They identify not simply as writers/scholars but as experts in anticommunity argu-

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ment and "Randism." They use these meetings to forge a united front in their presentations, and so they are anxious to follow the standards that the group has set. The first question they would want Goode to answer is how their group could possibly constitute a "community." Or consider an association of professional snake charmers (or any profession that has few members) who meet regularly to hear lectures on the latest techniques and on marketing strategy. These charmers must, according to Goode, constitute a community, despite the possibility that not one member has ever spoken to another. They attend the meetings, learn from the presentations, and then go about their own business afterwards. In short, no one knows anyone else in the community and never needs to. No one ever even needs to speak to another member. Thus an association of professionals constitutes a community in which the members can remain perfect strangers. Dropping any of our four criteria could create equally bizarre communities. Drop the requirement for sharing an overall way of life, and then only one part of a member's personality would be sufficient for community. A business corporation could then quality as a community. Relationships could be close; the person could identify with his company; and he could be concerned about all other employees as employees.3 But the requirement is not to know one's colleagues as persons but to know them only as employees, only as far as their professional or work relationship extends. Man is thereby fragmented, for he is divided into at least two parts: employee or colleague and the rest of him. Fragmentation and separation of human beings into compartments are frequent complaints of communitarians. Both Marx and R. H. Tawney—though the latter perhaps could not be called a communitarian—decried divisions that created an "economic man" subject to one set of laws, a "political man" subject to another, a "family man" subject to a third (Tawney added and emphasized a spiritual man as well), all unrelated to, and "unintegrated" in, the particular person. Suppose that we drop the criterion of face-to-face relationships. Then a neighborhood community, according to our criteria, could include any and all neighbors who moved away. That they could still share a common way of life and live in the next county or city or country strains credulity but is possible. But a common way of life is made in common and must make adjustments in living caused by the vicissitudes, great and small, that befall individuals, families, and groups in the community. Those outside the fold, though still adhering to the common values and way of life, could not be touched by the changes in the community that are bound to occur. Face-to-face relationships also guarantee that the community cannot grow so large that each person will not know everyone. Whether the communards have moved away or the community has grown too large, the strain on mutual concern and obligations would be great. Could one feel obligations to persons that one had never met? Could there be reciprocity with those who have moved away? Is trust in others granted by dint of membership, or must there also be more to it than that? It would seem that trust is granted initially because in a community one knows that the other will be there when needed. A person not known now can be known later. When the group stops being a network of relationships and becomes a system—


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with its members living outside or remaining unknown because of size—there is a danger that those within it could become simply replaceable parts, that anyone in the role would do provided that it is a community role. Moreover, it is often part of communal solidarity, a part attributable to steady face-to-face interactions, that obligations are acted on because their importance and force can be felt, whereas members of associations may have obligations but not act on them because, lacking the regularity of affective interaction, they do not feel that force. Such obligations must then be enforced.4 Finally, what would happen if a community member could participate fully and be obligated completely without identifying with the community? However dubious the possibility, consider the example of a Israeli spy who infiltrates an Arab village community. He takes up the life of a merchant, shares actively in the community life, knows everyone and everyone knows him ... to a certain extent. For he conceals his identity as an agent and conceals that he identifies with the life he has in Tel Aviv. Even though from the outside he appears to be a full member of the community, fulfilling all obligations and acting on concern for all residents of the village, this is still merely an appearance. Would we grant him the status of a full member of the community if we knew that his involvement was a ruse? Would we grant such membership to a man who had fallen in love with a communard and feigned involvement just to be near her? The sham involves more than a lack of identity; it involves as well using the community as a means to a specific, and uncommon, end.

Communitarians on Community In trumpeting the restoration of community, communitarians must have in mind something like our four criteria. Or do they? When, for example, Sheldon Wolin writes in Politics and Vision that human beings need "to dwell in more intimate relationships with each other, to enjoy more affective ties, to experience some closer solidarity" (1960, p. 363), he cannot mean that man lives without affection or social bonds or attachments. Familial relations still exist; fraternal associations, clubs, societies, churches, and collegial groups of all sorts flourish in liberal societies. Rather, he, and others, must mean that community as a quality of relationships that invigorate and integrate the whole person, that help constitute identity, and that bind persons to others is a way of life no longer available. Thus liberal man even in fellowship, association, and family is always a lonely man. Hence an important distinction separates the solitary man who has no company to keep, no association or relationship that binds him securely and closely; and the lonely man who has company and associations yet finds no solace or security in them, no purpose and no identity. For the solitary man may make a life and identity for himself—as Thoreau did in his temporary retreat at Walden Pond—but the lonely man is not only rootless but also lifeless, what Hannah Arendt called "not being in the world at all." What man needs, then, is community in which he is and feels an integral part of an overall way of life. Aside from the austere and often severe environments of

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monasteries and religious sects and the Utopian, if not vacuous, experiments in communal living, such a way of life is not found in liberal society. Thus communitarians have looked over their shoulders for their models: to the polis of ancient Greece, especially Athens; to the medieval village; to Elizabethan society. Yet these models fail to satisfy what might be termed our modern sensibilities, for the price to pay for these communities was a rigid social hierarchy and a concomitant inequality of status. What most communitarians seek is not a facsimile of the past but its ethos in the present. They seek what Marx called Gemeinwesen, in which all persons would be part of an organic community that would elevate the common life and absorb individuals fully within it without absorbing their individuality. This is, of course, the recurrent communitarian objective: to combine individual autonomy and community, what Charles Taylor described as the Hegelian goal of uniting the radical autonomy of Kant with the expressive unity of the Greek polis (1975, pp. 388, 427). But this is a dubious endeavor. As we saw from the point of view of the self, the communitarians cannot sustain community without jeopardizing autonomy. From the point of view of community, the communitarians can fare no better. Their objective is kept alive only by their remaining vague about the nature of community, for the only type of community that can securely bind the whole person in an overall way of life is a "total" community that, as we shall see, cannot withstand the independent criticality characteristic of autonomy. Should the communitarians accept something like our fourfold criteria, which can provide the kind of life and identity they seek, they would jeopardize individual autonomy. Thus Alasdair Maclntyre can define community as agreement on the ends as well as on the means to those ends. These constitute the good shared by all members; to wit, the common good. "It is this sharing which is essential and primary to the constitution of any form of community" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 155). Yet vital traditions "embody continuities of conflict" regarding the scope and nature of the ends and practices (1981, p. 222). If that is so, then what happens to community, to the sharing, when conflict erupts? When he says that "the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly" but is the shared good of human relationships— something that sounds as if it ought to define community—the good is either a set of precise contents pursued by those of like minds—what Sandel condemns in Rawls as the "sentimental" notion of community—or it is a metaperspective devoid of any guiding content at all: "The good life for man is the life spent in seeking the good life for man" (1981, p. 219). In fact, both such goods are possible components of the liberal community that Maclntyre himself denounces. Michael Walzer's attempts to define community are no less shallow. In Spheres of Justice he argues that the political sphere is the heart of community, for it "is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together to produce a collective consciousness." In his understanding, political community is simply a synonym for country or nation (1983, p. 35). But such an approach lacks any analytical bite. Moreover, it is mistaken on at least two counts, our fourfold criteria notwithstanding. First, as I argued in the previous chapter when considering William Connolly's ideas about generating the common good, common vocabulary can be confused for common meanings. Nowhere does this seem more likely than in politics. Second, surely


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ethnic subcultures are a world of common meanings, certainly more so than national politics, about which Walzer himself admits that sometimes "political and historical communities don't coincide." When they do not, "the sharing [of common meanings] takes place in smaller units" (1983, p. 29). What happens when the meanings shared in the subgroup do not correspond, or perhaps even run counter, to those of the political community? David Miller (1985) argues that when politics—as in the kind of socialism with which Walzer is associated—demands an overarching attachment to citizenship or to the national community, then subgroup identity is subordinated or quashed. The bonds of commonality established by national politics are sufficient in Walzer's mind for resolving differences among various subcultural communities. But if we can be satisfied with a definition of community as broad as his, then we must be satisfied with calling almost any kind of association, common enterprise, joint deliberation, public conversation, or generative procedure a form of community. The definition of community that is closest to that of total community while still alleging to comprise autonomy is Michael Sandel's: "To be a community in the strong sense, a community must be constitutive of the shared self-understandings of the participants" (1982, p. 175). Rather than a relationship one chooses, constitutive community is an attachment, an end, a given that one discovers (1982, p. 150). Even though Sandel boldly states that community constitutes one's identity, how this works remains indeterminate and ambagious. Does discovering attachments necessitate staying attached? How are the discoveries made? They are made through reflective introspection or self-understanding of ends already given: "This notion of community describes a framework of self-understandings that is distinguishable from and in some sense prior to the sentiments and dispositions of individuals within the framework" (1982, p. 134). It is the community framework that gives shape to personal identity. Yet though one can reflect on what is given within the community, one cannot reflect on the framework itself. One's autonomy is thereby confined to a limited range, which, as we have seen, is really not autonomy. Sandel forthrightly declares for a constitutive community of preordained norms, ends, and attachments, and to be constitutive these norms and ends and attachments cannot be transcended. Durkheim recognized that for community to be constitutive it had to be a total community, and to be a total community it had to provide "clearcut rules defining limits to desire and ambition in all spheres of life" and "limited horizons for [man's] thoughts" (quoted in Lukes, 1967, p. 144). Autonomy, or rational thought that requires one to step back reflectively from such communal rules and roles, would have to be suspended in constitutive community.

Total Community Over 150 years ago Tocqueville described the nature of total community in his discussion of despotic democracy: It gladly works for [the citizens'] happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities,

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Beyond Individualism facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. . . . Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. ... It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men's will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies. (1969, p. 692)

Communitarians value liberal autonomy but seem trapped by their own insistence on constitutive community. Thus Charles Taylor agrees with Sandel that community is constitutive (Taylor, 1985c, p. 8), but he will not go as far as Hegel does and suggest modeling community after the Greek polis, in which social practices and institutions demanded and reinforced behavior in conformity to ends and norms already given. In this setting the Athenians, according to Hegel, acted "out of instinct," and harmony was ensured, as the institutional matrix itself was "the essence, the 'substance' of the self."5 This is total community. Taylor argues that the dire need today is to restore some semblance of Hegelian Sittlichkeit—moral obligations to an ongoing community from which one inherits the norms and ends that form a meaningful life. It is only through such an inheritance that individuals can define themselves (Taylor, 1975, p. 379). Liberal political and social theory, with its emphasis on the nature of man as an independent organism and thus on his distance from the community (1975, p. 380), provides no "basis for men's identification with their society" (1975, p. 410). Yet Taylor does not see constitutive community as strong or total community. Rather, he sees it as cultural conversation. Simply put, it is language and culture that constitute personal identity; one cannot understand oneself apart from the communicative interchanges in the community. Although such an interpretation of community fits well with the emphasis on sodality and relationships in the theory of compound individuality, it does little to separate community from association. Indeed, Taylor suggest that in order to counter the alienation found in modern liberal societies and to enable men to identify with their communities without introducing fascism, nationalism, or other forms of total community, those partial communities—"geographical, or cultural, or occupational"—essential to social differentiation and personal identity must be renewed (Taylor, 1975, pp. 409-16). This is what Taylor means by a community's being constitutive. The irony in this is that an emphasis on partial communities is a hallmark of liberalism (Miller, 1985). If constitutive communities can be partial, can be geographical or cultural or occupational, then we are not really describing communities but variations of associations. How are Taylorian partial communities different from those offered in liberal societies? Whereas liberals always enter partial communities voluntarily, Taylor


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sees persons as natural members of partial communities. Thus there would seem to be two kinds of partial communities: those we can choose to enter and those we are born into; in short, voluntary communities and existential communities. Although no communitarian would suggest that liberal societies do not offer voluntary communities, even total communities that one can choose to enter, they might suggest that such communities, even if broadly based, numerous, and variegated, exist only as a means to avoid the fragmentation and hollowness of modern society. They exist only to fill the identity void left by society's preclusion of existential communities. Because modern society emphasizes individualism over community and because such an emphasis disrupts communal ties, modern society cannot fulfill our need for existential communities, save as exceptions. In order to accommodate the diversity and conflict found in and characteristic of modern industrial societies, social ties must be looser, and the bonds, more abstract. Yet every person is born into an existential community. Indeed, everyone is raised in a total community, or so the membership level of self seems. The membership self requires sharing a total way of life, a worldview and how to behave in it. Meaning for this self comes through sharing the community's common values, interests, aims, aspirations, and relationships. These are the self. Because identity is as the community, its integrity—the structure and fulfillment of its prescribed rules and roles—is paramount. Social cohesion is based on and found in the shared description of social reality; proper ways to behave are given in the description. Values, meaning, symbols, and solidarity are not chosen or created but given. Yet considering the arguments that preceded this discussion, how can a child be born into a total community—be it clan, tribe, neighborhood, or nation—in a modern liberal social structure that precludes community? The fragmentation of man makes total community impossible and, simultaneously, breeds contempt for it. But the level at which such fragmentation takes place, or at least the level at which it can be recognized—the self-reflective level—has not yet been reached. Thus the child "is not conscious of a division between his own attitudes to the community and the way in which that community organizes and articulates its life" (Plant, 1974, p. 19). The membership world is one "which is fundamentally unproblematic; it is constituted by rules which are grounded in belief. Here, not only do men find a generalized world of meaning, but they are able to orient themselves within that sphere because they have an identity which is unproblematic" (Rasmussen, 1983, p. 6). The notion of an unproblematic identity is essential to making sense of the membership world, for many modern children are not really born into a total community but into a network of subcultures. Out of this seeming welter a child constructs a coherent worldview, not by integrating perspectives, but by aggregating them. A network might include the shared conceptions of the society at large: its language, mores, laws, history, ideals, and the like and also the conceptions of separate, even competing, worldviews. One parent might be Roman Catholic, from a neighborhood that is ethnically homogeneous and from a family that continues to speak only Italian at family gatherings. The other parent might be Jewish, from a family that is both orthodox and Zionist. This child may be close to her parents but closest to a Zen Buddhist brother who lives with her and her family. For reasons of

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convenience and enrichment, the family may live in a neighborhood that is predominantly Chinese. The child may go to the best day-care facility, run by Chinese who seek to raise community-minded children and who propagate the tenets of Confucianism. This child will absorb no fewer than four different value systems and will learn the rules and roles for governing each. Yet just as children up to a certain age can leam as many as eight languages without confusion, so they can absorb competing, even contradictory, worldviews, because they do not need to integrate them. When self-reflection begins, conflicts and tensions arise. The child then starts the move from membership to autonomy. In this move, unless the child opts for one of the subcultures exclusively and in its pure form, the constitutive community, the existential community that Taylor prizes, will be lost. Are the tensions and conflicts in this scenario the result of diversity or fragmentation? Liberal society permits cultural diversity that leads directly to these tensions. But is this cultural diversity the reflection of society's need for fragmentation as the best—and perhaps the only—way of maintaining a liberal system, or is this diversity the reflection of the individual maturational process, that self-reflectivity results in diversity within? Thus liberalism could then be seen not as forcing fragmentation but as reflecting one particular level of human development. Whatever its source, diversity undercuts the idea that the network into which the child is born is a constitutive community. It is constitutive, but is it a community? First, the life is not a common way of life; otherwise, all would share in it, not in parts of it. Second, the network of subcultures is a community only from the perspective of the child. Only she is identified as it; only she recognizes its many parts and can make them a community. Thus we have a silly but now likely situation in which a person is in a community of one. So even though all the ingredients are present to make community, the membership level is not really a community save for the perspective of the member herself. Yet that perspective may be the ideal that Taylor and other communitarians seek as community, because it provides a secure and unproblematic identity. But if this is to be maintained in the face of the emergence of self-reflectivity, then such identity comes at a price that most are unwilling to pay, the price of diversity and autonomous selfhood, the recognition that my community or worldview is only one possibility among many. Although the membership self offers an instant solidarity and a ready-made worldview, it does so effortlessly. Because the self is unreflective, this cannot be the destination of any communitarian wishing to join community and autonomy. However salutary autonomy may seem, the communitarians recognize that it, too, comes with a price, the price of certainty and security. Should individuals be allowed to manifest a diversity of interests within themselves, a diversity that may transcend and contradict their community? Can community exist, as Durkheim suggested, only by putting a cap on its members' mental horizons? If the cap is removed in order to recognize or to foster diversity, must community thereby be destroyed? Is this what happened with modern society? Should the loss of community thus not be lamented but applauded? Perhaps the critique of the communitarians is then stood on its head: Diversity within man is not the result of fragmentation but


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is the concentrated reflection of diversity found among men. Diversity is not the evil of modernity but is the result of self-reflectivity, for even if no other ways of life existed for comparison, self-reflectivity would permit the creation of hypothetical worlds. To suppress that occurrence we must fit our children with Durkheim's cap. To limit diversity is to perpetuate what social critic Richard Sennett calls the ethos of the ghetto. It emphasizes sharing a way of life to the exclusion of all others and builds a cocoon against the world. The greater the stress on collective personality, the more insular, exclusive, and suspicious the outlook will become. Outsiders are reduced to pseudospecies; unknowns are avoided. "Negotiation becomes the great threat to community: change positions or alter them, and the communal spirit itself is weakened" (Sennett, 1977, p. 251). This attitude is deleterious even to those within the community, for it leads not to fraternity but to fratricide. In order to share a collective personality the faces of all must be recognizable in the common face. Therefore, the collective personality must remain "rigid and still" (Sennett, 1977, p. 250). Every variance in habit or behavior leads to the query Is she still one of us? Individual deviation threatens the whole, and people must be watched and tested. Emotional charging and recharging through rituals, purges, and purifications becomes the standard and necessary method to confect solidarity. "Distrust and solidarity, seemingly so opposed, are united" (Sennett, 1977, p. 311). The result is what Sennett calls "destructive Gemeinschaft."6 The sad fact is that a Maclntyresque withdrawal into local communities (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 263) or the creation of a community of communities seems destined to result in, if it is not already built on, the basics of destructive gemeinschaft. Such actions might even reproduce the same problems for a communitarian society that communitarians excoriate in liberalism: They criticize liberalism for emphasizing individualism; for having exclusively instrumental relationships; for prizing rationality and universals over the concrete, real, and historical; for promoting selfinterest and individual rights over a concern for the common good; for conceiving the res publica as an arena for adjudicating competing interests; and for seeing politics as the process for amalgamating private interests into victorious zero-sum coalitions. Yet many of these features would surely appear in the interactions and relationships among communities. Are communities granted the right to follow the principles and to pursue the ends they wish? Can relationships among and between communities be anything but instrumental? What is the basis on which rights for communities would be established? Aren't communities as closed to alternative worldviews as atomists are? Aren't the visions of the communitarians merely excuses for like-minded persons to live in a closed world, or for communities to make all persons within them like-minded?7 Aren't they really promoting individualism on a community scale and thus perpetuating the very weakness that communitarians have denominated as the chief liability of liberalism? However many questions we ask or examples we provide, however intricate our maze of definitions, we always end up at the same Minotaurian dilemma: Communitarians can either pursue total community and risk the submergence, if not the elimination, of individuality, or they can forsake constitutive community, accept

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strong associations, and battle loneliness, atomism, alienation, and anomie in some other way. Must we, for example, rule out participation, as Taylor does, as one such possible way?

Participation and Liberal Community Taylor sees the movements for greater democratic participation as a reaction to modem alienation and as an attempt to exercise autonomy while taking responsibility for changing one's society. It is part of the recurrent demand of political theorists "to reconstruct society ... do away with heteronomy, overcome alienation, or recover spontaneity" (Taylor, 1975, p. 411). Participation, however, says Taylor, cannot work these miracles. Although it is true that modern societies have moved toward the greater homogeneity that Hegel identified as necessary for equal participation—for differences might preclude everyone from participating equally—it is also true, according to Taylor, that this homogeneity has undercut identity with cultural communities and thereby increased alienation. Modern society has supplanted subgroup identity and offered nothing in its place. Stepping in to fill the identity void is fascism, nationalism, totalitarianism (Taylor, 1975, pp. 413-14), the kind of despotic regime described by Tocqueville. Stepping in is total community. Thus, it is not participation per se to which Taylor objects, it is the increased homogeneity that participation requires. But is it homogeneity or political and legal equality that participation requires? Moreover, what evidence does Taylor adduce to show that modern societies have moved toward greater homogeneity (Taylor, 1975, p. 412) and that citizens have developed a unity of outlook and life-style? (1975, p. 410) He does not adduce any. He invokes the same sorts of images found in earlier communitarian critiques of mass society. We can certainly agree that materially societies seem much more homogeneous, producing and wanting the same kinds of goods. Though it is unmistakably true, as Salvador Giner points out (1969, p. 504), that partial or "identity" communities have lost the one factor that characterized traditional communities—economic self-sufficiency—it does not follow that "emotionally and primordially" such identity groups are no longer available. Indeed, making people more alike legally and economically was necessary for enlarging and enlivening social consciousness and for addressing social problems that could be hidden behind communal barriers. It was one way, but perhaps not the only way, to overcome communal provincialism and xenophobia. Consequently, over the past two decades diverse ethnic, religious, and interest subcultures have become more publicly and politically active. Participation seems to have increased not because of homogeneity but because of demands for recognition by diverse identity communities. Does participation itself offer a way toward, if not a form of, community? J. Roland Pennock and J. W. Chapman suggest that equally important to the contribution that participation makes to individual development "is [its] creation of real community." Working with others, they state, satisfies our need to belong and helps us achieve personal identity by becoming an integral and valued part of a collective


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entity and enterprise (1979, p. 444). Although citizenship and participatory politics may give men integrative experience, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, by joining us in a life of common involvements (Wolin, 1960, p. 434), it would surely be stretching the point to call that relationship an integrative community. Although it might be true that participatory democracy touches on dilemmas and issues pertaining to all aspects of life, this cannot be the same as saying that a democracy is a community because it encompasses or deals with an entire way of life. Generative participation does not offer a unifying or integrative perspective as if it were the successor to the medieval church. Rather, it offers an integrative context in which pluralistic, conflicting, multiple viewpoints are aired and honored and in which action is taken and decisions are made even when no unity is reached. Participation, even the generative procedures, does not constitute a community because the ties that bind people to one another are functional. The purpose of gathering and sharing is to deliberate and to take action on issues important to the collectivity. The procedures are purposeful; the ties are practical. A community, on the other hand, has no single purpose but has purposes; its ties are affective and historical; its obligations, unwritten. Participatory settings function as organizations, according to formal rules and regulations. The community functions according to history, custom, and chemistry. Though both involve face-to-face encounters, there is no demand in participation to know anyone beyond attending to their iterations. In no sense do they share a way of life. The steps beyond individualism toward compound individuality on a wide scale require a public or collective forum in which participants can take up and act on the positions of various others. The result is to generate a compound common good and to take oneself outside or beyond one's own worldview. The hope is that such participation will have a spillover effect beyond participation, that it will benefit the individual in his personal relations by conditioning intimacy. And it may bring individuals to a realization of the value and standards by which they define themselves and to a desire to seek out others to share those values and standards or build them into a way of life. In brief, the generative procedures may encourage and inspire community, but they themselves cannot serve as a community. Still, any community that they would inspire would most likely be a partial community, which might take two forms. First, the partial community might conform to a Rawlsian strong or rich association. Here persons would be joined by identifying with and sharing a set of specific values, purposes, concerns, beliefs, or interests that are judged essential to one's way of life, however different that way of life may be from the lives of the others involved. Thus you and I might join a cause promoting economic and workplace democracy, and both come to identify strongly with it. But you could be a rich capitalist who also identifies with your polo playing and Ferrari rallies, and I might identify no less strongly with my working-class origins and my heavy-metal band. Second, the partial community might be a community of compound individuals. But these individuals, even in community, would still be defined by constitutive relationships and autonomy, which cannot exist in total community.8 Yet isn't compound individuality, with its combination of constitutive relationships and autonomy, precisely what the communitarians seek? It is not exactly

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what they seek. The constitutive relationships of the compound self are primarily dyadic relationships of limited, significant others. Although identity depends on both relationships and autonomy, the mutuality involved could not survive the demands of a community wide reciprocity.9 But if not exactly a community, doesn't generative participation speak to many of the communitarians' concerns? Don't constitutive relationships, though not as demanding as a constitutive community, still undercut the deontological liberalism that Sandel decries? If Sandel can accept the idea of partial communities and the need, as we have described it, for sodality, if autonomy is to function properly, then generative participation will go a long way toward fulfilling his communitarian vision. Likewise, generative participation provides the sense of belonging to a greater whole that animates Taylor's arguments. Jane Mansbridge's research supports the idea expressed by Pennock and Chapman, and questioned by Taylor, that participation supplies the belongingness important to personal identity.10 Does generative participation bring the liberal and the communitarian closer together? As has been said, liberal society permits persons to belong to many different partial communities. Indeed, if community can be defined acceptably as strong association—individuals coming together voluntarily to share specific values and purposes, so much so that they might identify with that sharing—then liberalism can be said to require community. Without it the individuality and autonomy—as opposed to individualism—central to liberalism could not flourish, for it is through the various channels of associative identity that individuality and autonomy can be expressed. Liberalism, therefore, not only tolerates but actually encourages subgroup diversity, a point conceded by no less a communitarian than Robert Paul Wolff.11 These various subgroups and associations might then be classified and evaluated according to the degree to which they adhere to, satisfy, or combine our fourfold criteria for defining community. Yet if the partial communities and manifold associations for which liberalism is renowned do provide belongingness through diverse choice, why is it that the communitarian analysis continues to hit a nerve? Why, in Erich Fromm's words, does modern man still carry "an unbearable feeling of isolation and powerlessness," and why does modern society still seem vulnerable to, if not characterized by, alienation? Finally, if liberal societies offer membership in and commitments to associations, why is there so little compound individuality?12 The response to each question is the same: Liberal societies do not fail to offer partial communities and identity associations, but they fail to offer the right kind. They do not require or demand generative participation. Liberalism brings man to the level of autonomous identity but then offers him mostly, or mostly promotes, atomism. Most associations designed around specific purposes and procedures do not need active participation. From the workplace to professional organizations to voluntary groups, few associations demand that members open themselves or their worldviews to others. That is not their purpose; the views important to the group are those held and shared prior to joining. It is why people join. Therefore, although members may derive a sense of belongingness,13 they do not derive what can lead them out of atomism—the possibility of constitutive or intimate relationships and open worldviews. This is the intuitive insight and the challenge of the communitarians, buried under their ambiguities.


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When Robert Paul Wolff (1968) proposes "a new philosophy of community" to offset the weaknesses of liberalism, he, like the other communitarians we have considered, seeks to reconcile autonomy and the social nature of personality. But the three kinds of community he adumbrates14 would all be available in and could even define a liberal polity built around partial communities and generative participation. Participation in the generative procedures strengthens each pole of personal identity as it opens up new possibilities for their connection. Participants exercise their autonomy in each discussion as they review their ideas, beliefs, goals, and standards in relation to the issue under consideration. But at the same time each person has an attitude of making decisions that affect the collectivity and tries through dialogue to understand, if not advance, the interests of others. The emphasis is on collective goals, but the generative procedures allow these to be derived, not imposed. Every discussion also holds the possibility of a new and different understanding of one's neighbors and thus a new and different relationship with them. The combination of opening to others and reflecting on what we think and what others say can lead to deeper self-understanding and to a new habit of heart and mind that spills over into everyday living and that forms a new kind of selfhood characterized by openness and others—compound individuality. Not surprisingly, many liberals and communitarians at bottom want the same thing, namely, autonomy in community, individuality and meaningful relationships, and personal identity constituted by both differentiation and attachments to others. What hinders them or keeps them apart is the presence of atomism, which both would see from the perspective of compound individuality as an aberration. That perspective entails seeing beyond one's own interests as well as beyond one's groups' interests. Each recognizes that he is neither a self alone nor a collective self; that she is neither atomistic, cut off from the past and denying any dependence, nor communally situated, unable to stand back reflectively from the sodality or able to transcend it but not reshape it. Neither liberal individualism nor communitarianism will ever be sufficient for developing intimacy. Individualists fight the need to open and attach themselves that compound individuality requires. Communitarians cannot tolerate the reciprocity between the self and limited others that intimacy ensures. Communities, according to their view, demand adjustments to the communities' mores and practices; to cease to have well-established boundaries is to fail to provide members with a secure identity. But any community that compound individuals create will be open and reciprocal, among the members and between each member and the community itself. In other words, the community, too, must be willing to make adjustments to changes in its members. No communitarian suggests reciprocity of that sort. Thus even though intimacy and compound individuality do not guarantee community, they do bring the constitutive relationships that communitarians crave. Total communities can never provide the kind of environment that reflective communitarians seek. Although such communities can exist in modern liberal societies, as evidenced in the United States by various monastic orders, religious groups, and intentional communities, they will always be exceptions. The liberal soil is not inhospitable, but that soil is made rich by a mulch of diversity, choice, and autonomy. Communitarians do not oppose these per se, but they see in liberal societies an undue emphasis on choice and diversity that sacrifices the kinds of

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social bonds that make society cohesive. In their desire to avoid individualism and restore community, the communitarians too often fail to see that their proposals incur the loss of not just individualism but of self-reflectivity itself. This is particularly true when they search through history for examples of strong community. Granted, the Greek polis showed proportionally greater political participation among its citizenry, but its citizen ranks were tightly constrained. Granted, the medieval village offered a more secure social status, but only through a rigid hierarchy. If, on the other hand, communitarians wish only to evoke, by using the term community, a need for belonging and a sense of social obligation on the part of all who are members of the collectivity, then there is no need to accuse liberalism of failing to provide or of being incapable of providing a sense of community. Liberalism refers to more than deontology or the egocentric inclinations and minimal state advertisements of libertarianism (a point that I shall take up in the next chapter). Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire (1987), as an example of recent liberal theory, argues from a decidedly communitarian position. Yet liberalism must do more to move its citizens out of individualism and back toward the social nature of personal identity. This will be my focus in the final chapter. The communitarian attempt to find the right combination of individuality and sociality that can yield diverse expression and social cohesion is worthwhile, if only to show the weaknesses in the social foundations of our present polities. But the way to the combination, as argued throughout this study, is not back to thepolis but on to compound individuality; is not in the leveling of liberalism but in building on its encouragement of diversity and its possibilities for greater participation. One senses that the communitarians, in leaving their definitions and descriptions of community marinating in ambiguity, intuit this. They would be well advised, therefore, to strengthen their case and avoid quixotism by heeding Machiavelli's comments, which pertain equally well to critiques of liberalism as to nostalgia for bygone communities: "It appears to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth." (1985, p. 61).

III Reconstituting the Liberal Self


6 Socrates in a Pluralistic Tradition Retrospective Contemplating the Hegelian attempt to combine the fullness of moral autonomy with the restoration of constitutive community, Charles Taylor asked, "What is the underlying conception of man and society which can provide a pole of identification for us?" (1979a, p. 133) Individualism provides one pole—differentiation—by conceiving of man as independent and self-sufficient, whose goals and interests are individually conceived and are often thought to be of ultimate concern. In opposing liberal individualism, communitarians offer a time-tested alternative built of constitutive attachments and ends: One is known only by the communities from which one's identity is derived. In this counterpoint they seek to bring autonomy into harmony with an orientation that is decidedly social and relational. Yet the communitarian enterprise is doomed from the outset. Autonomy is jeopardized in community when the range of choice is limited or cannot be transcended. If it can be transcended, then the individual is faced with an unfortunate choice: acquiescence or departure. How else could the community continue to provide a stable, secure identity and a cohesive social life if the social mores, ends, and attachments were not restricted or fixed? It is possible to give cogent philosophical accounts of autonomy without sociality, evident, for example, in libertarian literature. But from a psychological perspective it is precisely the absence of sociality as constitutive relationship in the presence of autonomy that differentiates liberal individualism from the level of self called compound individuality. The communitarians have identified the absence but have stumbled in their attempts to fit it in with the presence. Their goal of uniting constitutive relationship and autonomy remains unattained, and unattainable, only because they continue to look over their shoulders for community as the solution, back to the polis or medieval village rather than forward to compound individuality. This is understandable. Communitarians can come upon this level of selfhood beyond individualism only by crossing into the alien, and somewhat arcane, territory of developmental psychology. Failing that, they engage in intellectual archaeology to bring to modernity from antiquity and the Middle Ages the models and insights of life constituted by shared ends and attachments. The conundrum is that while wishing to save autonomy from liberal individualism, communitarians, in looking to the past, may do so only by subverting either autonomy or community. The results, for political and social theorists striving to answer Taylor's query, 149

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are these two stark poles: Glorify self-sufficiency, differentiation, and self-assertion—or at least accept them as the inevitable price to be paid for modernity—or try to reinstate, or retreat to, a former era when personal identity was formed, defined, and secured in the social ethos. We arrive, then, where we started: the debate over the nature of the self between Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor. The dangers of the first pole are, of course, well described in the communitarian critique of liberalism: The self promoted therein is characterized by the pursuit of self-interests, by egocentrism, and by using others, as Aristotle said, as "living tools" to achieve private ends. Liberalism, in the communitarian view, entrenches this level of self through social institutions and practices. When society institutionalizes through an emphasis on individualism man's separation from and independence of relationships, the result is, as Kohlberg found in studying moral development in the Western world and as Habermas observed, egocentrism and hedonism raised to a principle. The danger of the second pole, the communitarian case, is that in being defined by and embedded in society's prescribed roles, statuses, and responsibilities, selves may become submerged in or fused with the collectivity. Though the traditional values of discipline, industriousness, loyalty, patriotism, convention, customs, deference, and civility may once again guide life, this life may well depend on a rigid social hierarchy or result in pressures and practices that make one conform. "In traditional societies, and even in the Greek [polis] or under feudalism, a man defined himself in terms of a set of established descriptions by means of which he situated and identified himself vis-a-vis other men" (Maclntyre, 1967, p. 124). The theory of compound individuality offers an alternative, a possible third pole of identification, seen as a balance between the differentiation pole of liberalism and the relationship pole of communitarianism. But it does not do so by tying these two antipodal alternatives to particular levels of the self—the communitarian view to the membership level and the liberal view to the autonomous level. More is involved than that. Rather, the theory of compound individuality uses insights from both while showing how each as a separate formulation of identity is incomplete and thus flawed. The deontological liberal asserts that individuals and their concomitant rights are prior to any obligations to society. Individual autonomy grants the person the power to choose among conceptions of the good and to rely on her own rationality for the standards by which choices are made. In challenging this assertion, the communitarians point out that such a view presupposes a self socially disengaged, a self that is without any constitutive attributes and is thus no self at all. Instead, they see the self, as stated, as inextricably situated in social circumstance and autonomy as exercised within aims and attachments already given. The theorist of compound individuality, building on extensive empirical research, posits a self-system that encompasses both, namely, agency that is unencumbered and self-definition that is socially situated. The communitarians are wrong, from this perspective, to suggest that the person cannot be, or should not be, separate from communal ends and relationships. Autonomy, born of formal operational thought, is based precisely on that separation. But liberals are wrong to suggest that in being separate from, and thus able to act on, social givens, the

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person is separate from every given. One's autonomy enables one to step back from and beyond communal boundaries, but not beyond all boundaries. To reflect on his social circumstances, a person must take up some position. Never without some perspective or particularities, the self is simply without these particularities. The liberal folly is to think that the self can exist or operate without any perspective, backdrop, or guide. The self is never without some self-definition. So whereas liberals accuse communitarians of developing selfhood through imposition, not choice, communitarians accuse liberals of developing selfhood through invention, not discovery. The theory of compound individuality shows both to be mistaken. To assume, as the liberal does, that selfhood can be created or chosen overlooks the strong communitarian position, substantiated by psychological research, that individuality is a social product and that the self at every level develops out of a social matrix and depends on sociality. Individuality, even individualism, can arise only after and by coming through membership. To assume, as a communitarian such as Sandel does, that selfhood can be discovered from within a clutter of preordained ends and attachments is to overlook the crucial separation that must exist between what is discovered and the one who discovers. Only a self separate from and thus not constituted by its ends could discover, attend to, and thus act on those ends. One can certainly identify with particular ends, ends that may indeed constitute one's self-definition. But these ends require commitment, which is possible only when there is a self separate from—and thus brought to and not found in—the relationship or cause or end. Self-reflectivity, then, permits one to discover that the ends that once constituted one's subjectivity are now ends from which one is separate and to which one can thus commit and relate. Autonomy, therefore, not only can attentuate but can also fortify and renew the relationship to one's sodality.1 As the theory of compound individuality shows, the self at every level as it integrates the prior levels becomes a compound of those levels. Yet at the autonomous level, the level of individuality, the self can also be a compound in a different way. Selfhood is characterized by both autonomy and constitutive relationships. Thus the self or individual is a compound not only of other levels but also of others. Although this is clearly a communitarian goal, compound individuality is not its realization, for here agency is constituted not by communal attachments but by dyadic relationships, that is, relationships with a few, particular others. The mutuality forged in these relationships makes one's self-definition relational, interactive, and intersubjective. The relationship is both internal in that one's life story cannot be told or understood without that of the other and external in that one's life is expressed in but not derived from the relationship. The relationship creates a mutual life as the partners coregulate their identities. But the relationship is a union of two selves, not a merger of one into the other. Nor is this identity community wide; the constitution of the self is relational, not communal. Compound individuality is the completion of the differentiation arrested at individualism. The self as an isolate, hiding in the notion of pristine self-sufficiency, is seen from this new perspective as an aberration. The individual can now withstand what the atomist could not: perspectives that challenge or threaten his own worldview and relationships that make demands on him and on his character. The com-

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pound individual tolerates these divergent viewpoints and, what is more, seeks them out. Now assured of agency regardless of the self-definition, the person can be intimate; she can share identity coregulation with another. This is a healthier person not only because of the nature of his relationships or of her autonomy, but also because of his or her ability to respond to a greater variety of situations, demands, experiences, people, and interpretations. The "spillover" from such an identity, though little can be said with certainty and without further research, is that the respect and concern and openness showed to others in these relationships can spread out into other aspects of the individual's life. The failings and ambiguities in the theories of liberal and communitarian selves should not blind us to the truths in both theories. The communitarian insistence on the social nature of identity is a reminder that the individuality we cherish is a social product. In that regard, communitarians are justified in demanding social obligations from individuals who owe for the level of selfhood that even permits them to forsake the community, even to forsake sociality. They would be justified, therefore, to suggest that one such social obligation might be mandatory national service, presumably with a range of choice. Liberal theory reminds us that the autonomous person, no longer identified as or through the community, can now identify with the community. For the first time the person can commit to standards, relationships, values, a shared way of life. Commitment is possible only because the person has relationships and is not those relationships. Thus commitment can mean deeper, because conscious, relationships. Missing from modern society, comments Sheldon Wolin, is the ability "to 'identify' with an adequate group, one which will provide membership; that is, a defined role and assured expectations" (1960, p. 357). But if they are able to make commitments, why can't modern, autonomous citizens identify with liberal associations? Myriad religious and political groups and causes are available; failing that, there is within liberal society unlimited opportunity to start such groups. Indeed, one might even be able to identify with a community circumscribing a total way of life, though such a decision must be autonomous and therefore revocable. Communitarians might retort that Wolin is arguing for something far different from liberal associations. Although it is true that liberal societies tolerate, though perhaps do not encourage, commitment to total communities, notice should be taken of how few and eccentric such communities are. In reply, the liberal says that these are few because to modern sensibilities— especially to those who cherish autonomy—the total community will always appear exceptional if not eccentric. Surely the communitarian must concur that some citizens can establish a stable identity by defining themselves according to their professions, unions, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, sexual preference, hobbies, or sports teams. Yet in none of these memberships is anything but voluntary obligation placed on the individual. If a demand is excessive or, worse, if the group should disappoint the member, then the first and expected response is to walk away. Membership in liberal associations is still instrumental to the achievement of the members' individual ends, and the individual's identity remains stable amidst such groups only because she can readily find a new group as a means to the satisfaction of her interests.


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Whereas liberals gather to pursue the interests of the individuals involved, communitarians seek something outside themselves, a telos. This end or purpose provides meaning and role, expectations and solidarity, as all work together to attain or embody the end, however constituted. The relationships forged in this sharing define the persons engaged. Thus the communitarians look to the polis, the medieval village, the virtuous republic to find the "defined roles and assured expectations" that are not chosen but that inhere in the shared way of life. Other roles and expectations exist beyond the confines of the community, but beyond that horizon the very structure and meaning of one's life and thus of one's self are in jeopardy. The life in such a constitutive community is, however, without full participation. Community can demand obligations from its members, because their identity is socially constituted and derives from the group. To sustain this stable social identity, to ensure social solidarity through defined ends and boundaries, the community must isolate autonomous critique. The community can demand modification of a member's behavior, but it cannot be the other way round. Questioning the community cannot be allowed to lead to changes; it cannot have any "cumulative structural consequences," for the community will protect its integrity by ensuring that scrutiny "lacks a social base within which it could crystallize into a counterworld, with its own institutionalized cluster of counteridentities" (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 65). Challenging the shared way of life undermines the stability of the social order and thus the security of members' identities. Then relationships can be based not on the persons within the roles but on the roles themselves. When persons become secondary to their roles and the telos, when the person goes but the relationships remain because the roles continue intact, then, as liberals argue, is this not the way in which the individual in community can be sacrificed for the good of the cause, for the cause of the good? Just as communitarianism cannot abide full participation, lest it destroy the communal framework, so liberalism limits full participation lest it jeopardize the public/private boundary, challenge rights, and disrupt the pursuit of self-interest. So the communitarian longing for the stable but restrictive social orders of antiquity and the Middle Ages continues to have purchase today because of the failings of liberal democratic societies. The social bonds of such societies, based on contracts voluntarily entered for the mutual advantage and associations that reflect such contracts, are not, the communitarians argue, strong enough to provide social cohesion or secure personal identity. In a society that does not value relationships other than as means to attain private interests, it is easy to sequester the elderly in old-age homes; to endure the poor sleeping on sidewalks; to release the insane and deficient, as a means of curbing expenses, into the life of the streets; to maintain human life by means of machines—thus clashing the right to life with the right to die—while performing abortions—thus clashing the right to life with the right to choose. The theory of compound individuality offers no clean reconciliation of liberalism and communitarianism. What it does offer is a view of human nature that shows the theories of the self, and their concomitants, of both liberalism and communitarianism to be half-right and half-wrong. The theory also shows some-

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thing else: Communitarians need to take seriously the liberal emphasis on autonomy and its protection—individual rights. Liberals need to take seriously the communitarian notion of constitutive identity. Although, as I hoped I have shown, there are fundamental problems with the communitarian positions on the nature of the self and of community—problems that doom their enterprise—nevertheless, the communitarians show liberals that individualism is, at the least, an inadequate foundation for their political theory. Does the theory of compound individuality supply an adequate foundation? It does. Indeed, the entire "tour" through political theory and developmental psychology leads to this point. Although historically, liberal theories give pride of place to individualism, if only going so far with the idea as to emphasize the centrality in liberalism of individual rights, liberalism need not embrace individualism as defined in this study, that is, as atomism or self-sufficiency. The true heart of liberalism should not be individualism but, instead, compound individuality.2 In the remainder of this final chapter I shall talk about liberalism as based on compound individuality. This is liberalism as we ought to have it, not, of course, the one we now have or the one we can simply live with. Compound individuality, and the psychological theory that informs it, is the liberal ideal. It is a regulative ideal, offering both the goal toward which liberal selves should proceed and the means, the social and political conditions, for proceeding, namely, "generative participation." Modern or "New" Liberals Individualism or atomism is not a theory of the liberal self but of the libertarian self. The quest for self-sufficiency and the view of politics as the pursuit of selfish interests reflect the resuscitation of unadulterated classical liberalism. Both are characteristic of libertarianism.3 Gerald Gaus argues that modern liberalism begins precisely where individualism ends: Modern liberals are concerned with the sociality of individuals and the integration of individuals within society.4 The view of liberalism that I am offering here—liberalism beyond individualism—is therefore a continuation of the "revisioning" of liberalism undertaken by T. H. Green and his disciples (Hobhouse, Hobson, Ritchie, Bosanquet) and by John Dewey in America. These "revisionists" did not see persons as social atoms but as involved in relations of reciprocity so that one's goals, beliefs, and motivations were linked to these relationships. The problem for these modern or "new" liberals, then, was to retain the individuality of each person while simultaneously linking him through these relationships into a constitutive network. This, of course, is the communitarian enterprise, and what the theory of compound individuality says to communitarians about the central weakness of their theories pertains no less to these modern liberals: The attempt to combine individual autonomy and constitutive community is a mistake. They cannot be reconciled, and any attempt to do so is to bind oneself to failure. Therefore, the view of liberalism as compound individuality is a continuation of what modern liberals started and is also a redemption of their mission. The true


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liberal enterprise is to reconcile individuality and sociality, not community. The constitutive relationships characteristic of compound individuality approximate community or, more accurately, approach it by degrees, without falling into the traps in constitutive community. These points, all flowing from prior chapters, will be addressed in due course. But first, to explain how modern liberals fall into the communitarian dilemma, and thus where my view differs from theirs, I shall take up briefly, after a slightly discursive peregrination, the modern liberal theory of selfdevelopment and the notions of individuality and community of John Dewey. To say that modern liberalism is fundamentally characterized by the desire to reconcile the individual and community fails to distinguish it from virtually every modern political ideology, from Marxism to anarchism to conservatism. So to be a modern liberal theorist, Gerald Gaus adds, the attempted reconciliation must include a specified form and a particular theory of human nature and human development (see Gaus, 1983, "Introduction"). Whereas classical liberals such as John Locke and James Mill saw society as the framework for the pursuit of private ends, thus reconciling community and the individual by conceptualizing the public interest as the sum of individual interests, the modern liberal is more likely to emphasize interdependence instead of dependence, cooperation not competition, and mutual appreciation over private pleasure. This position, according to modern liberals, is a psychological necessity, for in their image of human nature, individuals, no matter how highly developed, always need others to complete their lives. Persons, in other words, must look to others to complete their natures. As the contemporary liberal philosopher John Rawls says, because we have many more capacities than we can develop, we look to those who have developed capacities different from ours. In so doing we find our nature completed. "This idea of finding completion in others," comments Gaus, "is the crucial conceptual link between the modern liberals' conception of individuality and their avowal of man's natural social interest, i.e., his interest in the laws of others" (1983, p. 53). This perspective may take modern liberals out of an atomistic orientation, but not completely, for relationships on this view remain instrumental. Gaus claims otherwise. This liberal social interest, he observes, is distinct from any sense that one might be interested in others "merely as a means to our gratification" (1983, p. 56). He suggests, instead, that it is an intrinsic interest in the lives of others and the need to share experiences with them. Yet consider Rawls's position: "We need one another as partners in ways of life that are engaged in for their own sake, and the successes and enjoyments of others are necessary for and complementary to our own good" (1977, pp. 522-23). This is precisely the nature of instrumental relationships. Gaus believes, following social psychologist Solomon Asch, that atomistic relationships are entered into to meet narrowly self-centered needs. But this view is oversimplified, and Rawls is more on target. We may enjoy a way of life for its own sake, but we need others to enjoy it. We need others who complement both our way of life and ourselves. In terms from the theory of compound individuality, instrumental relationships are those we enter to reinforce our own self-definitions. Along similar lines, the modem liberal ideal is self-realization, in Hobhouse's phrase, "full development of personality" (1964, p. 69). Yet these liberals realized

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that no single individual can develop all the potentialities of human beings. So we must look to others. Although they may not compliment our way of life or selves, they complement them. What others do is useful as a reflection for understanding our own lives and, on a grander scale, our nature. But with this comes a dilemma: "Concentration and specialization are necessary if particular faculties are to be highly developed, yet specialization seems to lead to feelings of loss for those possibilities never explored" (Gaus, 1983, p. 41). We therefore use others to alleviate these feelings of loss. And in the context of self-development as described by modern liberals there seems no way out of the utilitarian perspective, other than to offset these feelings by burying them—that is, by retreating into pure or defensive individualism in which others are not important to or necessary for self-development or self-definition. Thus in trying to establish society, and politics in particular, as the setting for self-development, liberals leave themselves open to criticism for treating others as means to the individual's own end.5 Regardless of the problems that modern liberals have with the nature of social relationships, most modem liberals were committed to a theory of human nature in which individuals were made, not born. They were committed to what I have acknowledged to be the principal communitarian contribution—to wit, that the origins of individuality are social. In Liberalism and Social Action John Dewey argued against the early liberal conception of individuality in which persons were conceived of "as something ready-made, already possessed, and needing only the removal of certain legal restrictions to come into full play" (1963, p. 39). In place of early liberalism Dewey proposed "renascent" liberalism in which individuality is the result of "continuous growth." Individuality "is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation, but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical, including 'cultural' economic, legal and political institutions" ("The Future of Liberalism," 1946, p. 136). Dewey is not specific on the nature of the relationships required for the development of individuality. His emphasis is on the need for social institutions for fostering "continuous growth." This seems to accord with the theory of compound individuality and the social nature of individuality. Yet for Dewey, liberalism ought to aim at a kind of individual different from compound individuality. Indeed, he has in mind "rugged individuals" who think independently and who are free from "parasitical dependence" on charity. While clearly championing the value of autonomy— "to be liberal means to value each man's right to choose and to act according to his own judgment" (Damico, 1978, p. 74)—and while standing against servile, oppressive, and regimented dependence, Dewey may have overlooked the benefit of interdependence in the sense conveyed through compound individuality. Yet it is a concept, I think, of which Dewey would have approved, for he acknowledged that liberalism, in recognizing "historic relativity" and by being committed to "experimental procedure," necessarily "carries with it the idea of continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and liberty" (Gaus, 1983, p. 7; see also Dewey, 1963, pp. 51-52). Although Dewey would concur on the nature of individuality, a different area presents a more formidable problem: Dewey's understanding of community. It is the key to his attempt to reconcile individuality and sociality,6 and it is a problem


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because Dewey does not differentiate thick or constitutive community from thin or associational community (strong association): Men live in community in virtue of the things they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as the sociologists say. (1916, p. 4)

Dewey does, however, differentiate between community and association. Association is simple interaction among anything, even "electrons, atoms and molecules. . . . [B]ut a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertakings engaged in" (1979, p. 159). This differentiation is not enough either to define community or to differentiate it from association (see Dewey. 1979, Chap. 5). Associations can easily add Dewey's function of communication without achieving what could truly be called a community. Language may place us in a social context, for language and even concepts can be shared, and thus they are communal. Yet that hardly situates us in relationships or in a community, any more than our interactions with a bank teller do.7 Sharing the same language, or even the same norms, is not to suggest beyond the weakest metaphorical link that we are interrelated. The possibility for intimate relationship may exist between persons, but it is no more actual in the mere fact of communicating than it would be to say that because all humans share the same physiology and use it to play sports together that we are thereby in a community. Communities are established on certain requirements for how persons will actually relate to one another, not on certain superficial similarities. Therefore Dewey's definitions of both association and community are too easy to meet. Yet if we review Dewey's quotation on community, we shall find that he has more in mind for community than I have identified. Dewey does not go so far as to say that persons must have in common the same aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge, but when he adds "like-mindedness" this seems the implication. This description then rubs up against the definition of constitutive community and its shared way of life. There, it will be remembered, communards are not tied through a language to a common understanding; they are embedded in that understanding. But simply communicating with one another—despite implications of shared language and concepts—is not going to establish, as Dewey knows, this sense of community. If Dewey meant that persons must be able to discuss and evaluate aims, aspirations, beliefs, and so on, rather than seeing that persons must share them—in other words, had he placed the emphasis on the possibility of common understanding and not, as written, on the need for like-mindedness—then he and I would agree, as it is the commonality underlying the possibility of mutual understanding that unites liberals and leads them to participation in associations. Provided that understanding comes from discussion and debate, this commonality is also what keeps them there. Gaus comments that the modern liberals he studied were "ultimately driven back to the balancing of opposites," that is, commonality and individuality, or what I have discussed as community and autonomy. "The type of community to which all were ultimately attracted is, in theory, in tension with individual liberty" (Gaus,

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1983, pp. 108, 109). But if we drop the notion that individuality, because it is a social product, must be in part constituted by community, and we substitute the position on which modern liberals agree—namely, that individuality must be constituted by relationships or sociality—then compound individuality will relieve the tension. Liberals can have constitutive relationships in a society of diverse ways of life and worldviews, including diverse conceptions of the good, while retaining their individual autonomy to scrutinize and evaluate those ranges of diversity through a politics of dialogue and a private arrangement of "thick" associations. It does seem that a politics of dialogue, a democracy built of generative participation, would increase "commonality" as it makes possible the expansion of shared interests, values, ideas, and ends, just as Dewey suggested (1916, p. 84). But a politics of dialogue can also heighten divisions and disagreements. Whereas harmony and cooperation were central values of modern liberals, and would be in the liberal scheme that I am outlining, the liberal ideal draws on and even relies on conflict. It does so for two reasons. First, conflict is not just divisive; it can also be creative and, like diversity, even unifying. Second, as Sir Isaiah Berlin noted, values clash not only between groups and cultures but also "within the breast of a single individual" (1988, p. 14). This was the profound and original truth in Berlin's message in "Two Concepts of Liberty," a truth unfortunately overshadowed by Berlin's rendering into contemporary idiom Constant's dichotomy of ancient and modern liberties.8 As Berlin said, there will always be conflicts of values that are unresolvable. This is pluralism, and it is the world in which humans must function. It is the world that liberalism addresses: These collisions (of values) are of the essence of ... what we are. . . . We must say that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; that principles which are harmonized in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act." (Berlin, 1988, p. 15) Pluralism, the world of conflicting worldviews, is the cause and consequence of autonomy. To attempt to end those clashes either would be an exercise in frustration or would eventuate in a surge of coercion that could stamp out in the name of the Higher Self the diversity and autonomy of individuals. This was the great danger that Berlin saw in positive liberty, and it served as a powerful critique of totalitarian regimes and ideologies and also of those forms of liberalism that might guide its practitioners down the totalitarian path. For it was just this notion of positive freedom as self-mastery and self-realization that Berlin feared and T. H. Green unwittingly encouraged. Green argued that there is an objective "eternal consciousness" that is our higher or "better self" (T. H. Green, 1883, pp. 24-25, 102). The goal of each individual, said Green, is the goal of society—to perfect ourselves in accordance with this authentic or higher self. In reaction to such notions, though more in reaction to the barbarisms and "final solutions" committed in the name of salvation, Berlin (1969, pp. 167-70) wrote orT self-development as positive freedom, suitable as neither liberal means nor the


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liberal end. In its place he erected negative freedom or noninterference. There is in Berlin's liberalism an inviolate private sphere in which each person is free to follow the life she thinks to be the best life. Self-development, however, does not have to drop entirely from sight. Instead, it refers to the autonomy of the individual, sovereign in his private sphere, to pursue in public his private interests with the help of like-minded others. Yet this brings us back to liberalism as a world of individualism, in which society is a collection of careening private personalities, and every interaction, like billiard balls, is a collision, with each spinning off in an independent orbit.9 Liberal theorists like Berlin think that Green, and presumably others like Rawls, went too far on the path of positive freedom toward the shrine of the final solution.10 But I think they failed to go far enough. Their conceptualizations of "self" in self-development, of individuality, and of sociality were not potent enough to get them beyond the traps of individualism and its forms of autonomy or beyond community and its form of constitutiveness. At this point I shall be more positive about what and how compound individuality can redeem the modern liberal enterprise. It can do so, as I have repeated ad nauseum, by showing how individuality is composed not of autonomy but of autonomy and also constitutive relationships. What are the normative implications for liberalism of compound individuality? First, compound individuality offers liberalism a positive and powerful notion of virtues; second, it offers a vision of democracy as a vehicle for self-development and the creation of a compound common good; and third, it offers a theory of liberal associational ties that will not be sufficient to engender community but will be sufficient to establish a sense of social cohesion if not social solidarity. I shall in due course take up each of these implications, though I trust at this point the reader has a clear picture of how compound individuality contributes to or enables offers two and three. But first I want to point out that all of this is predicated on the truth in Isaiah Berlin's message, that pluralism expresses a profound social and therefore political truth and also a psychological truth: Values clash not only among groups and cultures but also "within the breast of a single individual." It is this truth that brings persons up from the membership self and into the autonomous self. At that point, for liberals to have compound individuality on a societywide scale—if they want, that is, to move beyond individualism and reconcile individuality and constitutive sociality—they must press through the marketplace of ideas for the social and political institutions that can foster compound individuality. The theory of compound individuality holds the necessary ontology, a theory of human nature that can reconcile the modern liberal emphasis on individuality and the communitarian focus on sociality. Each of these theories alone continues to have influence, because both represent earlier ontologies that were prevalent historically and were grounded psychologically in early stages of self-development. To establish liberalism as self-development toward compound individuality, I need to "rewrite" or refocus the psychological theory underlying the liberal self. In developmental psychology the model for recent liberalism has been Kohlberg's theory of moral development. Yet Kohlberg's theory, especially given the problems with his higher stages as discussed in Chapter 2, is not sensitive to the nature and problems of

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pluralism in modern societies. There is, however, a developmental psychological theory that is sensitive to these, a theory that recognizes and honors the clash of values facing each citizen of a liberal polity and that presents empirical evidence for, as well as a realistic appraisal of, our psychological movement into the pluralism characteristic of modern cultures.11 This is the theory of psychologist William Perry.

A New Liberal Psychology William Perry's work, mentioned earlier in this book, is based on both cognitive development and ego development. His empirical studies showed college-age students working through nine stages or "positions," as he called them, of ethical relativism.12 College provides an ideal environment for considering and meeting challenges and conflicts. Students are stimulated to work with formal operational thought as the means for handling the clash of values and worldviews. The realization of plural views, what Perry calls "relativism," is, as we have seen, hardly met with equanimity. It is typically accompanied, writes Michael Chandler, by a sense of uneasiness that is hard to shake off. There is a gradual awareness of what Sartre called a "plurality of solitudes"—that each person's point of view relentlessly cancels out the viewpoint of another. This potentially ominous and isolative awareness heralds in a growing sense of estrangement from others. (Chandler, 1975, p. 172) The first three strategies or positions for dealing with relativism are composed of ways for dismissing it, says Perry, by hanging onto the conditioned or inherited view that authority figures are always right. In a university the professor is the authority; therefore, what she says must be correct. In these positions is an overlap with or perfect fit between Perry's theory and Kohlberg's conventional stages. Perry's subjects construe "all issues of truth and morality in the terms of a sweeping and unconsidered differentiation between ingroup versus out-group. ... In the familiar world, morality and personal responsibility consist of simple obedience." Learning consists, therefore, of memorizing the "correct responses, answers, and procedures as assigned by Authority" (1968, p. 59). Truth, in short, is what an authority figure says it is, whether that authority is one's parents or teachers or peers or society at large (politicians, police, judges, etc.). What Perry's students exhibit is what Chandler (1975) found in all the strategies of his subjects when first confronting a pluralistic universe: They attempted to deal with the multiplicity of perspectives and the relativism that would ensue by denying out of hand their legitimacy. But some students solve the problem by "dismissing" relativism in the opposite way. Rather than falling back on the apodictic directives of authorities, they accept the view that there are plural perspectives but see each one as right for that person. All perspectives are thereby equal, and therefore it does not matter if yours contradicts mine. Kohlberg found evidence of such strategies in his studies, and he had to build


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them into his own model of moral development as the "phase" or transitional Stage 4/5, the "regression" from the principled or logically complex stages to a hedonistic, egocentric, and instrumentalist attitude reminiscent of Kohlberg's own Stage 2. In the face of overwhelming evidence, even Kohlberg had to admit that these young adults were moving from more formally operational thinking back to a stage of less complex forms of judgment. But such an admission jeopardized his entire model (see Chapter 2 and also Kohlberg & Kramer, 1969). Perry had no such problems, for in his model the basis of moral development is learning to come to grips with a pluralistic, diverse, relative world. Rather than an exception or a phase, relativistic thinking in all its forms is the rule. Unlike Kohlberg who sees relativism transcended in Kantian fashion by principled thinking, Perry, like Berlin, sees a persistent and irreducible plurality of conflicting values. The strong evidence behind Perry's scheme, and the ring of common sense it sounds for those of us who grew up in Western liberal democracies, leads to the conclusion that liberal psychology is made not of Kohlberg's model but of a hybrid of Kohlberg and Perry. Given the overwhelming data, cross-cultural and longitudinal, that support Kohlberg's preconventional and conventional stages (Stages 1 to 4) and given the similarity of emphasis on conformity to and defense of authority found at Kohlberg's conventional stages and at Perry's first three positions, I suggest that liberal psychology, as part of the liberal view on human nature, should be a hybrid of Kohlberg's first four stages as a base and Perry's final six positions on relativism on top. In other words, lop off Kohlberg's fanciful postconventional stages and affix Perry's "postrelativist" positions as the head. I am not abandoning, then, an essentialist ontology, but I am building relativism in toward the top while jettisoning Kohlberg's absolute principles. What is the result? What does this hybrid psychological model tell us we look like? First, Perry too posits a transitional stage, "Position 4," at which conformity ebbs, and the reasoner comes to see the world as a place where "anything goes" (1968, p. 107). Perry calls this transition, in the face of relativism, "detachment," as reasoning about moral issues is simply a game. Reasoning is no more legitimate than intuition or flipping a coin. Because all values are relative and all are subjective, all are equally good. Here is Kohlberg's reasoning egocentric hedonist—our atomist.13 Like Kohlberg, Perry argues that this phase passes away. But the result is not agreement on a set of absolute moral principles. Rather, for Perry "detachment" yields to positions of "commitment" in the face of relativism. What marks the change to commitment? The person realizes that he must either make a commitment or abrogate his responsibility. Relativism has made choice a possibility. But choose how? How do I choose one way of life over another, one set of values over another? Perry's subjects come to realize that although they see a multiplicity and diversity of viewpoints and recognize relativism in that sense—namely, that many people believe many different things and have different ways of seeing and living in the world—they all do not conclude that "everyone has a right to any opinion whatsoever" or that "one opinion is as good as another."14 Instead, they decide to commit to certain values, ideas, standards, and ways of life; to make choices and

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commitments after reasoned considerations. They realize that the way to handle a relativisitic world is not to succumb to it—that is, to explain it away or rationalize it as an atomist would by forming a rigid defense—but to evaluate the options available and commit to one path in the full understanding that reason, because there might be more than one cogent interpretation, might not be a sufficient criterion for making that choice. Reason can leave these subjects with more than one choice. The world is now seen as relative, a world of complexity with few absolutes. The person "discovers that he has undertaken not a finite set of decisions but a way of life" (Perry, 1968, p. 153). Perry's Positions 7, 8, and 9 represent actual experience in making commitments as a way of life, as the person carries out, or forward, commitments earlier made and modified. These later positions indicate an increasing ability to make such commitments. Position 9, for example, brings the realization that although the person knows herself, she is "to be forever on the move," always evaluating and considering commitments and reasons for and against them and always searching for a balance in a true Deweyan sense between immersion in action and self-reflective contemplation. The notion of balance is important to liberalism. The complexity of this world of multiple perspectives, the world Perry calls relativistic, especially in the conflict among value systems, demands a capacity to confront conflict and contradictions, to tolerate paradox in the midst of responsible action. The resolution of these conflicts is rarely a solution; it is a balance, a homeostasis, a dynamic equilibrium. It is the tension described earlier between differentiation—reliance on one's autonomy—and relationships—the need to be included or to relate. Therefore, as I argued in Chapter 5, the diversity found in the world is in part a reflection of the diversity found within. Piaget explains that the innate cognitive structures are educed when the environment offers challenges that require the self to look at the world in a new way in order to achieve a balance or equilibrium. Compound individuality, as the model of the liberal self, can arise only out of the confrontation of the self with diverse ways of life and competing conceptions of the good. Therefore liberals should embrace this diversity or pluralism and not seek to retreat or escape from it, as atomists would. So the quintessential liberal attitude is the one laid out by Berlin: Diverse value systems, worldviews, and conceptions of the good life are irreducible and often irreconcilable. As a result, liberals ought to hold the values of tolerance in the face of diversity and of reason when trying to adjudicate the clashing of divergent views. The liberal psychology that I have adumbrated, the hybrid of Kohlberg and Perry, indicates that for formal operational selves there is no way to reduce pluralism to an absolute; no way, that is, to substitute an objective standard for relativism. Moral commitments and political commitments are made by keeping in mind both principles and principals; they are made through contextualism. Yet there are ways to try to reduce pluralism and to try to escape relativism. Clearly, there have been and are attempts, psychological and political, to find an objective standard by which to eradicate uncertainty, if not diversity, or under which to subsume diverse systems. Berlin's theme in all his work has been to illustrate this quest for certainty in various political ideologies and the harm that ensues from it. Atomism is the psychological equivalent. Neither is the way of liberalism. Iron-


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ically, Kohlberg's theory represents an atomistic and thus a nonliberal quest, as in his view moral development ends when reasoners have reached Stage 6, a position from which moral dilemmas are solved by recourse to absolute principles that would be agreed to by all rational persons. This is an invitation to individualism, to an intellectual self-sufficiency in which one need not consult others once these universal principles have been reached. Thus even if the principles of Kohlberg's Stage 6 are the most glorious that liberalism can ever offer, they are in his scheme principles that hold without exception. Kohlberg's ideal is therefore the autonomous self, but as the atomist and not as the compound individual, for the compound individual is open to and welcoming of situations and solutions that might modify his principles.15 Psychologically and politically, then, the liberal self as compound individual cherishes diversity and relativism, because while being right—committing to a path—he also recognizes that he may be wrong—a theme to which I shall return. Unlike other ideologies, including variants of classical liberalism, that find atomism and the possibilities of absolutes, rigid doctrines, final solutions, or constrained ends as psychologically and politically compelling, liberalism lives, will live, and ought to live in a world in which "ultimate values are irreconcilable" and "the ends of men are many" (Berlin, 1969, pp. l-li)

The Bugbear of Relativism If this is so, then aren't liberals in the very situation that the communitarians have criticized? Aren't liberals condemned to live in a world of relative values, ends, and beliefs that are, as Maclntyre suggested in After Virtue (1981), at bottom nothing but subjective preferences based on taste? Indeed, Perry himself says that his "postrelativisitc"16 positions emphasize "emotional and aesthetic assessments," a shift from reason to a subject's "style" (1968, p. 205). So the ultimate criterion by which we commit ourselves is really aesthetic, and all difficult cases reduce to matters of taste. To explore this major objection, I must first explain what I mean by relativism. So far the term, following Perry, has been broadly and loosely defined to mean the presence of multiple or plural views. More specifically, however, relativism refers to the philosophical position in which the value and belief systems, what I have been calling worldview, of persons and cultures are relative to their historical and existential circumstances. Furthermore, relativism carries with it, as Fishkin has explained (1984), the idea that one value system is as good as any other. What works for you is good for you; what works for me is good for me. There is no way to judge one as better than another. Going further, some relativists would add that two such systems cannot even be discussed, that they are incommensurable.17 This would seem, then, to be exactly the position Perry is in and the corner, amply described by communitarians, into which I have painted liberalism. But relativism, in my view, does not trap liberals in solipsism and emotivism. Rather, it reinforces those liberal values of tolerance and use of reason. Yet Perry has concluded that reason cannot be used when we make our deepest

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commitments. But that is not quite what he said. Commitments are always made after reasonable deliberation. The problem with reason, a problem that liberals have often overlooked,18 is that reason will not get us to self-evident truths, to the absolute, objective bedrock for establishing liberal polities. All persons confronting the inevitable relativism of viewpoints, values, and goals find that reason provides a wide berth for its use. Reason can provide more than one legitimate context and interpretation with no way of choosing among them. This Perry describes as a choice that reflects a move from the assertion of individualism in certainty to the affirmation of individuality in doubt. This individual, the compound individual as the liberal self, is willing in the face of uncertainty to make commitments, what Perry calls "acts of choice," regardless of that uncertainty (1968, p. 135). The liberal self affirms "his own position from within himself in full awareness that reason can never completely justify him or assure him" (1968, p. 136). There is still no justification for this choice, a critic might claim, outside taste. Liberals have not escaped from the corner and cannot do so but through their own subjective preferences. If liberalism does not honor the objective standard or absolute, then it must live with the consequences: that all values, goals, and beliefs are subjective, arbitrary, even whimsical. All matters of morality thereby reduce to emotivism, or what Maclntyre calls Niet/schean nihilism. Yet why does the absence of objectivity in moral claims automatically translate these claims into mere arbitrary preferences? Why does that then mean that all values are therefore equally valid? Liberals need and should want to accept relativism as pluralism, as multiple perspectives, but they need not accept relativism as moral nihilism or their commitments as whimsical tastes. Liberals should, and do, take the position that moral claims, values, standards, and beliefs are relative but are relative to reason and evidence. Owing to argument—that is, presentations of reasons and evidence—some values and claims are better than others. Determining whether one value or set of values is better than another requires discourse, the weighing of evidence, empirical and rational. It is plausible to suggest that one holds a value for some reason. Even taste or preference is a reason, for the assumption is that having or acting on this taste is at least preferable to not having or acting on it (just as not having it may be preferable to having it). So we have a reason for making a value choice, judgment, or decision. But can we then go on to say whether our taste or preference itself is a "good" reason? Having good reasons presupposes a commonality of language and, in the broadest of terms, a sharing of values, so that what constitutes a reason and constitutes evidence is recognized by the participants in the discourse. This, of course, is not to say that one recognizes all reason and evidence as valid or acceptable. Rather, it is that there is agreement on what counts as a reason ("That is a reason, but it is not a good one.") or as evidence ("That is evidence, but it is only circumstantial."). Ronald Beiner uses playing chess as a metaphor for evaluating good reasons: "In playing chess, only in certain cases is there a single demonstrably 'correct' move. In general, there is rather a plurality of 'good' moves, and each of these potentially 'good' moves is arguable, that is, can be argued for on grounds publicly presented for comparison and assessment" (Perry, 1968, p. 133). The point of dialogue, of "public" presentation, is to show one's claims to be


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grounded in reason(s) that others can accept as reasons even when they disagree. Some of these reasons will be "bad" reasons, ones that can be shown logically or through evidence to be wrong. For example, it can be demonstrated scientifically that human intelligence cannot be measured by head size. Therefore, any argument for justifying academic tracking on the basis of intelligence measured by head size can be proved to be unreasonable. There are "good" reasons, therefore, for rejecting such claims. Reasons are "good" in two ways. First, they are held to be persuasive or sound or coherent relative to a group, culture, or tradition. Reasons are good relatively; that is, relative to a context that itself can change through new reasons or evidence. Does this mean that persons in a context holding a certain reason can be assured that that reason is right and good? They cannot, because, second, to be good, reason must also conform to standards—consistency and laws of logic—that we think operate independent of the context. What about a culture that does not accept our context, that does not understand or honor consistency and laws of logic? This is exactly the communitarian point: It cannot be said that such standards are independent of context, of all community. How, for example, could a liberal prove to a culture that its annual sacrifice of humans does not bring the sun up every morning? The liberal cannot adduce Western empirical evidence, because in the context of this particular culture such evidence is irrelevant. He might present our reasons and evidence, but these are reasons and evidence as the liberal sees them. But all of this is based on the assumption that he can convince them and possibly that he must convince them. What the liberal should do is try to engage in dialogue to establish first the commonality of language and concepts, the most important of which is to determine what the culture thinks is a good reason and what might count as evidence. If there is no agreement on that, then further discussion will be pointless. Then he can conclude that there are two incommensurable systems. But the liberal does not then conclude that this culture's practice is true for them. He concludes that their system is wrong and immoral. Does he then impose his views on them and force them to stop the sacrifices? To pursue that question I shall consider a practice slightly closer to home, a view from somewhere. In Spheres of Justice Michael Walzer claims that justice is relative, which to him means that any way of life is just "if its substantive life is lived in a certain way— that is, in a way faithful to the shared understandings of the members" (1983, p. 313). This is, if it can be said that there is such a thing, a standard communitarian position. To combat the dilemma that relativism reduces moral claims and practices to arbitrary individual preferences, communitarians erect, or posit, an inviolate framework within which to choose—a framework, as Maclntyre said, that we are not free to accept or reject. This overcomes the problem of relativism or arbitrary choices in a strange way, if it overcomes them at all. For the community choices could be as collectively arbitrary as the individual's choices: "This is the way we like to do it; this is the way we've always done it." So individual choices are not arbitrary; they are in conformity to the communal values. But the communal choices themselves, the framework, might be arbitrary. Reason is applied by the communitarian self within the framework, and choices are made in conformity with the

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reasons and evidence recognized in and honored by the community. Good reasons are therefore defined by our first point—that is, that they are relative to the context—but the second point—that standards are independent of the context—has no purchase.19 Thus, says Walzer, to override the shared understandings of a community "is always to act unjustly" (1983, p. 314). So for Walzer the caste system in India is a just institution for India, and it would be unjust for any liberal, or any foreign regime, to attempt to override it. A liberal, I suggest, would accept this position on nonintervention, but not for the reasons that Walzer cites. Indeed, Walzer seems to be in a bind, for in his view not only can no other society intervene, but no other society can even criticize the caste system or suggest that another way of life is a better one. From a liberal perspective such a conclusion is unwarranted. Indeed, such a conclusion manifests a fundamental misunderstanding of what a liberal would claim. A liberal who holds on the basis of some evidence and reasons that a caste system is unjust and wrong in her society is also claiming that it is unjust and wrong in any society. The liberal acknowledges that her claim is relative, but it is not relative to the history or nature of the society engaged in the practice. Rather, it is relative to the reasons and evidence justifying the claim. This position does not lead to the conclusion that liberals therefore ought to unite and are justified in uniting to eradicate the Indian caste system. That act could result in an even greater injustice: not only, as Walzer says, the disruption of an autochthonous way of life but also an invasion of a nation and the imposition of values. Moreover, the liberal must admit, and remain open to, the possibility of challenges to and refutations of her own position, the liberal framework itself. Communitarians, on the other hand, cannot accept that scrutiny or openness, because to them claims are relative only to the communal context. That context is inviolate or at least not to be judged from any position or by any criteria outside that framework.20 In determining for herself whether her reasons and framework are good ones, the liberal searches for common ground with other frameworks, knowing that in these different frameworks her reasons may not be acceptable or even recognized as reasons. Therefore, a view or opinion that can be affirmed on the basis of reason or evidence is one that the liberal deems valid and true. But because that claim is relative to the reasons and evidence supporting it, the liberal acknowledges that evidence can change. Thus one's opinion might be true for the time being, but it might turn out to be false later. Tastes, however, are not based on good reasons; they express "mere opinions," by which I mean that they have no basis in reason. A person can say, "I like asparagus because I've eaten it a hundred times (evidence), and it tastes good (reason)." But this is not a reason that has any purchase with others, and so it does not count as a good reason. "The man who says 'This is good' and can give no reasons—who can provide no cognitive grounds for his claim—is expressing his likes and dislikes, but he is not making a genuine value judgment" (Spragens, 1981, p. 368). Spragen's statement about scientists pertains equally to the liberal attitude: Every person "is entitled to his 'opinion,' but he is only insofar as he is able and willing to support that opinion by argument and evidence" (1981, p. 374).


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Liberals are those who accept or ought to accept the use of reason to understand and attempt to settle political and moral disputes. The assumption behind this is twofold. First, this is a world of relativism, of plural perspectives and discordant moral claims that are not reducible to an objective viewpoint; second, there is, and liberals accept, standards of rationality, but not to the extent that liberals expect all rational persons to agree with their principles. When liberals engage in discourse, it is to ascertain both what others believe or claim and, equally if not more important, how they justify or explain the belief or claim. What standard or reasons constitute that justification? If your moral position is opposite mine or if your commitment is to a moral system that I reject—say, Nazism, for a clear-cut example—then I want to know why you made that commitment, how you can justify that position, and why you think it valuable (as commitments involve positive valuation). Liberals are those who talk out and argue about their commitments, especially to ways of life and the like. They do so for two reasons. First, argument—as built of evidence and reason—might determine which perspective, position, or policy is best, if not true. What is required for this is, as stated, a standard of rationality, not a set of universal principles, beliefs, values, or ends. Because moral and political claims are relative to evidence and reason, liberals cherish dialogue and argument to show that they are right, but on the assumption that they might well be wrong. The same reasons and evidence might appear in a very different light to someone else. "Here I can experience my proper conviction that my ideas are 'right' and still speak with humility" (Perry, 1968, p. 32). So dialogue helps liberals pursue the truth of a matter by clarifying and establishing good reasons for their own positions. This points to the second reason. The goal is to make claims that are intersubjective. Liberal positions are, as Thomas Spragens describes them, "fiduciary" (1981, p. 359). That is, they are not objective in the sense that they are held by all persons or ought to be held by all persons in the same way. Nor are they subjective, held only by me and derived from personal preference, taste, or emotion. Rather, they are intersubjective, held because there are publicly arguable and demonstrable reasons recognized by others as good reasons for doing so. "They are warranted by their explanatory power, their coherence, their exactitude of fit to acceptable data, their intellectual beauty or 'simplicity,' and their heuristic fertility" (Spragens, 1981, p. 359). That is the dialogic liberal ideal. Liberal reason therefore rests on and proceeds through intersubjectivity: Liberals argue and reason not just to come to an agreement, which is sometimes impossible, but to uncover together which positions are unreasonable and which are reasonable. This liberal position therefore not only permits conflict, as Fishkin points out (1984, p. 102), but also demands conflict in order to arrive at the truth. The clash of claims is important, because the liberal's principles or ideas or theories are incomplete. Yet incompletion does not lead or reduce to tentativeness in liberalism or in the liberal self. One holds positions firmly but openly: firmly because they have been validated intersubjectively—through reasoned dialogue—and openly because additional evidence, reasons, or experience may prove those positions to be wrong. Thus Allan Bloom, in his best-selling work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), had it backwards: Liberalism does not close the mind by opening it to everything (see the Introduction). Instead, liberalism requires that any proposition

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be tried out or put forth in moral and political discourse, for it is the qualities of one's reasons that will justify holding a position. In thinking that a particular position is the best one and not simply the best one for me, liberals welcome criticism, argument, conflict so as to test whether the position is in fact the best. If it were simply best for me, if liberals actually accepted relativism as all claims being equally subjective and thus equally valid, then a liberal would not entertain any assault on his position. He would simply claim: "Mine works for me; yours works for you." Liberals hold instead that their ethos, their way of life, is the best unless you can show, through reasons and evidence, otherwise. Here moral and political reasoning is like science: definite but not definitive. Liberals are like Socrates in a pluralist tradition: striving to make one's beliefs and values "reasonably" consistent and coherent while keeping them open to continuous reappraisal in light of the values, beliefs, and arguments of others.

Liberal Virtues and the Good Life Maclntyre sees politics in liberal or pluralist societies as "civil war carried on by other means" (1981, p. 253). This he sees as inevitable. When there is no unity to our moral discourse and when our assumptions, standards, and conceptions of the good always conflict, then politics can take no other form. But "civil war" is hyperbole. Conflict need not be internecine; it can be creative. That liberals lack consensual conceptions of the good or consensual ends, values, and beliefs is not to say that moral discourse cannot be rational or that political decisions cannot reasonably be made and agreed to. That, in fact, is what generative participation is designed to do, and that is all that liberals ought to demand. In a pluralistic world, as I argued in the previous section, that is all that they do demand. Liberal politics and moral discourse are underlaid by agreement on essentials. Liberals agree on the need for publicly argued reasons and evidence in order to judge moral and political claims. In short, liberals agree on the mode of argument necessary to establish the validity of moral and political claims. Liberals may not share assumptions about the good life, but they share enough in language to be able to disagree and agree and to carry on a dialogue about those assumptions. So liberals have in common the language with which to agree and disagree, concepts about which to agree and disagree, and a mode of argument for adjudicating and evaluating those conflicts. If there were no such fundamental agreement, if liberals truly believed that all conflicting claims were incommensurable, there would be nothing about which to disagree. This fundamental agreement serves as a framework in which we disagree. But notice that this is not a communitarian framework like Taylor's "horizon of evaluations." At the same time this liberal framework, contra Dewey, is not enough to generate community. It does not commit us to any substantive way of life. But it does commit us to some notions of what is good. In all probability, Maclntyre, for example, would not disagree with this. Communitarians do not argue that liberal discourse offers no commitments; rather, it offers the wrong kind of commitments. Liberal discourse lacks commitments to "one cosmology rather than another, one


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relationship of local law and custom to cosmic order rather than another, one justification of particular relationships of individuals to community and both to land and to landscape rather than another" (Maclntyre, 1987, p. 405). The commitments of liberalism, abstract and therefore weak, are not substantive enough to resolve our disagreements. For communitarians like Maclntyre, this means that liberals do not end up with a consensus on aims, values, and beliefs. Yet surely, liberal commitments are enough to provide a political framework in which reasoned discourse can take place and in which persons can agree to accept an outcome, even as they continue to disagree with it in substance. A liberal is just as concerned with the good life as any communitarian is.21 There are values and virtues that liberals see as essential to living a good life. These are the traditional liberal values and rights, though I hope I have placed some in a new light: reasonableness, tolerance, openness, mutual respect, liberty, and, above all, autonomy. Clearly, a good life for a liberal must feature these prominently. These values or virtues constitute a substantive notion of the good life only as much as traditional liberal rights do. Liberal virtues are necessary for the pursuit of the liberal good life; they are part of the framework for self-development, for making an autonomous choice among plural or diverse or relative ways of life. They are therefore like Aristotelian virtues: They are means to and, at the same time, a partial definition of the good life. In other words, liberal virtues do leave out certain kinds of lives that some might think good. But the liberal emphasis, as with autonomy, needs to be on the process of choosing the good life, not on binding that life. Liberals exclude some conceptions of the good life, but those conceptions do not constitute a full or "comprehensive," as Rawls calls it, good life. Ronald Dworkin contends that a liberal political theory supposes that political decisions must be so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another. (1978, p. 127)

Nor does the government treat them as equals if it permits only one group or only some groups to develop and exercise their capacities to judge and to choose among different conceptions of the good life, and to recognize and commit to one choice of conception after having compared it with others. In short, liberalism must ensure the conditions in which citizens, all citizens, can become autonomous and can act on that autonomy. What is important to note, therefore, is that the values of liberalism—including the welfare state, domestic tranquility, the use of reason, toleration of different religious persuasions and beliefs, separation of public and private, and individual rights—are not ends for liberals; rather, they are necessary conditions for enabling citizens to make and control their own lives, to live a good life. All of these liberal values are necessary for autonomy, its existence and full exercise. Autonomy is, in turn, necessary for self-development as compound individuality. Compound individuality adds one "ingredient" to autonomy that separates it from the autonomy of individualism and thus separates liberalism and the

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liberal self from libertarianism and its atomistic self: Autonomous choosing for the liberal self is not done alone. The atomist, who also cherishes autonomy, seeks selfsufficiency.22 For the atomist, therefore, liberty is cherished as the ultimate end, cherished, that is, for its own sake. For the liberal self, liberty, and the right to it, is cherished as a necessary means for living the good life, to be able to examine and choose the goals of our life that we think are good. The value of freedom, therefore, lies in its contribution to the exercise of autonomy. Thus the liberal self as compound individuality requires that some liberal values need to be reinterpreted or added. Such a liberal does, of course, value toleration and pluralism. She also values openness. The virtue of openness encompasses toleration but also goes beyond it, and so I draw attention to it separately. Toleration requires that we hear the opinions of others, that we honor their right to speak, thus fulfilling the Dworkinian liberal demand to treat others with respect. But openness requires more. It requires us to subject to critical review our own standards, ends, and beliefs and our own identities. Liberal selves hold a notion that "we could be, we could live, otherwise." Openness requires not only that others hear and be heard but also that liberals take seriously—that is, as if they were one's own—the positions and opinions of others. This means that openness goes beyond toleration and mutual respect and toward Dworkin's call for mutual concern. I can respect your right to speak, but concern requires that I take what you speak seriously. Openness offers a strong contrast with communitarianism and libertarianism. Unlike the communitarian self that is embedded in and thereby limited to the boundaries established and endorsed by the community, and unlike the libertarian self that is limited by the boundaries of the self-definition that have been mortared into place with self-interest, the liberal self looks to identify the limits, contradictions, and constraints in its standards and worldview. Such an orientation leaves the self open but not lost, leaves the self vulnerable but not groundless or chaotic, leaves the self susceptible but not without resources. That is, the liberal self is not tolerant of and open to just anything. Liberal selves do not tolerate attempts to foreclose someone's autonomy, to coerce citizens into one particular way of life, or to ignore justifications based on reason and evidence. Liberals do not tolerate the violation of rights. All liberal rights, it seems to me, can be subsumed under one right, the right to autonomy. They are the conditions for its development and expression. "Liberty [for example] is needed precisely to find out what is valuable in life—to question, re-examine, and revise our beliefs about value. . . . [L]iberty is needed because we can be mistaken about even our most fundamental interests, and because some goals are more worthy than others" (Kymlicka, 1988, p. 185). Liberals need liberty to exercise autonomy. So liberalism involves not just state neutrality regarding the conceptions of the good life or a private sphere of negative liberty in which persons can pursue a life as good as they can make it. It also involves the steps and conditions necessary for the pursuit of that good life. Liberals should argue, therefore, that the government has a duty to promote positive liberty, to enforce the conditions of and protect the right to autonomy. This is self-development not as Berlin imagined it but as the theory of compound individuality describes it. Liberals should not, then, be shy about urging the state to promote the structure of the good


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life—the conditions for the development and exercise of autonomy as compound individuality—though not the contents of the good life: specific choices, practices, beliefs, customs, standards, ends, and the like. David Held comments that in the history of political thought, "many liberals stopped far short of proclaiming that for individuals to be 'free and equal' they must themselves be sovereign" (1987, p. 271). This proclamation is a demand for individual autonomy. Today liberals ought to make this proclamation, to proclaim the right of all citizens to autonomy. Yet John Rawls argues that this is exactly what liberals should not do. To suggest that liberalism should champion autonomy, with all its attendant ideas about freedom, would be to impose a certain model of life on individuals. And this would violate the central tenets of liberalism, especially the tenet of neutrality. Instead, Rawls suggests that "the conception of the person as a citizen" revolves around regarding citizens as free: (1) free to conceive of themselves and others as having the moral power to form or hold a conception of the good; (2) free to regard themselves as "self-originating sources of valid claims," not in their inventing these claims but in their approving of them; and (3) free in being capable of taking responsibility for their ends and capable of adjusting their aims and aspirations (1985, pp. 240ff). All of these, Rawls points out, are necessary for the political conception of the person and do not commit persons to other aspects of life associated with liberalism, for example, "the ideals of autonomy and individuality" (1985, p. 245). After all, autonomy is just one ideal among many. Liberalism cannot honor that. Yet how is Rawls's description of the freedom necessary for liberal citizenship not also a description of autonomy? Liberalism promotes autonomy as Rawls promotes freedom, as a necessary condition of the liberal self (in Rawls's terms, a necessary condition of a liberal citizen), not as a way of life. Autonomy relates to the process of evaluating different conceptions of the good life; it does not itself form such a conception, no more or less than Rawls's "freedom" does. In other words, autonomy is necessary for choosing a conception of the good life, but it is not sufficient for living out a good life. Autonomy dictates little about the content of one's life. In short, compound individuals do not have to be liberals. Rawls wishes to distinguish between a liberal political conception and liberalism as a comprehensive ideology. Yet I do not see how Rawls can have the kind of free citizens he wants without honoring autonomy. He does not see or does not appreciate that autonomy is both a value and a process. Autonomy consists of three parts: 1. The capacity to make rational choices. 2. The ability to exercise that capacity. 3. The ability to act on, though not necessarily realize, those choices. Here autonomy must be one of those primary goods that Rawls claims all citizens need to be assured "that their (permissible) comprehensive conceptions of the good, however distinct their content and their related religious and philosophical doctrines," can advance (Rawls, 1988, p. 257). Only with these primary goods can citizens be free and equal. Indeed, autonomy seems little different in structure from the requirements that Rawls sets out for "moral personality." And this rests on having the capabilities for forming conceptions of the good and possessing a sense

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of justice (see Rawls, 1971, p. 505, and 1980, p. 524). Autonomy is the capability to evaluate critically those conceptions of the good and to choose one as part of a life plan. Citizens, says Rawls, must have "certain qualities of character" in a just and stable constitutional regime (1988, p. 264, n. 21). Autonomy is related to those qualities.

Liberal Politics Liberals are not undecided or wishy-washy about the good life or hesitant to make commitments to it. Rather, they make commitments in the face of diverse possibilities, possible refutations, and clear challenges. Facing challenges makes their commitments deeper because, having been pursued dialectically, their foundation has been laid in critical self-reflection and reasoned argument. But they also hold open these commitments to future challenges, options, refutations, and possibilities. Because liberals think that their judgments and values are right and good, they hold them solidly and confidently; because liberals think them to be right and good, they hold them humbly, considering as well that they may be wrong. Liberals like Berlin, while applauding autonomy as self-sufficiency, have equated its exercise with the liberal right to negative liberty, the absence of external obstacles to one's being able to choose the good life. But autonomy, as I have argued for it, entails the right to positive liberty as self-development.23 This is not self-development in the sense proposed by T. H. Green or criticized by Berlin. Rather, it is self-development as described by the theory of compound individuality in which the self is conceived of as a series of stages representing different cognitive and linguistic structures. Therefore, to achieve the unfolding of the autonomous level, and thus the autonomous self as the liberal self, requires at least the provision of certain societal conditions—education, food, shelter, health care—for moving through the various innate structures and developing autonomy. But tnese conditions do not carry the guarantee that one will or must develop autonomy. Autonomy also requires the provision of political conditions by which to foster and act on it, without assuming that to act on autonomy guarantees that one will achieve what one autonomously chooses.24 The conditions for expressing and acting on autonomy are generative participation, the generative procedures built of autonomy and contextualist thinking. In brief, this focus on autonomy shifts the emphasis in liberalism from liberty as an end to liberty and reason as means. The means are employed to enable persons to attain the fruits of autonomy, or the choosing and living out of a good life. This is the liberal goal and ideal. What liberals should argue, therefore, is that they have a right to autonomy and to the conditions that promote it. It is a right that encompasses the individual rights that liberals have historically cherished. All of those are protections or guarantees that one can use to choose autonomously a conception of the good life and to live out that good life. Liberalism is thus not neutral on or naive about the good life; it does have a conception of it. This conception revolves around autonomy and the values, rights, and conditions that autonomy requires: toleration, openness, reason,


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liberty. Having such values and rights will clearly eliminate certain conceptions of the good life, those, for example, that focus a life on preordained ends and values that preclude choice and are opposite these liberal ones. Therefore, liberalism, though it values governmental neutrality regarding the ends of life and conceptions of the good that people can pursue, is anything but neutral regarding whether such choosing is itself good. Some citizens do not want to be autonomous and do not want their children to be so. They want them raised in a particular kind of cultural climate; they want them to inherit a way of life, not to choose it. Autonomy, according to this view, is disruptive and alienating. The liberal position is that no way of life can be committed to without autonomy; it can be lived out but not committed to. No life selected in any way but by autonomy can be a liberal's good life. But liberals do not want to impose autonomy; they want to argue for it. Yet that requires procedures that themselves require autonomy. The retort to this is that this liberal understanding of commitment is a product of the very value system and way of thinking that these nonliberal citizens are condemning. "If I am willing to die for my way of life," they might say, "isn't that as deep a commitment as anyone can make?" The liberal response is, "Maybe not." Commitment literally means bringing oneself to something or someone. This requires that there be a separate self or "I" that brings itself to the object—"to put [them] together." Two separate things are brought together. Therefore commitments are "mine"; one cannot be brought to them. If I am required to swear an oath of allegiance to a leader, no one would say that the oath is a sign of my commitment to him. Nor is any relationship without the exercise of independent critical reflection an autonomous commitment. A liberal commitment is one made through self-reflective and critical thought. Liberals therefore want choice, autonomous choice. They insist that the right to autonomy is necessary as a process for choosing any sort of worthwhile or good life. And it is also an expression of the kind of good and valuable life that liberals want to lead. But whereas the first—the process of choosing—is a public matter, the latter—the kind of life chosen—is a private matter. For a liberal, no public position or policy is going to be binding or acceptable unless it has passed through a political procedure that is neutral toward all conceptions of and opinions on the good life. That means that this procedure must be democratic, as I explained in Chapter 4. It must ensure that all opinions can be heard and entered as part of the debate. Whether those opinions have been formed autonomously is not an issue. As part of the dialogue, however, they must be argued. In short, the democratic procedures must be liberal procedures; that is, they must assume that the participants are autonomous, that they can and will engage in reasoned dialogue. They also must be these liberal procedures, for only generative procedures can respect the opinions of all participants and can show all participants equal respect and concern. Thus in matters of public interest, in politics, liberals demand that all participants, regardless of their ways of life, follow liberal procedures. In private matters, liberals make no such demand. Persons are free to live as they think best, provided that they do not violate the rights of others and all have equal access to autonomy. Liberals, however, are not neutral toward their own conceptions of the good life,

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and they try to persuade all others through the liberal democratic procedures that the right to autonomy is necessary for any good life. They argue that a life lived by and in pursuit of liberal values in both public and private is the best way of life.25 As John Rawls pointed out (1988), liberalism is a theory of politics, not a whole way of life. The demands that I am making here are political demands: (1) Citizens who wish to participate, and there is no requirement that they do so, must follow the generative procedures. This means that in politics citizens must be liberals, showing the characteristics of the liberal self. (2) Persons may be as closed-minded, egotistical, malevolent, and self-obsessed as they like, but in public matters they must be public-minded. That is, they must play by the rules that ensure equal concern and respect for all participants.26 That does not mean that liberals demand that citizens coming to politics carry any particular philosophical or religious baggage or that they put any such baggage aside. They can carry and use what they have and what they are, provided that they follow the generative procedures and do not negate or trespass the political rights of others. But this theory of democratic liberalism appears to violate neutrality, for I claimed in Chapter 4 that if the liberal self is to be achieved on a societal scale, then this idea of liberal democracy—participatory democracy using the generative procedures—will be necessary. The hope is that the liberal values associated with these procedures—autonomy, openness, toleration, liberty, equal concern and respect, and so forth—might "spill over," leading to the creation and spread of compound individuality. This would seem, then, to separate my position from a liberal like Rawls, for then my procedures would not be neutral. Yet the procedures themselves are neutral, as Rawls defined neutrality.27 The spillover is a by-product, a way to promote self-development to compound individuality while also creating through the generative procedures a compound common good.28 Rawls agrees that requiring citizens to accept political neutrality means temporarily adopting certain liberal political virtues that may have the effect of leading some into a comprehensive moral doctrine. "It is surely impossible," he explains, "for the basic structures of a just constitutional regime not to have important effects and influences on which comprehensive doctrines endure and gain adherents over time, and it is futile to try to counteract these effects and influences" (1988, p. 262). Liberalism "may still affirm the superiority of certain forms of moral character and encourage certain moral virtues."29 Liberals indeed will so affirm. The fulfillment of the liberal self, properly understood, goes beyond a call for democracy as the best expression of and protection for those rights that we find essential to liberalism and a good life. The fulfillment also calls for political activism: active participation through the generative procedures in those associations and institutions that influence our lives. Such activism is the only means to achieve compound individuality. This kind of liberal democratic participation is the only kind that can honor and preserve the equal concern and respect due all citizens as autonomous persons and can promote self-development to compound individuality while trying to forge a compound common good. There is, of course, no guarantee of any of this and no need for citizens in private to adopt liberal values or a liberal orientation. Nothing I have said means that all citizens will accept abortion as the woman's right to control her own body,


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will decry prayer in schools as a failure to separate church and state, will regard the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, or will march to end covert intelligence operations or to increase welfare programs. Different individuals will continue to choose and to act on whatever conceptions of the good life they think best. Liberals are concerned with having the right to choose and also with how they choose. Liberals want people to choose autonomously, wisely, independently, through reasoned reflection; they want them to choose well. But they demand such choices only in politics, in which there are procedures for hearing and perhaps settling the ineluctable clash of values. Political procedures are engaged for the purpose of arriving at some position or policy on issues of public concern, not to establish some sort of universal moral perspective. This places a new or renewed emphasis in liberalism on political participation, and the only kind of politics that makes sense for liberals is participatory democracy, whether local, national, or associational. In any setting, liberal politics requires self-rule or autonomy. Without self-rule the self-government assumed of democracies, even if only the representational kind of today's Western democracies, is in jeopardy. Without autonomy our choices are limited to the banality of consumerism—which brand of 25, or 125, cereals should I choose? The exercise of autonomy should not rest ultimately or solely on the coincidence of self-chosen principles and society's laws, applicable to all but not made by all. The laws of society pertain to each member as they pertain to all members. As such, they form a part of one's autonomy and ought to be examined autonomously. A liberal society that leaves disobedience as the only autonomous avenue is an impoverished society. The liberal self seeks to find congruence between principles and laws. The liberal self is what the community was at the membership level and the king was in the medieval hierarchy: nomos empsychos—the embodied spirit of law. Each liberal should be able to participate to make the social laws by which she lives cohere with her own self-chosen principles. Neither a liberal's principles nor society's laws are selected arbitrarily. Principles chosen autonomously will be examined intersubjectively, just as the laws must receive legislative scrutiny and support. The liberal citizen seeks not to be a law unto himself, as the atomist does, and thereby have the license to rule by caprice. He seeks, instead, the opportunity for joint action, to share in the actual making of laws through democratic dialogue, jut as he acts to choose and live by his principles in the context of others. So the democratic action is the public expression of the joint or intersubjective action that liberal selves undertake when choosing the principles of the good life, and it is the public expression of compound individuals whose very lives are defined by joint action with those special others. During the Middle Ages the law was the soul that ruled the corporate body. Just as the soul breathed life into the body, so the law breathed life into the body politic. With the rise of autonomous selves, persons took responsibility for their own "souls"; they became concerned about the laws they lived by and under. Although the idea of the supremacy of law called for no specific type of government— aristocratic, communist, monarchical—the idea of autonomous life does. No autonomous person can leave the state of his principles and nomos unexamined or subject to the dictates of others. The call is for participatory democracy, and the demand of

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liberal selves as compound individuals is for this democracy in all political settings.30 The character traits or virtues that Carol Gould describes as necessary for the "democratic personality" (1988, chaps. 10 & 11) are those necessary for what I call the liberal sel.f. Both her rendition of democracy and mine add new meaning to the phrase liberal democracy. No longer seen only as an adjective that insists on a constitutional guarantee of individual rights to protect citizens against encroachments by democratic majorities and by the state, liberal now refers to the guarantee of certain rights and liberties that condition self-development. But I think that such development should refer only to an understanding of "self" as derived from the theory of compound individuality and not as Gould understands it.31 How do I justify building liberalism around self-development and the theory of compound individuality? And when I claim that liberals should argue for the right to autonomy and the conditions to promote it, on what do I base this right? If it is claimed that the theory of compound individuality provides the answer, that the right to autonomy follows from our nature as humans, then we might ask: "But what is the property of humans that confers it?" The answer is that all humans undergo the same process of self-development; all humans pass through these same stages. Yet this makes it sound as if I am trying to derive, as Kohlberg did, what liberalism and the liberal self should be from what is in human nature. This, however, is not the case. Although all persons pass through the stages of human development described in the theory of compound individuality, those stages are identified as, and are identical only as, the unfolding of the innate cognitive and linguistic structures. The self is at every level a manifestation of those innate structures. It is simply not the case that all humans will or should value the selves at each level because they are essential aspects of human nature. Having a self is essential; having a particular kind of self is not. For liberals the self as compound individuality is attractive and necessary, because it is the fulfillment of the liberal ideal, the reconciliation of individuality and sociality. Indeed, for liberals who follow the path of the "new" liberal theorists, this must be the liberal self, for it is the only level at which individuality and sociality can be reconciled without jeopardizing either liberal autonomy or communitarian constitutive social relations. But we cannot conclude that compound individuality is inevitable. It must be chosen; it does not by nature simply come. Conservatives could argue that persons should not be encouraged to be autonomous, that social stability and order are better values, and that embeddedness in and respect for one's traditions are the real source of stable identity and meaningful life. Socialists might contend, too, that social solidarity is healthier and better than autonomy and therefore that pluralism should be eradicated in favor of an overarching obligation to the preordained communal ends and values required of all socialist citizens. Both conservatives and socialists could well argue for the membership self or for the incipient and inchoate formal operational thinking associated with Kohlberg's Stage 4. From the perspective of psychological well-being, it is not at all clear that finding security in atomistic self-assertion or in submissive relationships is not


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better from some individuals. The risk of openness found in and demanded by compound individuality—openness to the worldviews of others and to having one's own identity coregulated—may be too threatening for some to bear. Nor is it clear that a society of compound individuals is possible through restructured participation. Far more empirical research and more experimentation with different modes of participation are necessary. Therefore compound individuality, the self beyond individualism, is not the self that all persons will come to or want, but it is the self for which liberalism ought to aim. Although it fulfills the liberal desire for individuality and sociality—in stronger terms, autonomy and constitutive relationship—it also appears as a more integrated and thus a healthier self. It addresses the "felt needs" that Nancy Rosenblum (1987, p. 190) says are necessary for justifying political life and reconciling men and women to it. Although early liberalism was successful at addressing the felt need of individuals for liberty and autonomy, it failed to address the felt need of constitutive relationship. That was the mission and reminder of both the modern liberals and today's communitarians. Liberals should also see compound individuality as a better, or higher, kind of self for more "technical" reasons: Each new stage represents a new structure that recapitulates the preceding structures but adds a new element, thereby creating an equilibrium at a "higher" level. This self can handle more data; that is, it can handle more problems and of greater complexity. Still, this liberal self as a higher self is not the better self of Berlin's positive freedom. There are no final solutions here, no absolutes or objective standards, no right way of life to be imposed on citizens. This realization is not without its casulties; in this case, it is the liberal value of progress. There is a price to be paid at this stage of self, just as there is at every level of self-development. Lost is the security of membership self, the boundaries and embeddedness, the sure answers and indubitable convictions. With compound individualities come new possibilities and greater freedom but also greater responsibilities and thus new anxieties. As Isaiah Berlin beautifully summarized: "Any study of society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands" (1988, p. 16). Compound individuality and the theory of it are no different.

Liberal Lessons from Communitarianism When I began this study 1 thought that the theory of compound individuality and the theory of human nature of which it is a part might help reconcile liberalism and communitarianism. But given the problems in communitarian theories of self and community, such a reconciliation is impossible, and attempts at it are a mistake. The simple reason is that communitarians cannot preserve autonomous individuality within or through constitutive community; they cannot have the social solidarity and cohesion that comes from total community without losing individual autonomy. But if communitarians are actually seeking constitutive relationships, autonomy,

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and a politics and associations of participatory dialogue, then they can find them in a liberalism that has learned some communitarian lessons. First and foremost is that the self is socially constructed at all its stages. Individuality, indeed all levels of selfdevelopment, are social achievements. The self crucial to modern politics first develops not as a self-contained, independent, and unique "I" but, rather, as an embedded part of a social matrix in which both self and sodality are constituted by and known through membership and kinship relations that leave no doubt as to the self's form, boundaries, and nature. The self, then, is historical, though the cognitive structures that underlie these are innate. Liberalism can learn a lesson, therefore, from the communitarians' appreciation for the importance of context and social circumstance. Yet by looking back to constitutive communities, communitarians have misread the distinction between the context-bound personality when the self was embedded in communal rules and roles and the contextual thiTnking characteristic of constitutive relationships. Libera should journey back, then, with communitarians, not to the myths of community but to the nature and limits and facts of particularity. Communitarians are right to point out the myths of radically unencumbered and highly abstracted individuals; there is no Archimedean point from which to judge one's own culture and traditions. But there are other cultures and traditions, different particularities, from which to do so. The journey into these other locales is not part of the communitarian enterprise, or even the conservative or socialist enterprise. It is part and parcel of the liberal enterprise. Liberalism acknowledges that reason does not lead to universal moral principles but instead to a recognition of the need for particularity and with that, and because of that, a need for diversity, toleration, openness, liberty, reason, and autonomy. Doesn't this emphasis on particularity, though not of the restrictive variety of communitarianism, condemn us to a philosophy of relativism? It does, but this is a relativism in which values, ends, and beliefs are seen as relative to evidence and reasons rather than cultures. This relativism means that conflict cannot be avoided. Here enters the need for a liberal democratic politics, as a way to grow personally through conflict and as a way to grow collectively and publicly, as citizens meet to discuss, to deliberate on, and to attempt to forge a compound common good on issues of public concern. This emphasis on politics and reasoned dialogue points out another lesson that liberals can learn from the communitarians. Liberals need to learn to take seriously the idea of constitutive "others" as part of their self-identity. Compound individuality preserves both autonomy and constitutive relationships. Less clear is the notion that liberal associations, if they organized around active participation and the generative procedures, could both provide the sense of belonging that communitarians crave as well as approach by degree—approximate—the nature of community. Active participation creates community in the sense that John Dewey meant it: a union of persons through communication, through sharing ideas in open discourse rather than banding together to insulate one's group from other groups. This emphasis on communication reminds liberals that there is quite a lot on which they agree, not the least significant of which is the principle and the politics of agreeing


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how to disagree. Our language contains common concepts that enable us to engage in dialogue and debate. We have ideas, beliefs, and standards over which we disagree, but also by which we disagree. To have this dialogue liberalism needs participatory outlets built of contextualism. Liberalism could support such participation as part of any association; liberal associations could offer the kind of participation that could lead persons beyond prudential calculus. But it has not done so. Current democratic structures certainly do not do it. Politics today is constituted by periodic elections and candidate campaigns not powerful enough in the United States to bring out a majority of eligible voters; by political platforms that no United States politician need ever act on; by issue agendas set for the voters by the parties, their experts, or their elected representatives;.by political parties that may determine the party platform not by principles but by the popularity of positions on issues proposed in opinion polis; in short, by a vocabulary and by structures that demand that we fashion our views to fit the established political framework. Thus the political practices in which we engage simply reproduce the framework we already have. This we call liberal democracy, but it is a truncated democracy depending on truncated or atomistic persons. Nowhere is there a "possibility of a hermeneutical development of new categories; the transformation or metamorphosis of one's perceptual categories in the course of a dialogue is denied" (Shorter, 1984, p. 175). And this is so, as Maclntyre points out, because in liberal individualism, individual preferences are inviolate, brought to and thus beyond debate (1988, p. 392). Modern political orders "lack institutionalized forums within which fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted" (Maclntyre, 1988, p. 2), with the result that political choices are downgraded as politics becomes just another marketplace. Liberal selves need more than that. They see the purpose of politics in any setting as the arena for shaping their own destinies while sharing in the shaping of the destinies of others. The two are inseparable. The common end that transcends the conflict of interests is a commitment to the context in which clash and conflict will occur and to the mode of argument by which agreement may occur. That commitment does more than bargain away differences; it encourages differences to arise, because the common aim is not just to join men but to unite them. Provided that the context is deliberative and reciprocal, theoretical and practical, conversational and autonomous, liberal politics in the broad sense can do it. One can agree with democratic procedures and democratic principles without needing to agree with every decision reached democratically. The values that citizens in democracy hold in common are commitments to the personhood of each participant and to the procedures that express and foster autonomy as compound individuality. Liberal democrats are willing to argue for and hear arguments against their views and are willing to remain open to the views of others, as others are to them. Liberals participating in this direct democracy may judge poorly; they may fail to note issues or ideas that are significant support for or significant rebuttals of their positions; they may misinterpret what they do note; they may follow false trails and poor logic in projecting the consequences of an act or policy; they may succumb to their own prejudices or cravings and pay attention only halfheartedly to the

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evidence against their views or to those presenting them. Yet none of these possibilities takes away from the idea of participation, that each person is responsible and thus accountable for his positions; that he has the ability and willingness to explain his choices reasonably; and that she has the chance to participate to whatever degree she is capable, to take account of what she thinks is important, to listen to those accounts of what others think important, and to construct her own views and change them on the basis of intersubjective exchange. To deny citizens this sort of participation is to fail to recognize their autonomy and to treat them without the respect that their personhood deserves. To act stupidly is not to lose or to act without autonomy; to honor someone's actions when he does behave stupidly is, however, to deny his accountability and undermine his self-rule. One cannot be forced to be autonomous, for the first step in doing so denies autonomy. At some stage a society that seeks to develop individuality must assume autonomy in its adults, for the only way to engender autonomy is to create procedures that express it. Democracy, then, must precede compound individuality. Democracy is the realm of relative perspectives brought out in a context of deliberation and action. It is the realm for making rules that bind all citizens and that determine the nature and extent of activities in all social arenas, including which arenas are to be public or private. It is the realm that serves to integrate the person within by deliberation and conversation on specific issues with particular others, while also integrating the person with his fellows by instituting common democratic procedures for arriving at common decisions about common issues. Thus men become autonomous by acting as citizens, and they become citizens by acting autonomously. So generative participation is established not simply to talk atomists out of egocentrism and toward compound individuality but also to generate a compound common good, that is, to arrive at decisions that are, at bottom, the product of common reflection, deliberation, and concern. The attempt throughout these procedures is to push behind the presentation of positions to the reasons for holding and advancing them. In liberal dialogue of this sort, the participants are bound to one another in the common search for solutions to common problems. By coming to understand and explain the arguments behind and the implications for various positions, the participants may generate the kind of solidarity that will permit those who do not vote for the substance of a decision to hold to it as if it were their own. Though not held in common, the decision was made in common. That aids holding it in common. Such participation might well build unity from diversity. This, too, is a message from, but also to, communitarians. But "in the end," wrote Philip Abbot, "the dream of the fraternal and the liberal polity may both become tyrannies. One must choose the nightmare with which he may share his slumber" (1974, p. 319). Nightmare is not the only range of choices. We need not settle for the communitarian quest for the moral harmony of traditional societies or for the libertarian project of deriving the collective interest by aggregating the private interests of self-seeking individuals. Compound individuality and the generative participation that conditions it offer to Abbot, as to liberals, a third possibility: One can be constituted by relationships without losing autonomy. By acting autonomously the person remains an individual; by acting in constitutive


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relationships the person becomes a compound. Both autonomy and relationship then define the liberal as a self who cannot be known alone. What Aristotle said of the state is true also of the reconstituted liberal self: The state is a compound, and its identity, like that of all compounds, is determined and known by the scheme of its composition.


NOTES

Introduction 1. See Lukes, 1973, for a historical and analytical look at individualism. 2. With connotations of possessiveness, it has, in theory, been attributed to Locke and even to Hobbes (MacPherson, 1962). It was used, if not coined, by Tocqueville (1969), but its nearly ubiquitous use by critics of liberalism has been in the present. See Bellah, et al., 1985; Maclntyre, 1988; Sandel, 1982; and W. Sullivan, 1982. Indeed, of the contemporary communitarians, only Charles Taylor uses the term atomism. 3. Kant, for example, wrote in "What Is Enlightenment?" that "immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another," an example, as I shall later argue, of atomism. 4. In this book I do not justify why the theory of compound individuality is a better theory of human nature than its rivals are, as to do so would require a separate work focusing on philosophical anthropology, in addition to psychology. This work I hope soon to undertake. For now I can say only that most of the features of the cogent and thus persistent theories of human nature are retained in the theory of compound individuality, minus the reductive quality of those other theories. Human motivations are not seen to derive exclusively from economic production or from sexual impulses and the pleasure principle; selfesteem is not, for example, attributable in the theory of compound individuality to the control of bowel movements. This broaches an equally large question: Why don't I rely on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic categories? Psychoanalysis sees the basic structures of personality as set by age five. This means that the form or structure of the self is constant, though the contents of the self do change. So it is, perhaps, the same self facing various stages of, for example, Eriksonian crises. For Erikson, identity is not a structure but a property of ego that arises to restrain the libidinous or id impulses. There is a continual process of fitting together one's personality parts—those structured in the first five years of life—as the person encounters various crises. This is how identity is structured, but clearly this is not what I mean by structured or structural change. Rather, I mean qualitative change, so that the structure of the self at one level is fundamentally different at the next level. Heinz Kohut, another ego psychoanalyst, developed a psychology of the self; so why not use Kohut? Simply put, he is a structuralist in a limited way: The self is the first and fundamental psychic structure, but it does not transform any more than Erickson's or Freud's does. Instead, all succeeding psychic structures are held within it, including the Freudian drives. Nevertheless, having said all that, it is hardly the case that I have ignored psychoanalysis, ego psychology, or objects-relations theory. There are strong correlations between the theory of compound individuality and the work and theories of Ferenczi, Fenichel, Kaplan, Mahler, Blanck and Blanck, Kernberg, Hartmann, Fairbairn, and Kohut and Erikson themselves, as their work pertains to the first five to seven years of life. 5. I shall pursue the idea more vigorously in the first chapter, but I want to summarize the argument here: Any liberal notion of self that relies on the idea of "agency" alone—as Sandel says of Rawls, but that may be true only of libertarians, as I suggest in the final 183

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chapter—is vulnerable to the communitarian critique. More significant, however, is that such a notion, both psychologically and philosophically, is incoherent. Yet the communitarians' alternative is no less incoherent and vulnerable because it relies on "self-concept" alone, without agency.

Chapter 1 1. Communitarians from this period include Reinhold Niebuhr, especially The Nature and Destiny of Man, vols. 1 and 2; Simon Weil, The Need for Roots; Canon Demant, Christian Polity; Sebastian De Grazia, The Political Community; Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern Man; Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society; as well as Erich Fromm and Robert Nisbet. 2. See MacPherson, 1962. For communitarian critiques of liberalism so conceived, see, in addition to the communitarians cited in this chapter, Barber, 1984; Bellah, et al., 1985; W. Sullivan, 1982; Walzer, 1983; Wolff, 1968; and the works of Robert Nisbet, especially 1953 and 1975, which form a bridge between communitarianism of the 1950s and those of today. 3. "Lost Belonging on the Road to Progress: Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor in Conversation," excerpted in The Listener, March 20, 1986. Special thanks to moderator Michael Ignatieff for providing the full transcription. Although there are slight, subtle differences among person, agent, and self, I shall use these terms interchangeably. 4. Gellner said this, in part, in response to Taylor: "You've said that 'this is the view of the self that you [Gellner] like.' Well, I don't like it. I don't enjoy it; I just think, in all honesty, it is the price to be paid [for modernity]. We can't avoid or evade it. We can't go back. The price has been paid." 5. It is curious that in Sources of the Self, as careful a philosopher as Taylor gives only one footnote to Plotinus, from whom Augustine obtains his inward turn. 6. 1985a, p. 277. Taylor (1989b) also refers to this as the "immanentization" (p. 95), the "subjectivization" (p. 282), and the "interiority" (p. 460) of identity. 7. Radical reflexivity is Taylor's term for the turn within that uses, or results in the use of, the "first-person perspective." Emphasizing that perspective leads to a quasi solipsism or at least to the feeling, as one commentator put it, "that this experience [no matter of what] is my experience." "The Self in Contemporary Psycholoanalysis: Commentary on Charles Taylor," in S. Messer, L. Sass, and R. Woolfock, 1988, p. 326; emphasis added. 8. To repeat, Taylor is not critical of the turn within per se, for when it "began" with Augustine the turn was as a means of coming to God, who is external. Instead, Taylor is critical of the turn within that results in the internalization of personhood. Here we are thrown onto our own resources, found in and bounded by bodily sensations and the contents of our minds. This turning is accomplished "without benefit of interlocutor, in face of a silent universe and meaningless drives. . . . [T]he resources are within him ... as a lone reasoning agency" (Taylor, 1988, p. 301). This is the fundamental distinction Taylor makes between writers like Shelling, Novalis, and Baudelaire on one side and the great thinkers of Renaissance neo-Platonism and magical thought, like Bruno. . . . Bruno and Paracelsus . . . saw themselves as grasping the unmediated spiritual order of things. . . . [I]t doesn't have to be revealed through an articulation of what is in us. ... It is in this sense a public order . . . which is no longer possible for us. . . . Moderns certainly can conceive of a spiritual order of correspondences: Baudelaire did, and Yeats did. . . . But what we cannot conceive is such an order which we wouldn't have to accede to through an epiphany wrought

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by creative imagination; which would be somehow available unrefracted through the medium of someone's artistic creation. ... If Bruno and Paracelsus disagreed, at least one of them had to be wrong. (1988, pp. 427-28)

The contrast Taylor draws between Renaissance and modern thinkers is surely a telling one. Today any moral and spiritual order of things does seem to be "indexed to a personal vision," as he says. But this, I think, is not necessarily true, any more than it is true that when Bruno and Paracelsus disagreed, one of them had to be wrong. Depending on the topic, and it could be a spiritual one, the public order then, just as the public order now, would not demand that. Both of Taylor's positions are overstated, I think, because we can conceive of and experience an order unrefracted through the medium of someone's artistic vision. That order would be public in just the way Taylor envisions it, but not as an order that necessarily excludes views, visions, epiphanies that conflict. Bruno and Paracelsus, in disagreement, could both be right. I cannot here go into details or into the arguments for my position. In large measure they remain inchoate. I hope soon to undertake a study to organize and articulate those arguments and details. For the moment I can only give a glimpse of what will be involved: 1. The turn within, also in the context of seeing meaning in nature as determined by an objective order, has not produced in the East, with a history of "inwardness" far longer than that of the West, the modern identity that Taylor describes. Why not? Elucidating the answer to that question will provide a different reading of identity and the nature of the self, but a reading that ultimately must be able to address, and even accommodate, the modern self as described by Taylor. 2. An examination of the turn inward in the East will point to the mystical, or psychospiritual, insights of the sacred traditions, which have connections, of course, to the West. The religions of the East can be accurately described as psychologies. Although many of these insights have been coopted and corrupted by the prattling of disciples of the "New Age," the strength of these insights—beyond their histories in the East—is evinced in the West by the flourishing of tradition-oriented meditation centers throughout Europe and the United States; by the growth of religious, psychological, anthropological, historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary scholarship into various aspects of the esoteric side of sacred traditions—for example, the renewed interest in Native American traditions—and by the modem articulation of the great chain of being by such contemporary philosophers as Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon, Huston Smith, Jacob Needleman, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Ken Wilber, and their scientific counterparts: physicist David Bohm, chemist Ilye Prigogine, and biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. The works of none of these thinkers relies on creative imagination. 3. No one reading Sources of the Self can doubt that Taylor is right in his description, history, and analysis of our inward turn and the resultant modern self. The dilemma of that self is the increasing subjectivism that seems the ineluctable result of that turn. Therefore, both Taylor and our modern cultures would benefit from a serious look at the esoteric aspects of the sacred traditions, which hold out the promise of movement beyond subjectivism. Here the focus is not on personal vision, but on personal vision, which will be judged through "public" dialogue as to its "transpersonal," epistemological validity. Taylor, quite rightly, focused on the personal limitations of our inward turn, which is where the self bumps its head against the ceiling of creative imagination. An emphasis on vision, however, can provide the breakthrough necessary to reconcile the powers of modern identity with the need for public order. 4. Finally, we can no longer simply be told, as Taylor suggests, what "the permanent, stable, unchanging core of being in each of us" is (1988, p. 315), whether by a

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Notes member of the clergy, by a therapist, or even by a friend, in the Aristotelian sense. We need instead to experience that core directly. Perhaps that need, that recognized need, makes modern agents different from our traditional counterparts. Perhaps it puts us, many of us and potentially all of us, on a path historically reserved for the few—the shaman, the mystic, the elite. I think it does, and the change marks this age as an opportunity, one underscored by our modern sensitivity to equality. Taylor might agree. But it is not an act of retrieval that we need, but an act of discovery. We do not need to "recover contact" with the core (Taylor, 1988, p. 315), which in the JudeoChristian theistic tradition was too much mediated by clergy; we need to establish contact directly and personally. And again, here personally does not mean "subjectively."

So the solution is not the retrieval of theistic religion somehow shorn of those aspects that lead to mutilation and sacrifice. (Indeed, it may be the theism in religion that is the problem.) It is, instead, an inward look through the personal to the transpersonal, not simply individual particulars, but universal archetypes and psychological insights common to all persons and all human contexts. Here in addition to the esoteric side of the sacred traditions East and West, I would have to look at another area that Taylor seems to have overlooked: modern psychology, especially humanistic and Jungian psychologies. That Taylor fails to discuss much modern psychology is perhaps the only flaw in his splendid book. I think had he done so, had he looked at psychology East and West, he would have found that his description of the modern self is pervasive but not comprehensive. 9. It will be crucial to this study, therefore, to define what I, and various theorists under study, mean by "autonomy" and "community." The second and third chapters focus predominantly on autonomy, but I must ask the reader's indulgence, for my discussion of community is postponed until the penultimate chapter. 10. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz makes this point in his description of the Balinese: "Physically men come and go, mere accidents in a happenstance history. . . . But the masks they wear, the stage they occupy, the parts they play, and, most important, the spectacle they mount remain, and comprise not the facade but the substance of things, not the least [of which is] the self." "From the Natives' Point of View," American Academy of Arts and Sciences Bulletin 28 (1974): 62; quoted in D. Westen, Self& Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 324. 11. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, p. 136; quoted in Sandel, 1982, p. 132. 12. Rawls claims that criticisms that focus on his "conception of the self," such as Sandel's, are mistaken (Rawls, 1985, pp. 239 ff.): The description of the parties [to the original position] may seem to presuppose some metaphysical conception of the person, for example, that the essential nature of persons is independent of and prior to their contingent attributes, including their final ends. . . . But this is an illusion caused by not seeing the original position as a device of representation. (1985, p. 238)

Such an illusion may be readily dispelled, as in the article mentioned here, in which Rawls discusses in detail the original position as a device of representation and in which he presents justice as fairness as a conception drawing on the basic intuitive ideas and premises embedded in the political structures of a constitutional democracy. This, however, does not seem to be the case with regard to the basis of Sandel's critique, A Theory of Justice. 13. Sandel writes: "What makes the [liberal] ethic so compelling but also finally vulnerable are the promise and the failure of the unencumbered self" (1984c, p. 83). That promise is of free rational choice independent of particular ends. The failure is the inability to ground choices in anything but arbitrary preference. 14. Charles Taylor, however, objects to the idea of working on our traits, working on

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ourselves, for that means that we must "disengage" from our notions and beliefs. The person then becomes "fully distinguished from his natural and social worlds, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds" (1987, p. 471). This is the character of contemporary liberalism (1987, p. 472), and it is a problem because when we disengage we cease to live in our bodies or within our tradition or habits (1989b, p. 175). Instead, we make them objects to us, with the result that we come to "identify with the power to objectify particular features. . . . [WJhat we are essentially is none of the latter (those features), but what finds itself capable of fixing them and working on them" (1989b, pp. 170-71). The epitome of this is the punctual self, who is nothing but "an T " (1989b, p. 175), "the abstract power to remake these properties" (1988, p. 309). Taylor's central objection is that identity for moderns, and especially liberals, is with the power—the "I"—that objectifies and not with the content or features that constitute the subject. This is a powerful objection. To identify only with the ability to disengage is a problem and an error, as I shall discuss in the rest of this chapter. Liberals guilty of it cut themselves and others off from aspects of their lives central to identity. Personhood for Taylor rests on the horizon of evaluations without which one cannot evaluate at all. Yet, as Taylor acknowledges, there must also be an "ability to adhere to evaluations." This ability implies and requires a self separate from those evaluations. Otherwise, adhering to them would not be an issue, as the person would be embedded in them. In Sources of the Self Taylor also argues that what aligns Hume with Hutcheson and against Locke is that Hume saw the end of selfexploration as a kind of engagement: "coming to terms with what we really are. . . . We anatomize the moral sentiments. . . in order to accept them, endorse them, know what address we are living at. Even the disengagement serves the end of an ultimate engagement" (1989b, pp. 344-45). This kind of engagement is precisely what the self-reflectivity of autonomy is about. Although it is true that scrutiny may lead us away from some, even all, aspects of our tradition, this is not to say that it leads us away from constitutive traits or features altogether. Self-reflectivity means that we can take our self-concepts as objects of attention, but it does not mean that we are left with only the power to work on self-concepts but with no such constitutive concepts themselves. To my mind Taylor does not adequately develop the concept of disengagement. He goes only so far as to say that it results in the depriving the constituent features "of normative force" (1989b, p. 160). Taylor offers no argument for this, and I see no reason that it is so. We can examine critically— "objectify," in his language—any set of norms or standards, or even the domain of being that sets norms and standards, without their losing normative force. Through such examination they may lose such power, but they may not. Such force might be strengthened. Or Taylor sees disengagement as involving the separation of feelings from reason: "Throwing ourselves more fully into [an] experience ... is a kind of search which involves being 'all there'. . . . This involves reflectivity and self-awareness, but precisely not of the disengaged kind. Rather [when] we think of that person or event, we allow our feelings full reign" (1989b, p. 163). To the extent that modern selves dissociate reasoning from feeling this is a problem. But modern selves do not have to, and I'm not convinced they do. It seems to me that feelings are not to be suppressed or suspended, but they, too, need to be scrutinized. About the topics covered in this footnote I shall have more to say throughout the text, and especially in Chapter 6. 15. Sandel anticipates precisely this. When the ends are given in advance, says Sandel, the subject does not choose but reflects "on itself and [inquires] into its constituent nature . . . acknowledging its purposes as its own" (1989b, p. 58).

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Lest one think that "truly" self-reflective agents could easily burst through the conceptual barriers erected by the social milieu, consider this view from social anthropologist Ernest Gellner: It is hard to imagine a community composed of individuals capable of highly diversified conduct but not also endowed with a sophisticated system of markers for restricting that diversity at any given point. My own guess is that language began not with conveying information but with the need, engendered by the capacity for highly diversified conduct, to constrain volatile conduct. In the beginning was the prohibition. ("Sentiments and Sentences," The New Republic, March 23, 1987, p. 38)

16. Sandel"s theoretical emphasis, and those of Taylor and Maclntyre as well, manifests a frequent tendency among theorists, according to William Alston, to confuse the process of identity with the product of identity, to think of the self in terms of cognitions or evaluations. See W. P. Alston's "Self-Intervention and the Structure of Motivation," in T. Mischel, ed., The Self (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 65-68. Ironically, it is psychologists, says D. W. Hamlyn in the same volume, who show a preoccupation with the self-concept to the exclusion of the active self or agent (see his article, "Self-Knowledge"). In this regard the three communitarian theories under study here approximate the psychological theories of a new generation of social psychologists called the sociocognitivists or the social constructivists, one of whom—Kenneth Gergen—has defined identity for the movement in this way: Identity is "a subset of highly salient concepts which the individual most frequently utilizes in thinking about himself or his activities." This view clearly mistakes part of identity—the self-concept or what is thought about—for the whole and ignores the agency aspect or who is thinking or how things are thought about. See Kenneth Gergen, "The Social Construction of Self-knowledge," in Mischel, ed., The Self, pp. 139-169; quotation from p. 145. Introducing the notion of agency, as I have described it, into such theories would easily rescue the constructivists from the sort of contradictions and ambiguities that plague Sandel.

Chapter 2 1. These theorists trace their orientation back to the symbolic interactionism of George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley. The constructivists argue that human development, learning, and action are best understood and investigated as the result of human relations; that the language we use to organize and situate ourselves and our world is a social product; and that there are rules for establishing boundaries that are "historically and culturally situated." According to their position, an individual learns to build up or create a worldview through the influence and guidance of the social world in which he grows up. Such learning is accelerated when the child grasps rudimentary language that outlines "the common inventory of 'what there is' " within the culture and how the culture works. Through the language and customs of the culture the individual acquires a conceptual system, an intelligibility system, that enables him "to make sense of the stimulus world and to participate 'meaningfully' with other members of the culture." This has particular significance for the self: "What there is to understand about the self and how one is to go about it, follows from the rules governing concept usage. The social milieu—customs, concepts, and language— set the boundaries not only of the person's world but also of himself." The author of the preceding quotations, Kenneth Gergen, has not plainly stated what we should already suspect—that one's identity is a matter of specific concepts or traits. See Gergen, 1977, p. 39, n. 16, in which he does so. All my quotations are from Gergen, 1977. See also Gergen, 1982 and 1985. For other examples of this school, see Coulter, 1979; and Shorter, 1984.

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2. See in particular the early works of Abraham Maslow and the works of Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Erich Fromm. 3. The term compound individuality was coined by Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1967), and was later appropriated by Charles Hartshorne and, in the context in which I am using it, by Ken Wilber in Up from Eden (1981). 4. Piaget's experiments, especially the specific details of various stages, are under suspicion. Psychologists have found that, for example, many of the tasks characteristic of concrete operations can be performed by preoperational children if some slight adjustments in the experiments are made. Children as young as three, for instance, have been found to conserve number or classify consistently. See P. Bryant, "Piaget, Teachers and Psychologists," Oxford Review of Education 10 (1984). The stages, though perhaps unfolding more continuously than Piaget claimed, nevertheless exist. Yet it seems the case that these stages do not unfold completely so as to cover all the contents of one's mental operations. Piaget devised for this phenomenon the idea of decalage, that the same mental level may unfold in different stages or at different times depending on the content. Rather than the exception, however, some psychologists see decalage as the rule. See K. Fischer, "A Theory of Cognitive Development: The Control of Hierarchies of Skill," Psychological Review 87 (1980). 5. This distinction is commonplace. In biology what is intrinsic is called genotypic, and how it is manifested is called phenotypic. Piaget distinguished between "synchronic elements"—those that are given—and "diachronic factors"—those subject to "historical pressures" (Gardner, 1972, pp. 24-25). Developmental psychologist Jane Loevinger (1976) distinguishes between "dimensions" and "manifestations," and Ken Wilber (1980), borrowing his terms from linguistics, separates "deep structures" and "surface structures." 6. As other examples, Arieti describes the self as both "a living subject" operating on the world and "an individual as he is known to himself" (1967, p. 48). Eldstein and Noam describe it as "both the agent and the result of social interactions" (1982, p. 411). Wilber refers to the "proximate self" or organizer or "I" and the "distal self" or self-concept or "me" (1981, p. 78), and Broughton discusses "a self conceived and a self conceiving" (1981a, p. 22). 7. Examples of the equivalents include moral development (Kohlberg), interpersonal development (Selman), ego development (Loevinger), and development of faith (Fowler). 8. Disagreements arise when someone's basic structures are challenged as stages or when a generalist or author (such as this one) with a different intention collapses one "inviolate" stage into another. But it is also common practice among developmental theorists to correlate their findings and theories with those of other researchers. Thus, for example, Loevinger (1976) compares and correlates her proposed levels of ego with Perry; Sullivan, Grant, and Grant; Kohlberg; Peck; Fromm; Riesman; Graves; Piaget (moral stages); Erikson; Ausubel; and Ferenczi. The theory of compound individuality presented here is a distillation of approximately one dozen developmental theories and is a generalization of them. The description of the compound nature of individuality is itself a theoretical insight appearing in a different context in the works of Kenneth Wilber (1980, 1981, 1983a, 1983b). 9. Loevinger, 1976, Kohlberg, 1969, Riesman, 1954, andH. S. Sullivan, 1953, describe this level as one of conformity. 10. The idea of membership is, of course, described in cultural anthropology, but it is also discussed by such authors as Talcott Parsons in The Social System, Leslie White in The Science of Culture, Benjamin Whorf in Language, Thought, and Reality, G. H. Mead in Mind, Self, & Society, and, in a recent, intriguing study, Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. 11. This example comes from Ken Wilber, personal correspondence.

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12. Kohlberg's theory, though it does make the distinction between these two stages of self, does not provide a fully satisfactory psychological theory for a liberal self. Exploring one possibility for such a theory will be part of my focus in Chapter 6. 13. The empirical bases of the developmental theories used in my study are impressive. For example, Jane Loevinger, though most of her work was correlative, interviewed over fifteen hundred subjects; Silvano Arieti spent over sixteen years examining sick and well subjects in clinical settings; William Perry spent over three decades working with students at Harvard; and Kohlberg followed the same group of males for thirty years, interviewing them every three years. 14. All quotations in this section are from Kohlberg & Scharf, 1972. 15. All quotations are from Candee, 1975. 16. Of course, exactly the same is true of the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who justified his actions by claiming to have received authorization from his superiors. He sought such authorization to carry out the extralegal and illegal activities that he felt advanced the president's policies. His fundamental loyalty was not, however, to Ronald Reagan personally, but to "the president as commander in chief." His actions were to strengthen the nation and serve his country, not to win social approbation. 17. There would seem to be three reasons for this: (1) Kohlberg makes very strong claims that (2) are not restricted, as are those of most researchers, to the confines of the profession and their annals. (His claims and theories are of interest to, and thus appear in journals related to, several disciplines: philosophy, sociology, politics, and education.) (3) He has not stopped with generating a theory and testing it. Convinced of his findings and showing anything but diffidence, Kohlberg has sought to implement his theory and its practices as the focal point of educational and penal-reform programs. It is also true, as critics Reid and Yanarella have written, that Kohlberg offers a strong challenge to the behaviorist mainstream in Western psychology. Although this point should not be underestimated, other developmentalists offer the same challenge. If Kohlberg's seems stronger, it is for the reasons just cited. 18. Kohlberg, 1971, p. 175. Kohlberg based his claims on research studies in five cultures: the United States, Taiwan, Turkey, urban Mexico, and a Yucatan village. The studies were not longitudinal, and details regarding sample size, interview translation procedures, and means and range of scores have never been published (see Snarey, 1983). 19. See, for example, D. Locke, "A Psychologist Among the Philosophers," in S. Modgil & C. Modgil, eds., Lawrence Kohlberg (London: Palmer Press, 1985), esp. pp. 2938; and see his "The Illusion of Stage 6," Journal of Moral Education 9 (1981). See also Reid & Yanarella, 1980; and Schweder, 1982. 20. This subject will be taken up in the next chapter. 21. Consider, for example, this description of the Gahuka-Gama of Highland, New Guinea: There is "no essential separation of the individual from the social pattern; social roles and social status are not distinguished from the individuals who enact them." Individual identity and social identity were inseparable, "two heads of the same coin." K. Read, "Morality and the Concept of the Person Among the Gahuka-Gama, Oceania 25 (1955): 276. 22. Berger and Luckmann (1976, p. 164) comment: Maximal success in socialization is likely to occur in societies with very simple division of labor and minimal distribution of knowledge. . . . Put simply, everyone pretty much is what he is supposed to be. In such a society identities are easily recognizable ... a knight is a knight and a peasant 15 a peasant, to others as well as to themselves. There is, therefore, no problem of identity. The question, "who am I?" is unlikely to arise in consciousness, since the socially predefined answer is massively real subjectively and consistently confirmed in all significant social interaction.

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23. Hereafter, the developmental theory will be designated as the theory of compound individuality, and the particular self constituted by autonomy and relationships will be referred to simply as compound individuality.

Chapter 3 1. I use the term sodality in its broadest sense as a synonym for clan, village, group, tribe, or nation. This avoids for the time being, any semantic and interpretive entanglements that might result from using the term community. 2. As explained in the Introduction, the terms atomism and individualism and their derivatives are used interchangeably throughout. I recognize that this position does not do justice to those who espouse the idea of "holistic individualism," such as Durkheim or Charles Taylor. Taylor, for one, does not necessarily see individualism as atomism. Indeed, this notion of holistic individualism may correspond more than superficially to my notion of compound individuality. Unfortunately, the most that Taylor says (1989a) about this kind of individualism is that it was used by humanists like Wilhelm von Humboldt to honor both the social embeddedness of human agents and the prize of individual liberty. But what does that entail? To understand how close to, or far from, compound individuality it may be, Taylor would have to provide more discussion. 3. My understanding of autonomy as process is similar to Gerald Dworkin's view of autonomy as "procedural independence" (see Dworkin, 1986, esp. chap. 1). 4. For the importance of self-reflectivity to autonomy, see also Young, 1989, pp. 81-83. 5. Nozick, 1974, p. 160. Some writers make out individualism to be the central tenet of liberalism. According to this view, Arblaster sees liberalism as supporting only instrumental relationships: "Other people tend to appear as objects, neutral when they do not impinge upon us in any significant way, but otherwise serving as helps or hindrances to the realization of my purposes and the satisfaction of my desires" (1984, p. 37). Yet Arblaster does concede that liberalism offers another strand, exemplified by Kant, that holds that all others are to be regarded as ends in themselves, never as means. It is not appropriate to take up this subject here, but it could be argued that this Kantian perspective marks the bifurcation of modern liberalism and classical liberalism. Thus a critique of liberalism, such as Robert Paul Wolff's in The Poverty of Liberalism, that is based on the liberal tendency to treat others as means to another's ends is more accurately a critique of the libertarianism of someone like Nozick than of modern liberalism per se. That is, modern liberals could contend that the individualism Wolff decries ceases to be liberal precisely when it views others as means. For more discussion on this topic, see Chapter 6. 6. Sociologist Morris Rosenberg, citing the work of Matthew Erdelyi, suggests that when an individual's worldview is threatened, he may employ a series of mechanisms for defense: The threatening information is not seen; if seen, it does not register; if registered, it is misinterpreted; if correctly interpreted, it is forgotten; and so on. It is as though the raw material of external reality had to pass through a series of ever finer sieves which filter out the impurities—those facts offensive to the self. (Conceiving the Self [New York: Basic Books, 1979], p. 276)

What remains is either in consonance with or enhances the worldview and thus the self. Some might see here a remarkable summary of the mental functioning of Ronald Reagan as governor of California and as president of the United States. See Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

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I. Thus the women's responses in Kohlberg's studies, for example, are consistently scored at levels significantly lower than the responses of men, because women, according to the scorers, argue from evaluations of attachments rather than from abstract principles. 8. See Daniel J. Levinson, The Seasons of a Man's Life (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 335; quoted in Gilligan, 1982a, p. 154. 9. Gilligan, 1982a, pp. 170, 171; See also Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); and Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 10. See, for example, N. Haan, "Moral Reasoning of Young Adults," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 10 (1968); C. Holstein, "Irreversible Stepwise Sequence in the Development of Moral Judgment," Child Development 47 (1976); Kohlberg & Kramer, 1969. II. Kegan, 1982, pp. 211, 213. Embeddedness cultures refer to those social arrangements that engender and maintain a particular level of self-development. Gilligan's recent research has led her to question her earlier analysis of female development. Whereas traditional developmental psychology has seen adolescence as the time when boys and girls struggle to define a separate identity for themselves—a pattern that Gilligan followed, though seeing marked differences between the kinds of identities formed by boys and girls—Gilligan thinks now that girls struggle not to form an independent voice but to resist losing one. In adolescence, she postulates, young girls lose a strong sense of themselves as nurturers of both themselves and others. They repress this strong sense because they meet in society—that is, Western culture— "a wall of prohibition." Our Western culture does not want girls to be opinionated and assertive, and so they retreat into molds of the "nice" girl or the "perfect" girl. To support this position, Gilligan cites changes in adolescent girls' lives: For one, when they move from primary school to secondary school the teachers are now mostly male, and the curriculum is no longer child centered but content centered. This setting, she claims, transmits cultural stereotypes (All quotations are from Gilligan, 1990). We must await Gilligan's latest research reports to assess the evidence for her assertions, but one noticeable lapse in the report cited here is that no mention was made of the unfolding of formal operational thought during adolescence. The upshot of that might be that adolescent girls are for the first time confronting self-consciously—because for the first time they are self-reflective—the multiplicity of viewpoints and voices. Perhaps they retreat because they are confused and overwhelmed by it, just as adolescent boys, when somewhat older, are. Gilligan would then be following the developmental model of William Perry rather than Kohlberg. For an explanation of Perry's theory and the important role it plays in reconstituting the liberal self, see Chapter 6. 12. Recall that an innate or basic structure can unfold without identity necessarily moving with it. Thus, for example, formal operational thought, the sine qua non of autonomous selfhood, can unfold without having identity move completely, or in part, out of membership. Kohlberg's research found that many who show a law-and-order orientation are able through formal operations to step back from individual laws and see them as part of a system of laws. Although the person now sees that laws are the product of an abstract system larger than the sodality, identity continues to be in terms of system maintenance—this time, maintenance of the larger system of society. The individual has yet to see the possibility of his separation from or independence of that system. In addition, Kohlberg's Stage 4/5 is developmental evidence of atomism: It is a level of reflective egocentrism, hedonism, and anarchism. It is, therefore, unlike Kohlberg's Stage 2, which finds the same characteristics in young children. Stage 4/5 is egocentrism raised to a principle, as Habermas said (McCarthy, 1979, p. 351), an egocentrism that is self-reflective and rational.

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13. Aristotle wrote in The Politics: "The citizens of a state should always be educated to suit the constitution of their state. The type of character appropriate to a constitution is the power which continues to sustain it, as it is also the force which originally created it" (bk. 8, chap. 1, 1337a II, 1946, p. 332). 14. Inkeles and Smith document that becoming modern means becoming an individual, but their research does not explore what happens over time to traditional men who become modern men. The same factory work that was initially liberating might become enervating and alienating. Charles Taylor, one among many, argues that the social structures underlying and necessary for the functioning of industrial society are beginning to fail. The coordinated and disciplined work needed in the factory is breaking down because it is monotonous work. The ideals and purposes held out in the industrial societies and essential to their maintenance—the values of success, productivity, compromise, materialism, and the future over the past—are shifting their meaning from integral to man to hateful and hollow. See Taylor, 1985c, chap. 1, esp. pp. 49-50. 15. For two contemporary studies of how modern social institutions generate atomistic personality, see Bellah, et al., 1985; Lasch, 1979, 1984. 16. See Gilligan, 1977. In 1970 Gilligan and Murphy, following the studies and findings of developmental psychologist William Perry (1968), began a study to explore whether thinking about actual dilemmas involved more contextual thought than did thinking about hypothetical dilemmas. They also wanted to study whether life experiences entered into the thinking about hypothetical dilemmas employed by Kohlberg. They found that subjects at age nineteen who had met and even exceeded Kohlberg's criteria of formal logic were, by ages twenty-two to twenty-seven, beginning "to indicate dissatisfaction with this logic as an adequate basis for understanding their own personal dilemmas" (1980, p. 100). Their subjects did not feel any less strongly that they alone had to be the authors of their conceptions of what is right or true. In this, of course, their subjects were arguing for autonomy. Yet they doubted the possibility that generalizable rules, by which positions were justified, could take into account the particulars of their situations. Gilligan and Murphy's longitudinal data suggest that participants in real-life contexts use a more differentiated thinking in which the demand to judge according to principles had to be tempered by consideration of the consequences on those involved. See Gilligan & Murphy, 1980. 17. The use of the term dialectical, though it gives sufficient emphasis to the idea of embracing contradictions central to this mode of thinking, may create—given the oblique use of the term in the history of philosophy—more problems than it solves. At this point, empirical investigations of contextual, or dialectical, thinking seem scant. Nevertheless, those that do exist have been powerful enough to lead at least one psychologist to conclude that a consensus is now emerging in support of a contextual metatheory. See J. Zimmerman, "Social Harmony Theory: A Contextualist Account of Cognitive Functioning," in C. J. Brainerd, ed., Recent Advances in Cognitive-Developmental Theory (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983). 18. Basseches's dissertation has been expanded into a book, Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development (1984), and condensed into an article, "Dialectical Schemata," Human Development 23 (1980). The citations in my text, unless otherwise specified, refer to his dissertation (1978). The current debate on contextualism is not about the existence of this mode of thinking but about whether it represents a stage beyond formal operational thought or whether it is simply a variation of that formal stage. 19. See Kegan, 1982, and Chandler, 1975, for a discussion of this. Although theoretically possible, it seems unlikely that an atomist would act in this way. In surveying the

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psychological strategies used by adolescents to combat the threats associated with multiple views, Chandler found one feature common to them all: They attempted to deal with multiplicity by denying its legitimacy out of hand. Such denial, however, might be characteristic only of adolescent, not adult, behavior, though see my note 5 to this chapter. 20. Bellah and his colleagues (1985) discovered in their sociological research that in the kind of atomistic relationships that they found dominant in American society, one characteristic overshadowed the rest: the right to walk away from the relationship when one's needs are not met. 21. See Benn, 1982. See also Shotter's discussion, "Joint Action and the Making of Moral Worlds" (1984, pp. 142-51). Shotter's analysis refers to the development of autonomous action. Thus he writes, "people, although unaware of doing so, construct social worlds of meaning between themselves in the course of social interaction, and in doing so determine the form of their own consciousness, their own categories of thought, perception, feeling, action, and expression" (p. 142; emphasis added). It is when people become aware of jointly creating this world of meaning, which entails forming their own consciousness, that they are both autonomous and coregulated by intimate relationships. Shotter uses the term hermeneutics as shorthand for the process of creating or constructing a larger context in which conflicting or contradictory interpretations can be examined and clarified. The entire quotation is: "For they are constructing in miniature, in a hermeneutical back and forth, a social order, a common world between them 'of which neither is the sole creator' [Merleau-Ponty]" (1984, p. 164). 22. Shotter, 1984, pp. 243-49. In these recommendations Kegan follows the line of thought and the data of organizational behaviorist William Torbert (see Torbert, 1972, 1976). Torbert, in turn, is following the arguments and data of Chris Argyris, whose work focuses on the effects that jobs in large-scale organizations have on the personalities of the individuals who hold them. See Argyris's Integrating the Individual and the Organization (New York: Wiley, 1964); and Personality and Organization (New York: Garland Press, 1975). Kegan's proposals are, of course, theoretical. He is not concerned with whether and why businesses would restructure in this fashion, though, as mentioned, businesses would most likely come to value an impetus toward compound individuality only as a by-product of greater worker efficiency or greater overall productivity. For such an argument in favor of workplace democracy see Pateman, 1970. My view follows a similar theoretical line, and I will touch on the practical side of some of these issues in the next three chapters.

Chapter 4 1. Politics, trans. & ed. Ernest Barker, bk. 3, chap. 1, 1275a and 1275b, pp. 92-95. See also A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 5; and Delba Winthrop, "Aristotle on Participatory Democracy," Polity 11 (1978). The focus of this chapter should be made clear: I am not considering here the specific settings of participation, whether participation can work in practice, or how participation as outlined here could work in practice. Rather, I am looking at what form participation should take in order to effect social change beyond individualism to compound individuality. Moreover, although my focus is on political participation, I am not conceding that participation must be political, as if to leave aside or discount future research in such areas as workplace participation. (Indeed, Carole Paternan and Peter Bachrach argue that workplace participation is not an alternative to political participation or an extension of participation beyond politics but is already political. For an interesting communitarian perspective on this subject, see

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Walzer, 1983, chap. 12, esp. pp. 297-303. But any such discussion is at this point beyond my abilities and would be more of a diversion from than a contribution to the theory of the self for which I am arguing here. 2. It may seem curious that we have not first turned to Rousseau who is so strongly associated with participation (see Pateman, 1970, chap. 2) and with the psychological approach we are taking in this study: It is Rousseau, wrote John Plamenatz, who "turns our mind ... to considering how the social order affects the structure of human personality" (1963, vol. 1, p. 440). Our focus at this point, however, is on how participation fosters selfdevelopment, and Rousseau's outlook on that topic is, to say the least, problematic. Plamenatz, for example, wrote, It is worth noticing that Rousseau, who was among the first to try to show in any detail how men develop the capacities peculiar to their species through activities which make social and moral beings of them . . . who urged men to control and transform society to achieve a kind of freedom which he called moral and defined as obedience to a law prescribed to oneself, never used such expressions as "self-realization," "self-fulfillment," or "self-improvement." (1963, p. 323)

Perhaps Plamenatz was being too literal minded. Certainly Rousseau had in mind some form of self-development. Yet he confused the issue, it seems, by his frequent use of the term selfsufficiency. Ronald Grimsley insists that "self-sufficiency is his most frequently used term" (see 1971, vol. 10). In talking about self-sufficiency Rousseau was referring not to man himself but to his will. At first glance he seemed to suggest the restoration of the capacity of "primitive" or "natural" man—the very opposite of self-development. But it becomes evident that Rousseau envisioned not a return to the state of nature but a combination of the freedom of the man in the state of nature with the moral, social, and political obligations and liberties of the civic man. This freedom is clearly different. The freedom of natural man— consisting of self-sufficiency in satisfying his physical needs—is supplanted by the freedom of the autonomous citizen, free from the arbitrary will of others. Thus he remains "as free as before" but is no longer enslaved by "the impulse of appetite alone." No longer the dumb brute, he is now morally free, obeying laws he prescribes to himself. Thus Rousseau's selfsufficiency is a form of self-development as man develops into a citizen. How else can we interpret the opening of "The First Part" of A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak, from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating, by the light of reason, all the thick clouds in which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself; soaring in thought even to the celestial regions; like the sun, encompassing with giant strides the vast extent of the universe; and, what is still grander and more wonderful, going back into himself, there to study and get to know his own nature, his duties and end,

The goal of self-sufficiency, then, is not a return to nature but a turn back to it, a turn taken on an upward spiral of self-development. But there is a profound problem in Rousseau's sense of self-development. It is not the problem usually defined: Is the self realized or annihilated? It is more sophisticated and subtle than that: Does political participation express or does it produce the general will? The distinction is crucial. Whereas Mill sought the rational citizen, Rousseau, the good republican, sought the patriotic citizen. Whereas Mill demanded the development through participation of the critical faculties and thus argued for the presence of a diversity of opinions, Rousseau sought a convergence of private interests and public duties. He sought a homogeneity of viewpoints, to be effected by education, civil religion, games, patriotic festivals, military parades, and theater. Participation was little more than a perfunctory formality for expressing the efficacy of those institutions mandated to inculcate the essential social mores. Citizens did not need to communicate among them-

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selves; the people in the assemblies came to vote, not to debate. So despite his long-standing association with the idea of political participation, Rousseau's participation is not a method of developing the self but of expressing a social self "engineered" through social institutions. Self-development preceded participation, so that if the proper education—by tutor and festival and religion—has been efficacious, political participation could be a simple survey of the success of the social engineering. The citizen would still be autonomous, as Rousseau understood and developed that idea, for the self is not annihilated by or merged with the collectivity; instead, the self is a reflection of the collectivity. It is not developed in participation, but a developed self is brought to participation. Though each represents or presents that collectivity in his own way, still each is none other than the collectivity. At this point, for the sake of brevity, I have left only an impression of an interpretation and have not produced the requisite arguments or evidence. But I shall return to this topic in greater detail later in this chapter. 3. Representative Government. Dennis Thompson argues in John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (1976) that spurring intellectual growth directly, say through formal education, might be more efficacious for stimulating the kind of mental development that Mill wanted than would be relying on political participation. Although Thompson may be correct that political participation might stimulate only the development of political skills and the acquisition of narrow political knowledge, he seems to miss utterly the socializing and "community-building" aspects of it. 4. "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America," in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 2, pp. 47, 48. 5. On Liberty, 1972, p. 58. Mill and Tocqueville may have been the first modern political theorists to suggest that the pressures to conform to mass sentiment were a greater threat to liberty than was government interference. 6. To some extent what concerned Mill about the electorate was demonstrated by the voting behavior studies of Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944; and Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954. Their studies showed that only approximately one-third of the voters were accurate in their perceptions of where the candidates stood on the issues, and this one-third tended to be the best informed and best educated (see Berelson et al., 1954, chap. 10). Their research also revealed that when those with little interest in the election decided to vote, they were the most susceptible to political influence and information. This led these researchers to the conclusion that the least interested are making the most important decisions, a situation that would have been offset by a scheme such as "plural voting." 7. See Jefferson's letter to Joseph Cabell, February 2, 1816 (1944, pp. 660-62). A ward system would be even more feasible, and perhaps more appealing, in a workplace democracy. 8. Bengt Abrahamsson documents this point using Lindblad's survey of the Swedish Communal Workers' Union that showed a marked correlation between local union size and participation. In those local unions with more than one thousand members, 17 percent took part in the annual meeting, whereas the regular meetings averaged 9 percent participation. In those locals with thirty or fewer members, the percentages were 70 and 53, respectively (1977, pp. 204-5). 9. Mansbridge's research indicates that participants are vulnerable to others and avoid conflict more because of the social setting in which participation takes place than because of the participatory procedures themselves. In the two settings she investigated in detail, Mansbridge shows that because participants have multiple and daily relations with one another, they worry about gossip, the most frequent form of social sanction. It is fear of conflict, she reports—the fear that one's daily routine and interactions will be disrupted—that underscores the drive to settle disputes unanimously. 10. Limitations of space and the scope of this study preclude a detailed discussion of the

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feasibility of these participatory procedures and how they might blend with or supplant current representational structures at various levels of government. Some combination of these procedures and the mechanisms and institutions proposed by Benjamin Barber in Strong Democracy (1984, esp. chap. 10) might suffice, or perhaps a scheme of imbricated wards with face-to-face assemblies constituting the root system and limited, accountable representative assemblies, the branches—a facsimile of G. D. H. Cole's proposed hierarchical system of guilds (see Guild Socialism Restated). 11. W. Damon & M. Killen, "Peer Interaction and the Process of Change in Children's Moral Reasoning," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 28 (1982). 12. Although suggestive, such studies and their findings offer implications but scant direct empirical justification for what I have proposed. All the research of the sort mentioned in the text measures developmental change in dyadic interaction. Although such interaction is the basis of intimacy and compound individuality and thus bears directly on that aspect of this study, assessing the variables and conditions that stimulate developmental change in groups may be simply too difficult. Nevertheless, such studies as those conducted and cited by Broughton offer interesting though limited approaches that should be tried in group discussions. Bear in mind also that these researchers are interested in cognitive development more than in self-development. Compound selfhood, to repeat, is a change in meaning and not a shift in structures. Broughton does add, however, that something approaching Habermas's ideal speech situation "would truly foster personal and collective growth of the participants" (1982, p. 375) In this regard, the procedures I have outlined are a closer approximation of the Habermasian paradigm—as distortion-free communication is essential to those procedures— than are the constrained and orchestrated dialogues used in much developmental research. 13. Johannes Pedersen and Palle Svensson (1982), for example, reviewed the literature on political participation to ascertain whether Mill's claims for the educational effects of participation would be substantiated or refuted. Although interesting in its pertinence to Mill, their research has little bearing on our concerns. They focus on voter behavior, which, though crucial to Mill's assertion that the exercise of franchise is the road to mental cultivation, has little to offer by way of critique to a model that goes some distance beyond voting. Their focus may not even carry the weight the authors suppose, for as already suggested, Mill packed into this exercise far more than simple voting. Pedersen, interestingly, concluded from his studies that electoral participation is not the "school of public interest" that Mill thought it could be. Voting offers only a minimal socializing effect, though Pedersen admits that the evidence that voting increases a sense of public duty has yet to be analyzed (1982, p. 563). 14. Pateman, 1970, p. 63. Kurt Lewin conducted other pertinent experiments that Pateman does not cite. In "Frontiers in Group Dynamics," Human Relations 1, (1947), he reported two major components in fostering attitudinal change: (1) participation in which the person is involved in discussions and dilemmas and (2) communication in which opinions and views are actively solicited and debated. In "Group Decision and Social Change" (in E. Maccoby et al., eds., Readings in Social Psychology, 1958), Lewin reported that another factor important to change in attitude is the participant's perception that the others involved are also willing to commit themselves to decisions and action. 15. See chap. 5, esp. pp. 191-204. As a counterpoint to this, Bachrach and Baratz found that during the heyday of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program, when passive, disaffected, and inarticulate representatives from the poor were placed on boards and commissions, they "were invariably transformed into angry, articulate, and concerned individuals." Their participation evolved into genuine involvement (Bachrach, 1975, pp. 43-44). I conclude from this that for participatory activity beyond the kinds Sniderman mentions, selfesteem is either secondary or irrelevant.

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16. In addition to the two examples in the text, see Charvet, 1981; Iyer, 1979; Pitkin & Shumer, 1982; Schaar, 1970; W. Sullivan, 1982; Wolin, 1981, 1982. For two pallid attempts to apply communitarian approaches to a real issue, see Sandel, 1984; Stith, 1983. Perhaps the most egregious example of communitarian rhetoric devoid of supporting arguments is Benjamin Barber's Strong Democracy (1984). Barber would deny that he is a communitarian and even indulges in some communitarian bashing himself. But he has a harsh and narrow view of communitarianism. He equates it with any movement or theory that posits the achievement of civic identity through the merger of the individual into the collectivity. Communitarianism is too broad an outlook to be encompassed in its entirety by such a one-dimensional view. Indeed, Barber's own insistence throughout his book on the importance of community, though ill defined, as well as his assiduous criticism of liberalism, places him squarely in our communitarian camp. In support of his version of participatory, or "strong," democracy—proposed in opposition to both liberalism and his version of communitarianism—Barber fills his book with unsubstantiated notions such as these: Participation takes place in "an evolving problem-solving community that creates public ends" (p. 152); participation is meant to "invent alternative futures, create mutual purposes, and construct competing visions of community" (p. 177); participatory politics is a way "to transform conflict through a politics of distinctive inventiveness and discovery. It seeks to create a public language that will help reformulate private interests in terms susceptible to public accommodation" (p. 119); "outcomes [must] be commonly conceived" (p. 224); and public ends "are literally forged through the act of public participation, created through common deliberation and common action" (p. 152). Although he discusses specific participatory institutions and deliberative procedures, nowhere does he connect them to these ideas on creating public ends or the common good. He tells us what ought to be done but not how it can be done. Common deliberation, unfortunately, does not necessarily produce either common action or common ends. Finally, lest the reader think that the idea of generating or creating the common good is a new one, David Harris takes R. H. Tawney to task for suggesting it but failing to supply evidence or mechanisms for how it is to be accomplished: Tawney seems to have taken it for granted that such [common] ends exist. ... All men of goodwill would naturally agree that certain ends were ends that they held in common. ... It does not appear to have occurred to Tawney to consider the possibility that the development of a consensus on [ends] might be prevented by ... deep-seated moral conflict between people with sincerely and reflectively held views. (Harris, 1983, p. 227)

Or, I should add, by disagreement over the means of effecting it. 17. David Stockman, the lodestar in Ronald Reagan's best and brightest constellation, gave evidence in his published confessions that where there is heat there need not be much light. It seems that Stockman, having been elevated from a mere congressman to director of the budget, worked sedulously to put into effect President Reagan's first-year tax cuts and restraint of government spending. The premises according to which he and Mr. Reagan operated came from an economic forecast that its authors, Mr. Stockman and Murray Weidenbaum—then the president's chief economic adviser—knew to be false but politically expedient. 18. Lewis Mumford noted that idiosyncratic and aberrant beliefs should under no circumstances be suppressed or eliminated, as it is sometimes by unexpected combinations or unorthodox interpretations of views or beliefs that important new insights are discovered or made. See The Myth of the Machine, especially vol. 1: Technics and Human Development. 19. Compromise or bargaining amounts to the trading of values. The problem with this

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process is that if the parties to the negotiations understand that compromise is the goal, then they will be tempted to introduce into their positions superfluous demands that they are willing to trade or give up so as to insulate their deeper concerns. For example, at the height of their power, the Black Panthers used this tactic as a regular part of their negotiations: Demand much more than you think you can get so as to increase the likelihood that the fallback or compromise position will give you exactly what you want. America's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) had been described by some as feasible only as a bargaining chip in the game of nuclear disarmament. As such, it allowed the United States to give up nothing—except, perhaps, a chimera—in return for actual cuts in existing Soviet weaponry. 20. Henry Kariel, invoking Kant, describes such a participatory politics as "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck"—purposiveness without purpose (1983, p. 257). In short, we need to deliberate and decide on policies, but not in conformity to some ideal end. We harness "the energy conventionally invested in the pursuit of ideals" but direct it toward open and indeterminate goals. "The grip of specific ideals can only be loosened in forums that allow for the elaboration and integration of competing ideals. Within such forums, polar opposites of experience can be integrated by a discipline which holds them in a state of suspense" (1983, p. 258). What is this discipline? It is, says Kariel, "a readiness to evoke and arouse new interests, to strengthen weak ones and deflect strong ones, to remain an empathetic and yet detached participant-observer, to maintain a state of tense irresolution, to refuse to deny or affirm anything conclusively" (1983, p. 258). Unfortunately, by failing to go into any detail on how to structure and operate this discipline, Kariel leaves it, as the communitarians did, ambiguous and vacuous. But what is buried within Kariel's proposal is the suggestion that we should not attempt to resolve contradictions among propositions, interests, or ideals but, rather, should hold them in suspension, using them as a backdrop or context for defining and limiting the decisions we must make. Kariel's discipline seems tantamount to our ideal generative procedure freed from the constrictions of accommodating ideal ends while making use of such ends. 21. See B. M. Bass and F.-T. M. Norton, "Group Size and Leaderless Discussions" Journal of Applied Psychology 35 (1951), and A. P. Hare, Handbook of Small Group Research (1976); both cited in Mansbridge, 1980, pp. 371-72. Mansbridge states that smallgroup research shows that participatory groups attain consensus not only by bringing common interests to the group but also by producing changes in interests in the group process (1980, p. 282). She summarizes: "Dividing a large meeting into small groups facilitates perceiving a conflict from another's point of view" (1982, p. 135). 22. Joseph Tussman offers a similar approach in Obligation and the Body Politic (1960). Tussman argues that in conflicts of interests, two kinds of disagreements must be distinguished. The first he calls disagreements about assertions, those being brief statements of belief, desire, taste, preference: I want more money, I believe all politicians are crooks, and so on. The second kind is disagreements about claims. Instead of asserting "I believe all politicians are crooks," a claimant baldly states, "All politicians are crooks." This statement is a claim of truth and can be refuted by finding, for instance, one honest politician. Tussman claims that conflicts must be transformed from assertion disagreements into claim disagreements. "I want higher wages" becomes "I am entitled to higher wages." Then the reasons and arguments behind the claims can be unpacked and scrutinized (1960, pp. 76-81). Unfortunately, Tussman never unpacks or scrutinizes his own claim. Weighing the evidence and judging the arguments often involve more than determining the facts, though that is a start. The facts may not be readily apparent or available, or the arguments may not rest on fact. "Abortion is murder" is definitely a claim, but one that rests at this point more on definition than on defmitiveness. In short, political decisions often revalue judgments more than proof. That is the point of deliberation and something like generative procedures. The

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transformation of language that Tussman is proposing is really only a translation. It may establish more clearly and quickly the arguments behind the viewpoint, but that is something the participants ought to do anyway, especially in generative procedures. Certainly the interests of those issuing the statements do not seem transformed because of the difference in expression. If they are, then this should have been the basis of Tussman's argument rather than the equally unsubstantiated claim that a citizen "must in this [political] capacity, be concerned with the public interest, not with his private goods. His communication must be collegia!, not manipulative" (1960, p. 108). All Tussman offers is the imperative. Think in the public interest!—an exhortation that Rousseau, for one, found totally inadequate (see Rousseau, "A Discourse on Political Economy," 1973, p. 130). 23. Of course, another early theorist with similar concerns was Tocqueville, whose experiences in America led him to a new understanding of self-interest. Although self-interest is employed "to correct self-interest. . . . [It] produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. . . . [I]f it does not at once lead men to virtue by their will, it draws them gradually in that direction by their habits" (1969, vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 8). The more, that men participate in civic associations, the deeper and easier will become their habit of thinking of the interests of others: "Men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice; what was calculation becomes an instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one's fellow citizens, the habit and taste for them is at length required" (1969, chap. 4). One problem here is that the very fuel of participation—that "all men feel the value of goodwill and all try to win it by gaining the esteem and affection of those among whom they must live" (1969, vol. 2, pt. 2, chap. 2)—is the same pressure to conform that Tocqueville found firing tyrannies of the majority. He does not distinguish clearly, or does not tell us how self-interest properly understood led to a distinction, between a social pressure to work in concert and to acquiesce to the superior argument and a social pressure to go along with the herd irrespective of the quality or nature of the decision. The motivation in both seems the same, and though his tone is confident and his arguments appealing, Tocqueville remains unconvincing on this point. Perhaps he set the standard, discussed at length in this chapter, that communitarians have emulated all too successfully. Thus communitarian theorist William Sullivan can interpret Tocqueville, contra liberals, as saying that civic life transforms self-interest into altruism but then fail to present any argument either for Tocqueville's case or for his own built from this very interpretation (see W. Sullivan, 1982, esp. pp. 187, 202-7, 211-20). 24. Carole Pateman says of Rousseau's notorious "forced to be free" that participation itself "forces" one to be free. The mere act of deliberation requires one to think for himself, to make his own decisions (Pateman, 1970, p. 26). Yet this is not the context of Rousseau's usage. He states that citizens must be forced to obey the general will, a situation that arises after participation, not during it. Pateman suggests that citizens, whether they wish it or not, are "educated through participating in decision making." But is she also suggesting that they are to be forced to participate? She also claims that other "methods of educating the citizenry," such as public festivals and civil religion, are "not a necessary part of the theory" (1970, p. 25, n. 1). Because she does not explain why this is so, indeed because she drops the subject altogether, I can only conclude that these other methods are unnecessary for, and even harmful to, only her theory. Finally, Pateman suggests that the participatory system is self-sustaining "because the very qualities that are required of individual citizens if the system is to work successfully are those that the process of participation itself develops and fosters" (1970, p. 25). I have interpreted Rousseau's participation differently and through a less selective reading. Rather than being developmental, participation is expressive. It expresses the level of individual and collective virtue that has been instilled through the systems of civic education:

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tutorial, patriotic, and religious. Thus it may not be self-sustaining at all. How does Rousseau's idea of autonomy, according to this interpretation, fit with our sense of autonomy? For Rousseau, it would seem, autonomy refers to self-regulation or self-control in accordance with the values and mores of society. It is, in short, free and rational choice within a range of options, a definition of autonomy that we have already rejected. Rousseau's educative centerpiece, indeed, his entire social enterprise, is not designed to inculcate a predisposition toward autonomy as we have defined that term—a critical stance toward the rules and roles of one's sodality or society. The whole point of the internalization is that the voice with which we speak is not like the community's; it is the community's. The distinction to be made, then, is not between Rousseau's sense of autonomy and ours; rather, it is between his sense of autonomy and what we have previously described as the membership self. The distinction is that internalization presupposes a separation between the individual and the community. Rousseau's autonomous citizen takes into himself the "generalized other," to use G. H. Mead's term, whereas with the membership self the community voice constitutes the self; there is no separate other. Thus with membership there is no need to force one to be free, as the individual is the embodiment of the general will. This is precisely what Rousseau would like to revive, though he cannot do so if man is also to be autonomous. Thus he proposes a system of inculcation to raise citizens according to, and raise them up into, a right or virtuous or proper standard of conduct while preserving their freedom to choose. Although choices may be restricted to a range of options, there will always be the danger of a slip or rift between what is right for the citizen and what he thinks is right. Thus the need to compel obedience. 25. Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 7, pp. 194-95. How, writes Rousseau, can man be forced to defend the liberty of any one among them, without trespassing on that of others? And how can they provide for the public needs, without alienating the individual property of those who are forced to contribute to them? . . . This difficulty has been removed ... by the most sublime of all human institutions, or rather by a divine inspiration, which teaches mankind to initiate here below the unchangeable decrees of the Deity. By what inconceivable art has a means been found of making them subject; of using in the service of the State the properties, the persons, and even the lives of all its members, without constraining and without consulting them; of confining their will by their own admission . . . and forcing them to punish themselves, when they act against their own will?

By what art indeed? "These wonders are the work of law," brought down to the collectivity by the legislator, instilled by systems of civic education, enforced by compulsion to obey (Political Economy, pp. 123-24). 26. For Rousseau the authentic self, says Berman, is the merger of man and citizen. Yet after his studies of man and society, Rousseau concluded that this merger was impossible. The only remaining course was to protect man from this dream of fulfillment. Rousseau "theorized about how the state could divert men from themselves by maximizing rewards and incentives within limits which he would define" (Berman, 1971, p. 299). The self is truly itself when one is "sufficient unto oneself, like God" (Rousseau, 1979, p. 89). Thus one must either become a man, cut off from human society, finding peace and tranquillity in himself alone, or become a citizen, abandoning himself to find himself in the collectivity, to be totally controlled—as in the welfarist state described in Julie—and thinking himself totally free (see also Shklar, 1985). 27. See Wood, 1972, pp. 161—73. She is not alone in this interpretation. John Chapman describes the general will as "a process of 'dynamic interaction' " in which each participant does not merely reflect one another's judgments "but actively strives to correct them" (1956, pp. 45-46). See also Cohen, 1986. 28. Joshua Cohen builds on the reciprocity phenomenon that Rousseau mentions in Emile

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(1986, p. 213)—if someone is seen to be advancing our interests, we are inclined to advance theirs, and vice versa—"if the reciprocity mechanism is carried to its limit ... it results in a general will" (1986, p. 294). 29. Jane Mansbridge maintains that once representatives are cut off from face-to-face interaction with their constituents and engage in face-to-face discussions with fellow legislators, they begin to develop interests in accordance with their colleagues and often away from those of their constituents (1980, p. 240). The implication is that face-to-face interaction can have a significant impact on interest formation. Ben Barber presents a similar case, but again without real argument or any evidence (see Barber, 1984, pp. 127, 171-73, 200). 30. See Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Zeigler, 1964. As Dennis Thompson points out, the data on the phenomenon of opinion formation may be exaggerated, if not misleading. They are based on questionnaires in which respondents were asked to report on the political preferences of their associates. Thus the respondents may well read their own preferences into those of their colleagues and friends (see Thompson, 1976, pp. 89-90). 31. Thompson, 1976, pp. 89-90; see also Berelson et al., 1944, pp. 105-9. 32. Thompson, 1976, p. 100; see also Lane, 1959, p. 90. 33. D. Miller, "Two Conceptions of Politics" (n.d.), unpublished manuscript, p. 3. It should not be surprising to find Miller's position supported by social psychology. Freed Bales shows (1951) that when participation relies on dialogue, it increases the amount of conflicting viewpoints. In addition, he shows that when the purpose of interaction is to attain a group solution to an issue or problem—our compound common good—cooperation and interaction, as well as solicitation and consideration of viewpoints, are much higher than in competitive groups trying to bargain to gain their interests. In addition, the experimental research of Dr. David Perkins suggests that a "competent reasoner" thinks through a problem by challenging and altering his premises. "Effective reasoning," says Perkins, "depends on an active effort to interrogate one's knowledge base" (1983, p. 186). This interrogation, Perkins continues, permits premises to change, and thus one's viewpoint on an issue is "somewhat constructed" by the reasoner's understanding of different arguments for and against positions (1983, p. 178). The dialogue of the generative procedures provides such interrogation, and it is both generative and critical. When we probe our own and others' positions, we discover and concede as well as substantiate and refute. 34. Ryan, 1983a, p. 46. 35. Tocqueville called this attitude enlightened self-interest: "All parties are ready to recognize the rights of the majority because they all hope one day to profit themselves by them. ... [A] man who is not today one of the majority party may be so tomorrow" (1969, p. 241) Such an attitude pervaded the United States, so Tocqueville reported, with the result that "while the majority is in doubt, one talks; but when it is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and friends and enemies alike seem to make for its bandwagon" (1969, p. 254). 36. Walzer, 1970, p. 47. Added to this is the possibility of reopening an issue, as the decisions taken in the generative procedures do not resolve issues but seek to reach general agreement on a public policy. As Walzer also wrote: "In democratic politics, all destinations are temporary." See Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 310.

Chapter 5 1. Setting becomes an issue when the focus of change is not simply several individuals but society itself. Which social arrangements are to be changed, how, and when? In addition, there are, of course, serious issues to consider before participation, especially in politics, can

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be implemented. Among these are standard questions about, for example, the complexity of the issues, the competence of the people, the mechanisms to use when decisions must be made quickly, and the methods and costs, in time and money, of supplying information to the participants. To consider these in any depth would take us too far afield, as my approach here is theoretical. Yet consider one daunting obstacle: Once a ward has made its decision and derived its common interest, its result is then compounded by the results of all the other wards. In a town of twenty thousand adults there would be roughly 130 wards. Each ward might elect or select a representative to present and argue its case before the other ward representatives. This "grand ward" of 130 would then operate according to the generative procedures. But imagine that the town is a city of two million adults, or over 13,000 wards. Granted, a winnowing process might be conceived, but any such process would be tedious and ponderous, to say the least. Or imagine that the issue is of national importance. No electronic breakthrough is going to shorten the route to a decision made through generative political talk. Perhaps what would suffice in politics is a mixture of participatory arenas and representative structures such as Benjamin Barber proposes in Strong Democracy (1984) or David Miller suggests at the conclusion of "The Competitive Model of Democracy" (1983). Citizens' rigorous participation might then be restricted, as Mill suggested, to local issues, because the generative procedures could be organized best and would function well at that level. Politics might then retain much of its representative form, but perhaps all levels of government, from town councils to national assemblies, would function according to generative procedures. At the same time, professional organizations and workplaces of all sorts could be encouraged to adopt these procedures. Structured as they mostly are on a scale smaller than that of national politics, workplaces could decide on internal issues and policy through generative participation. Granting what I have said in prior chapters about the problems of participation in the workplace, if Carole Pateman (1970) is correct, the increases in worker efficiency and morale, in company productivity, and in worker cooperation through augmented relationships could convince businesses and organizations to try something like them. One additional point, however: As I argue in Chapter 6, compound individuals would in all likelihood press for generative participation on all levels of politics, as it is the means par excellence of expressing or exercising personal autonomy. 2. See Wilber, 1983b, chaps. 3, 4, 7; and Kegan, 1982, chap. 2. Wilber goes so far as to say that the self at each level is embedded in community. 3. Sheldon Wolin notes that attempts by management to make corporations more like communities are doomed to failure because organization, he argues, is antithetical to community (see 1960, chap. 10). 4. My thanks to Richard Dagger for this insight. 5. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 115; quoted in Taylor, 1975, pp. 381, 383. 6. Many communitarians ignore sociological and anthropological evidence. This enables them to assume or imply that gemeinschaft, as an ideal type, actually existed. As Inkeles and Smith report in their empirical studies of what makes man "modern," the idyll is far removed from the realities of village life: Because villagers suffer deep insecurity both in relation to nature, whence [they] look for sustenance, and in relations to the powerful figures in [the] village . . . villagers cannot rely on the support of others when in need. Family and group quarrels, indeed feuds, are often as much the norm as is harmony. Distrust is frequently rampant. . . . [I]nsults and abuse are as common in the village as elsewhere, and one waits a long while between rounds of respectful and dignified treatment. (1983, p. 278)

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7. "People draw the conventions of community about them, like a cloak around the shoulders, to protect them from the elements—other peoples' ways of doing things, other cultures, other communities" (A. P. Cohen, 1985, p. 63; emphasis in the original). 8. Raymond Plant has also dealt with the notion of partial communities by proposing a dual structure. I draw my first definition from his, but his second is quite different: A community, in his view, is partial if its obligations, while extending to all members, do not encompass the total person or all aspects of life. Thus in a community of scholars I might owe obligations to all members only to the extent that the obligations deal with my colleagues' lives as scholars. I am under no obligation, therefore, to help them with their mortgages or their children's behavior problems. But this understanding raises a difficulty. The line indicating where the scholarly life ends and the personal life begins is a fine, if ever visible, one. In fact, any personal problem might affect a scholar's professional life, thus legitimately involving me in her personal affairs. Either I draw the line myself, which means that I set the rules for my conduct in community, or the community draws the line in some formal way, thus undercutting one of the structural supports of community—implied obligations (see Plant, 1974, 1978). 9. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Benn, 1982, pp. 57-59. 10. See the 1983 preface to Mansbridge's 1980 book Beyond Adversary Democracy, especially p. xi. She states that face-to-face participation fosters the creation and maintenance of common interests, which in turn encourage members to identify with one another and with the group as a whole. 11. See Wolff, 1968, chap. 4. Diversity may even contribute to an overall sense of solidarity. Barnard and Vernon declare that "the point of pluralism is not merely that diversity exists, but that diversity is compatible with unity" (1975, p. 189). 12. Robert Kegan intimates that there are so few participatory settings, especially workplaces, because there are so few compound individuals, what he calls "interindividuals" (see 1982, chap. 8). The truth might well be the reverse: There are so few compound individuals because there are so few participatory settings. 13. Belongingness is not the value that some communitarians think it is. Researchers Wahba and Bridwell reviewed the empirical studies undertaken to verify or falsify Maslow's needs hierarchy, one level of which is the social needs that comprise belongingness, acceptance by a group or by friends, and so forth. This level succeeds the physiological needs— food, water, and sex—that have to be satisfied, according to Maslow, before the social needs can emerge and precedes the esteem and self-actualization needs that can arise only if the social needs are fulfilled. Wahba and Bridwell report in one section of their review that the most satisfied needs are consistently the social needs. Thus if it is a sense of belongingness to a group that the communitarians feel is missing, then either they have misdiagnosed the real lack, or they are simply wrong. See Wahba and Bridwell, "Maslow Reconsidered: A Review of Research on the Need Hierarchy Theory," Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance 15 (1976). 14. The three types of community are (1) affective community or the mutual awareness of sharing the culture, (2) production community or workers engaged in collective production enterprises, and (3) rational community or collective deliberation on social goals and social choices. These communities reinforce the "reciprocity of awareness" that Wolff says constitutes community.

Chapter 6 1. Maclntyre describes commitment in this way: Only when certain kinds of practical and theoretical issues . . . claimed the attention of a particular social group did they either discover for themselves where it was that their own

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allegiance had already been given or else for the first time clearly give their allegiance to one set of goods rather than the other. (1988, p. 36) What Maclntyre describes for the group becomes, as individualism begins to flower, the reflective procedure of the autonomous person. 2. At the risk of redundancy, I remind the reader that compound individuality is the name for the actual level of self and that the theory of compound individuality is the name for the view of the self as a series of stages. 3. Libertarians are interested in absolute rights, reducible to the absolute right to property. This reflects and is reflected in their notion of the self, which Newman describes as "anomic individualism" (1984, p. 49), the credo of which is "You are what you own." 4. See Gaus, 1983, and Freeden, 1978, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. Freeden states that one significant change in liberal theory at the turn of the century was a shift from a concern with the individual to a concern with the relationship between individuals and society. In a different vein, Lawrence Siedentop argues for a separate, predominantly continental strand of liberalism that from its beginning has been associated with a concern with social relationships (see "Two Strands of Liberalism," in Miller & Siedentop, 1983). 5. From the perspective of compound individuality, the modern liberals' position is not so much a dilemma as a misunderstanding, one that the theory of compound individuality rectifies. Full development does not refer, or should not refer, to all possible human acts, talents, and abilities. Surely no single human can develop all of those. But full development ought to refer to those innate structures of human cognition—the deep structures or levels— that underlie and inform the manifestation of abilities and talents, those structures that I described in Chapter 2. These levels are what must be developed. The level associated with the modern self is the structure of formal operational thought and self-reflectivity, recapitulated as "autonomy." But attaining autonomy is, of course, necessary though not sufficient for liberalism—for being and living as a liberal self—as autonomy also constitutes the self of libertarianism. Required beyond autonomy is compound individuality, a point already made and one to which I shall return in this chapter. Here one needs others for the completion of one's self, but one does not use others; one is in part defined by others. 6. See Damico, 1978. Damico points out that to unify "both aspects of personality— individuality and sociality—Dewey relies heavily on the idea of community" (p. 43). 7. The example is Carol Gould's, which she uses to illustrate the error of those who see individuals as socially isolated and externally related. But her notion of "shared understandings" as they relate to one's interaction with a bank teller are hardly sufficient to constitute internal relations, (see Gould, 1988, pp, 95ff.). 8. Although it is true that Berlin rests his case for liberalism as negative freedom on the strength of the idea of irreconcilable clashing values, his isolation of liberty and autonomy in the inviolate private sphere follows from what he sees as the deleterious nature of positive freedom. This freedom is the purview of totalitarian who claim to know the truth about life and human nature, who claim to speak from and to be able to lead us to our "higher" or "better" self. This attitude follows, says Berlin, from the desire for self-mastery. Although there are historical examples, from the Greeks to twentieth-century fascists, that support this view, I find no warrant for Berlin's conclusion that self-mastery must mean or must eventuate in a totalitarian pursuit of our "higher" self. This book should help explain why. 9. As if we needed another reminder, Taylor defines this as atomism: "a condition in which everyone defines his or her purposes in individual terms and cleaves to society on instrumental grounds" (1989b, p. 413). 10. For an argument that the advocacy of positive liberty as a means to self-realization is "the watershed in the evolution of liberal theory, dividing the classical and modem versions," see Gaus, 1983, chap. 5. 11. "The problem with orthodox liberal thought is that some men and women cannot

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recognize themselves in it" (Rosenblum, 1987, p. 3). That means that liberal theory does not capture the political or social or psychological experiences of their lives. This is certainly true of Kohlberg's higher stages, as too few can see themselves in the descriptions of the moral reasoners of Stages 5 and 6. 12. Because all of Perry's subjects are college students, formal operations and thus selfreflectivity are presupposed. 13. For a similar view of relativism, see Fishkin, 1984, who ties in his research to political theory. 14. Perry, 1968. Perry comments that rampant relativism in which no value is any better than another, which can be called "cynicism," was, for many people, a temporary crisis (p. 38). These "cynics," according to Perry, were definable "not as 'against thinking,' " which many could do extraordinarily well, but as "against thinking about one particular thing: thought. Most particularly [their] own thought." This is the atomist, who does not wish to scrutinize his worldview for fear of revealing, even to himself, cracks in its foundation. 15. Kohlberg asserted that his progressive moral ideology is based on "the value postulates of ethical liberalism" that reject value relativism and require universal principles (see Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972, p. 473). If Kohlberg could have demonstrated that there is a natural progression from hedonism to deontological ethics, then he would have made a powerful case for deontological liberalism. But he could not. 16. So called not because relativism is transcended but because it is accepted. 17. Again, as traditions go, Maclntyre comes close to this (see 1988). 18. See Thomas Spragens's discussion of this in The Irony of Liberal Reason (1981). 19. The failure to acknowledge such standards, even grounded in language, presents severe problems for communitarians. See my discussion of the communitarian self in Chapter 1 and of the nature of total community in Chapter 5. Yet even as hard-driving a communitarian as Alasdair Maclntyre seems to be moving toward this view of "logic independence," as he sees the demonstration of one tradition's superiority to another resting on the ability to persuade rationally the adherents of the failing tradition. 20. The points raised here call into question the extent to which Walzer is a communitarian. He is clearly on Maclntyre's side in thinking that those within a communal framework are not relativists. People holding values within the communal or shared understandings, he would argue, do not think of those values as relative. Yet from culture to culture these values are relative, and then he seems to be in the liberal camp that Maclntyre criticizes. Yet Maclntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) blurs the picture, for, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, if different traditions and their shared understandings are relative, then to follow the Maclntyre of After Virtue (1981), their framework can be based on no more than taste or arbitrary preference. 21. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Kymlicka, 1988. 22. Bellah and his colleagues comment: "Absolute independence [self-sufficiency] is a false ideal. It delivers not the autonomy it promises but loneliness and vulnerability instead" (1985, p. 247). Absolute independence undercuts autonomy by depriving it of the social context that gives the autonomous person a satisfying, harmonious life. 23. For a discussion of democratic participation as the positive liberty required of selfdevelopment, see Gould, 1988. 24. To ensure such a guarantee would mean that if I wanted to purchase a Rolls Royce, it would become an autonomous choice only once I had acquired the car. But autonomy is a process of choosing, a way of choosing, and it involves acting on, but not necessarily realizing, that choice. I can begin to work hard and save for the Rolls Royce, though I probably will never be able to buy it. Does this mean that a person who can buy the Rolls is more autonomous than I? It does not, for autonomy is not in that sense a matter of gradations or degrees. If, however, one cannot act on a choice made autonomously—that is, self-

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reflectively—it is still an autonomous choice, though one may lack the freedom to act on it. Thus a prisoner can autonomously choose to become an investment banker but lack the freedom to achieve it. That does not mean that the choice is not autonomous, but it does mean that he is not free to do it, in the sense of at liberty to do it. For a discussion of the difference between freedom and autonomy, see Richard Flathman, 1987.1 would like to thank Rich Dagger for the conversations about autonomy in which I could formulate and strengthen these ideas. 25. I have said that liberals ought to press the state to guarantee for persons those necessities required for autonomy—education, health care, shelter, clothing. These would need to be argued for politically. They can, of course, also be argued for on grounds other than autonomy, for example, that anyone born a citizen of this country is entitled to them. In other words, they do not have to be interpreted as liberal values. They can also be communitarian values. 26. This means, in effect, as Kant said, following Aristotle's formulation, that a "man will be a good citizen even if he is not a morally good man." Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant on History, pp. 111-12; quoted in Galston, 1988, p. 1278. 27. In "The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good," Rawls defined neutrality in an important way. That way is procedural: A procedure is neutral if it can be justified with appeal only to "neutral values, those that regulate fair procedures adjudicating between conflicting claims" (1988, p. 261). Such values would include impartiality and equal opportunity for all parties to present their cases. They would also include "values that underlie the principles of free rational discussion between reasonable persons fully capable of thought and judgment, and concerned to find the truth or to reach reasonable agreement on the best interest available" (1988, p. 261). The generative procedures are certainly in the spirit, if not to the letter, of this definition of neutrality. I would also add that if emphasis is placed on the terms free, fully capable of thought and judgment, and reasonable agreement in Rawls's description, then he is also discussing the need for participants to be autonomous. 28. The purpose of liberal democracy, as defined here, is not, as George Kateb stated (1984) and Carol Gould implied (1988), to promote self-development. That, to repeat myself, is only one-half of the story. It is also to develop good policies and good decisions through a procedure that is judged as fair and integrative, so that participants who fail to persuade the majority of the wisdom of their position will still accept the political decision, even or especially if a temporary decision, as a good—though not the best—outcome. 29. Rawls, 1988, p. 263. What, for Rawls, are these liberal values? He lists among them civility, tolerance, reasonableness, and a sense of fairness. He claims that these "political virtues must be distinguished from the virtues that characterize ways of life belonging to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines." But how? Is it not possible for the liberal virtues to form into or form the core of a comprehensive doctrine? If not, why not? If so, must liberalism then abandon them? This is not Rawls's concern. His point, and the one I have been making, is that only these virtues are suitable for a politics that honors all conceptions of the good life. 30. In his book The Self, the Individual, and the Community (1987), Brian Lee Crowley takes liberalism, both the utilitarian and deontological versions, to task for seeking to downplay, even eliminate, politics: Both utilitarianism and ethical liberalism seek a method of arriving at social decisions whose validity compels hypothetical rational men to acquiesce in whatever conclusions or results it produces. Politics, by contrast, seeks the assent of real men to the results themselves as well as to the way they are arrived at, and does so through persuasive argument directed towards, and drawing upon, common experience and common objects of knowledge. (1987, p. 281)

Perhaps Crowley has in mind the kinds of nameless liberal political philosophers that Walzer discusses in his article "Philosophy and Democracy" (1981), but I fail to see how liberalism

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per se, or Rawls or Dworkin or the liberals of the "new" or modern liberalism, can be accused of such a position on politics. It is true that Kohlberg's liberal theory of the self does attempt to provide universal moral principles. And unlike Rawls's principles of justice, which pertain to society's basic structures, these do tend to make liberalism non- or apolitical, for the test of one's moral positions on Kohlberg's view rests at the highest stage on the mere application of principles through perspectivism. It does not rely on debate, argument, or criticism to arrive at what one's principles are or whether they are appropriate to the circumstances. Yet having rejected Kohlberg's psychological model and having proposed a hybrid model, I trust that the importance of politics to both liberalism and my theory of the liberal self is clear. The aim of a liberal public philosophy is to define a standard common to all citizens regardless of their beliefs. The aim of liberal politics is to help order relations among citizens when values, ends, and beliefs conflict. Liberalism, therefore, calls for active participation in any setting in which values, ends, and beliefs are formed or decisions about them affect the participants' lives. These do not have to be political or public settings in the classical sense. Indeed, the goals of liberalism—the realization of the liberal self as a compound individual and the joint action to approach on each issue a compound common good—may be, for some, attainable through activism in associations that are not public and are political only in the broad sense used earlier. Here, then, I side with Rawls in separating liberalism from civic humanism (1988, p. 273). For civic humanists, political participation is not simply the arena for cultivating self-development; it is "the privileged locus of the good life." Political participation was necessary for any good life and also for transforming the orientation of the person away from private interests and toward the common good. That good existed outside or independent of the decisions that citizens made. Neither of these is true of liberalism. Political participation in public affairs may not be the only way to achieve compound individuality or to practice deriving the compound common good. But I think that it is the best way and will be one of the demands that developed liberal selves—that is, liberals as compound individuals—will make. 31. Though in general agreement with Gould, I have certain "intramural" disagreements with her position. She and I agree on the paramount right to autonomy, a right that extends beyond politics (1988, p. 289) to "the contexts of economic, cultural, and social organizations"; in short, to any context important to the citizens' control of their own social activity (1988, p. 255). But when she claims that the second basic character trait is "a disposition to reciprocity," we differ, not on what the required trait is, but on how it is structured or arrived at. Gould simply assumes that persons will have this trait, which she defines as "an ability to understand the perspective of the other" and to see that perspective "as equivalent to one's own" (1988, p. 290). If Gould meant by this characterization simply that others' perspectives are structured in the same way as mine—that is, by autonomous choice—then she and I are in complete agreement. Then, however, she should not have extended that justifiable claim to include in reciprocity that people must have "respect for each other's individual differences and interests" (1988, p. 257). My point is not that people cannot be reciprocal in this way. Clearly, I think that they can be. Yet atomists are not. Gould cannot just assume that relationships and democratic interactions will be reciprocal, as she defines it. The perspective she is seeking is developed; it is not given of either individuality or "human association." She is right that such reciprocity "requires certain institutional forms to support and encourage it" (1988, p. 257). As I argue in Chapter 4, the mere presence of participatory democratic procedures will not do the job. Nor can one assume that persons will come to participation with the right kind of disposition. Rather, we must build into the procedures the very conditions in which participants are compelled to develop and use such a disposition.

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INDEX

Abortion, 125-27, 153, 174 Agency, 29, 35, 37, 43-44, 64, 66-68, 150, 151-52, 183-84, 188 Alienation, 138, 142, 144 Alston, M., 188 Althusser, L., 38 Anarchism, 155 Aquinas, 27, 28, 101 Arblaster, A., 78, 191 Arendt, H., 135 Argyris, C., 194 Arieti, S., 190 Aristotle, 16, 27, 74, 78, 81, 102, 114, 132, 150, 169, 181, 186, 193, 207 Aristotelian self, 22-24, 31 Aristotelian virtues, 22, 24 on citizenship, 96 Asch, S., 155 Associations, as partial communities, 138-42, 143-44. See also Liberal associations Atomism, 3, 15, 20, 74, 77-79, 81, 84, 88-91, 93, 99, 104, 107, 117, 141, 142, 144-45, 151, 154, 155, 161, 162, 163, 170, 175, 176, 179, 180, 183, 191, 192, 193, 194, 205, 206, 208. See also Individualism Augustine, 15, 27, 28, 184 Autonomous self. See Liberal self Autonomy, 32-33, 50, 60, 63, 73, 86, 95, 96, 99, 101, 110, 120, 128, 136, 140, 143-46, 149, 150-52, 154, 157, 158, 159, 162, 169, 187, 193, 203, 205. See also Liberalism, and autonomy versus autarchy, 75 and choice, 74-76, 77, 84 defining, 73-77 and formal operational thought, 76. See also Piaget and individuality, 73 and modern liberalism, 154 as a process, 75, 169 and rationality, 74-75 and Rousseau, 118, 201 and self-reflectivity, 75-76 and self-sufficiency, 77-78, 84, 86

Bachrach, P., 108 Baldwin, J. M., 51, 52 Bales, F., 202 Barber, B., 116-17, 120, 122, 124, 197, 198 Barnard, P., and Vernon, R., 204 ' Barry, B., 122 Barthes, R., 38 Basseches, M., 86-88 Behaviorism, 38 Beiner, R., 1 l l , 114 Bell, D., 30 Bellah, R., 183 Benn, S. I., 83, 92, 95 on autonomy, 75 Berlin, I., 78, 163, 170, 177 on autonomy, 73-74, 205 and liberalism, 159, 162, 172 negative liberty, 159, 205 pluralism, 158, 159, 161 positive liberty, 158, 159, 177, 205 Herman, M., 201 Beyond individualism, 81, 82, 89, 93, 101, 128, 129, 143, 149. See also Compound individuality Bloom, A., 167 Bosanquet, B., 64, 154 Branden, N., 107 Broughton, J., 43, 44, 50, 51, 101, 105, 197 Bruno, G., 185 Burke, E., 3 Chandler, M., 160 Chapman, J. W., 142, 144, 201 Citizenship, 137, 143, 171 Civil liberty, 117 Civil religion, 119 Cohen, J., 201 Cole, G. D. H., 123 Commitments, 66, 83, 94, 151, 152, 162, 164, 167, 168, 172, 173 in intimate relationships, 92 in Perry, W., 161-64 Common good, 108, 118, 121, 126, 128, 136, 141. See also Compound common good

224

Index and contextualism, 91, 108 and participation, 119 Communitarian critique of liberalism, 65, 77, 79, 141, 150, 163, 184 Communitarian enterprise, 8, 149-51, 154, 178 Communitarian social self, 36, 66, 68, 128, 149, 150, 153, 165, 170, 178 Communitarianism, and the common good, 108-10 Communitarians, 13-14, 63, 116, 128, 130, 131, 135, 136, 165-66, 168-69, 177, 180, 184, 206 on autonomy, 65, 137, 146 Community, 94-95, 108, 128, 129-46, 149, 152, 158, 170, 175, 177, 178 versus associations, 130-35 and obligations, 131-35 and reciprocity, 132 defining, 130-37 definition of, 13 versus liberal associations, 138-46 total, 136-46, 152, 153, 177 Compound common good, 7, 113, 114-16, 122, 123, 124-25, 127, 128, 129, 143, 159, 174, 178, 180, 202, 208. See also Common good Compound individuality, 4, 37, 45, 52, 53, 60, 62, 63, 64, 74, 78, 81, 82-84, 86, 88, 93, 96, 111, 115, 123, 124, 143, 144, 145, 149, 151, 156, 163, 169-71, 174, 181, 191, 203, 204, 205 and cognitive development, 39 compound of autonomy and other selves, 5, 69, 77, 115, 151, 191 compound of innate structures, 4, 51 and contextualism, 100-4, 114 as the goal of liberalism, 8, 160-63, 168-77 intimacy importance of, 82, 91. See also Intimacy and reciprocity in relationships, 83, 92, 101 and Kohlberg's theory of moral development, 62 liberal self, 9, 69, 154, 162, 163, 164, 170, 175, 176, 177, 208 and participation, 99 reconciling liberalism and communitarianism, 7, 95, 150, 153, 154, 159 theory of, 37, 38, 60, 63, 67, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 80, 129, 138, 150-52,

225

153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 172, 176, 177, 183, 189, 205 Connolly, W., 109, 136 Conservatism, 155 Constant, B., 158 Constitutive community, 8, 9, 65, 137-46, 149, 153, 154, 155, 157, 177, 178 Constitutive relationships, 8, 9, 66, 68, 92, 94, 95, 96, 101, 143-46, 149, 155, 158, 176, 177, 178, 181 Contextualism, 82-95, 124, 128, 179 versus diversity of opinion, 89 and greater inclusiveness, 87-91 and integrating contradictions, 87-91 Contextualist thinking, 7, 172, 178 Cooley, C. H., 188 Creative conflict, 158, 168 Crowley, B., 207 Damico, A., 205 Democracy, 125, 128, 174, 180 despotic, 137 direct, 179 and Mill, J. S., 99 and generative participation, 158 and self-development, 159 in the workplace, 93, 143, 194, 196, 203 Democratic deliberation, 129 Democratic procedures, 173-74, 179, 180 Descartes, R., 15, 18 Destructive gemeinschaft, 141 Developmental psychology, 4, 6, 7, 37, 38-44, 67, 80, 101, 149, 154, 159-60, 192 developmental structuralism, 38 Dewey, J., 64, 123, 154, 156-58, 162, 168 constitutive community versus association, 157 on individuality and community, 155, 156-57, 158 Durkheim, E., 137, 140-41 Dworkin, G., 191 Dworkin, R., 95, 146, 169, 170 Education Mill, J. S., and, 99 Rousseau and, 118-19 Ego psychology, 38, 183 Equality, 118 Erikson, E., 35, 48, 183 Eudaimonia, 22 Federalist 51, 3 Fishkin, J., 163, 167

226

Index

Formal operational thought, 85, 150, 160, 192, 205. See also Piaget Foucault, M., 38 Fowler, J., 48, 58 Freeden, M., 205 Freud, S., 183 Fromm, E., 144 Gardner, H., 39 Gaus, G., 64, 154, 155, 157 Geertz, C., 186 Gellner, E., 14, 19, 150, 188 Gemeinschaft, 130-32, 141, 203 General will, 118, 119, 120-21, 129, 200, 201, 202 Generative participation, 7, 129, 143, 144, 145, 154, 158, 168, 172, 180 Generative procedures, 111-16, 122, 124, 125, 128, 143, 145, 172, 173, 174, 178, 203 and abortion, 126-27 Gergen, K., 188 Gesellschaft, 131-32 Gilligan, C., 79 change in research, 192 "collective life," 82-83, 109 on contextual thinking, 84-86 on intimacy, 82 women and relationships, 79-80 Giner, S., 142 Good life, 207. See also Liberal good life Goode, W. J., 133, 134 Gould, C., 176, 205, 207, 208 Government, 3, 112, 119, 170 Gray, J., 73, 74, 75, 76 Great chain of being, 15 Green, T. H., 64, 154, 159, 172 and higher self, 158 Gutmann, A., 95

Human nature, 3, 4, 5, 18, 153, 156, 159, 161, 176, 177, 183 Humanistic psychology, 38, 186 Humboldt, W. von, 97 Hume, 187 Ideology, 48, 155, 158, 163, 171 Individual rights, 54, 77, 99, 126, 127, 128, 141, 154, 169, 172, 176 Individualism, 77-82, 139, 144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 154, 164, 183, 205. See also Atomism and agency, 64 and autonomy, 169 definition of, 13 and libertarianism, 154 as self-sufficiency, 163 rise of, 81 Individuality, 73, 95, 99, 152, 155, 156, 176, 178, 179, 180 and autonomy, 63 autonomy and constitutive relationships, 159. See also Compound individuality definition of, 3, 67 Inkeles and Smith, 81-82, 193, 203 Interdependence, 83, 88, 156 in relationships, 155 Intersubjectivity, 31, 151, 167, 175 Intimacy, 115, 143, 144, 145, 152, 157, 194. See also Kegan, R. Jahoda, M., 102 Jefferson, T., on ward democracy, 102, 103 Jones, P., 115 Jung, C. J., 186 Justice, 29, 78, 85, 86, 101, 117, 119, 127, 165, 172

Kant, I., 18, 26, 29-30, 37, 63, 69, 74, Habermas, J., 76, 150, 192 77, 136, 161, 183, 199, 207 ideal speech situation, 197 and Categorical Imperative, 55 Kariel, H., 104, 199 Halsey, A. H., 130 Kegan, R., 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 79, Hamlyn, D. W., 188 Harris, D., 108 80, 86, 192, 194, 203 Hegel, G. W. P., 4, 62, 63, 136, 142, 149 interindividuality, 86, 204 interindividuality and intimacy, 83-84, Sittlichkeit, 138 93-94 Held, D., 171 Hermeneutical participant, 111 Kohlberg, L., 51, 52-63, 85, 87, 150, Hillery, G., 130 159, 160-63, 176, 190, 206, 208 conventional-level community, 53 Hobbes, T., 183 Hobhouse, L. T., 64, 154, 155 conventional levels of moral reasoning, 52, 53-54 Hobson, J. A., 154

Index cross-cultural studies of moral reasoning, 61-62, 161 invariant sequence of Kohlberg's stages, 53, 60-62 moral dilemmas, 52-54 postconventional levels of moral reasoning, 52, 53, 54-55 postconventional perspectivism, 54 preconventional levels of moral reasoning, 53, 55 rationality and postconventional stages, 54-60 and relationships, 53 and relativism, 62 on role-taking, 52-59 on rules and roles, 53 and the self, 51-52 theory of moral development, 52 and universal morality, 60-62 Kohut, H., 183 Kramer, D. A., 88 Lacan, J., 45 Ladd, J., 133 Language, 45, 68, 73, 109, 136, 138, 157, 164, 165, 168, 179, 188, 200 Learning theory, 38 Levi-Strauss, C., 38, 62 Liberal associations, 152, 153, 159, 174, 178-79, 208 Liberal democracy, 174, 176, 179, 207 Liberal enterprise, 8, 155, 159, 178 Liberal good life, 8, 29, 168-75 Liberal politics, 168, 172-77 Liberal self, 3, 5, 29, 36, 67, 152, 154, 159, 170, 171, 174, 190 autonomous, 6, 64, 150, 172 disengaged, 16, 27 Liberal values, 169-74 autonomy, 154, 169, 174 dialogue, 167, 168 equal concern and respect, 174 liberty, 169, 174 mutual respect, 169 openness, 169, 170, 174 pluralism, 170 progress, 177 reason, 163, 166, 167, 169 tolerance, 162, 163, 169, 170, 174 Liberalism, 128, 144, 145, 167-81 and autonomy, 169 deontological, 28, 34, 68, 144, 146, 150 heart of individualism, 3, 13, 154 human development, 176

227

and individualism, 95, 121, 141, 149, 159, 179 modern, 154—60 human development, 64, 154-63 reconciliation of the idividual and community, 64, 154-59, 176 neutrality, 29, 170. See also Neutrality reconstituted self, 74, 181. See also Compound individuality values and virtues, 8, 168-77 Libertarian individualism, 9, 170, 191, 205 Libertarian self, 154 Libertarianism, 149, 154, 180, 183 Liberty, the liberal goal, 3, 6, 172 Lindsay, A. D., 123 Lippmann, W., 110 Locke, J., 15-16, 155, 183 punctual self, 16, 23, 187 Loevinger, J., 38, 190 Lukes, S., 78, 183 Machiavelli, N., 146 Maclntyre, A., 5, 13-14, 21-28, 30-33, 35, 36, 65, 66, 91, 95, 114, 110, 136, 141, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 179, 183, 204 agency, 23 on autonomy, 25, 27-28 on community, 21-28 "heroic" self, 21—22 individualism, 23-26 on liberalism, 24-28 narrative unity, 24 rationality, 26-28 social identity, 23-28 on tradition, 26-28 MacPherson, C. B., 129 Madison, J., 3 Malinowski, B., 62 Mansbridge, J., 112, 144, 196, 199, 202, 204 adversary democracy versus unitary democracy, 128 face-to-face participation, 103 Marx, K., 63, 81, 108, 134 Gemeinwesen, 136 Marxism, 155 Maslow, A., 204 Mead, G. H., 36, 47, 188, 189, 201 Membership, 73, 175. See also Self Men, identity, 82, 92 Midgeley, M., 68 Milgram, S., 57-58 Mill, J, 155

228

Index

Mill, J. S., 64, 81, 102, 108, 111, 112 and democratic participation, 97-100 on good government, 97 and self-development through participation, 97-100 Miller, D., 124, 137 Mirroring, 103-4, 111, 113 Modernity, 14 Moral issues, 102 Mumford, L., 198 My Lai, 55-57 Natural liberty, 117 Negative liberty, 170, 172. See also Berlin, I. Neutrality, 171, 172, 173, 207. See also Rawls, J.; Liberalism Nietzsche, F., 164 Object-relations theory, 38, 42, 183 Paracelsus, 185 Participation, 142-43 and contextualism, 101-4, 107, 111-16 and psychological effects, 105-8, 123-24 public and private benefits, 107 see also Political participation Participatory democracy, 102, 129, 142, 174, 175 as community, 143 problems of, 108 Pateman, C, 105, 200 Pennock, J. R., 142, 144 Perkins, D., 202 Perry, W., 94, 160-64, 190 "Trojan Horse phenomenon," 89 Perspectivism, 62, 124, 160. See also Self Piaget, J., 38-43, 52, 60, 63, 85 cognitive development, 38-44, 162 cognitive structures versus self stages, 42-43 concrete operational intelligence, 39, 41, 45, 49, 50 and relationships, 41 decalage, 189 formal operational intelligence, 39, 41, 47, 49, 53-54, 62 introspective thinking, 42 prepositional thinking, 41 invariant sequence of cognitive structures, 42 preconceptual intelligence, 39, 40 as egocentrism, 40

test of conservation, 40 thinking, 41 schemas, 39, 42 on the self, 43 sensorimotor intelligence, 39, 40 thinking, 40 using symbols, 40 Plant, R., 204 Plato, 15, 132 Plotinus, 184 Pluralism, 160-62, 176 Polis, 22, 27, 66, 69, 96, 110, 149, 150, 153 Political decisions, 90, 102 Political interests, 123, 141 Political participation, 7, 94, 123, 175, 194, 196, 208. See also Participation dialogue, 7, 109, 113-17, 124, 125, 128 empirical support, 104 as self-development, 96-128 Political psychology, 105 Politics of dialogue, 158, 164-65, 173, 175, 178, 180 Positive liberty, 170, 172. See also Berlin, I. Psychoanalysis, 183 Psychological differentiation, 76, 79 Psychology and political theory, 5, 154 Public philosophy, 8 liberal, 208 Public and private interests, 110, 122, 155, 159, 208 Public talk, 116-17, 122 Rand, A., 133 Rationality, 73, 79, 141, 150, 167 Rawls, J., 29-34, 37, 64, 65, 68, 136, 143, 155, 159, 183, 186 on autonomy, 171-72 "comprehensive" good life, 169 on neutrality, 174 public or political identity, 34 Raz, J., 74, 75 Reasoned arguments, 125, 162, 164-68, 172 Reasons, good, 164-66 Reciprocity, 154 Relativism, 163-68, 178 as pluralism, 160-63, 164 Republicanism, 96 Riegel, K., 86 Right to autonomy, 170-71, 172, 173, 176 Ritchie, D. G., 154

Index Roe v. Wade, 126 Rosenblum, N., 177 Rousseau, J.-J., 4, 81, 101, 117-22. See also General will on duty, 119 republican community, 118 and the self, 117, 122, 195-96 Sandel, M., 5, 28-33, 35, 65, 66-67, 95, 136, 137, 138, 144, 183, 187 "cognitive" approach to self, 31 constitutive community, 31-33, 75 constitutive relationships, 84 voluntarist self, 30 Sartre, J. P., 160 Self as agency, and self-concept, 44 autonomous, 45, 49-52, 57, 63, 64, 68, 73, 78, 92, 159, 163 diversity of viewpoints, 64 and formal operational intelligence, 49-51 identifying with agency, 50-51 and individuality, 51 perspectivism, 49, 68 and rationality, 63 and relationships, 49-50, 64 and responsibility, 49 rules and roles, 51 and self-definition, 50, 51 autonomy and agency, 63, 64 and community, 50-51, 129, 139 deontological, 30, 33 membership, 6, 45-49, 56, 57-59, 65, 66, 68, 73, 75, 76, 78, 139, 150, 159, 175, 176, 177, 201 and adolescence, 48-49 and agency, 47, 49 bounded by rules and roles, 46-48 concrete operational intelligence, 47 conformity, 47-48, 59, 60 as member of a social order, 46 perspectivism, 47 self as community, 47-49, 64 self-definition, 47 modem, 14, 19, 28, 65, 185, 186, !87 disengaged, 15-19, 23 and other, 78 premodern, 14, 28, 65 unencumbered, 30-33, 67, 68, 186 Self beyond individualism, 177. See also Beyond individualism Self-concept, 35, 37, 44, 50, 64, 184, 188 through concrete operations, 46

229

as self-definition, 44, 150. See also Self-definition Self-concepts, 187 Self-definition, 151-52, 155, 156, 170 Self-development, 8, 44-52, 78, 80, 93, 142, 151, 155, 156, 158, 159, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178, 206, 208 and politics, 96-128 Self-interest, 110, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 141, 153, 170 Self-realization, 155, 158, 195, 205 Self-reflectivity, 50, 57, 58, 62, 65, 66-68, 73, 78, 79, 139, 140-41, 146, 151, 173, 187, 205, 206 Self-sufficiency, 151, 154, 170, 172, 195 and autonomy, 6, 77-78. See also Individualism Sennett, R., 141 Shklar, J., 118 Shotter, J., 92 Siedentop, L., 205 Snarey, J., 61 Sniderman, P., participation and self-esteem, 105-7 Social contract, 54, 101, 117 Social institutions, 80-81, 150, 156, 159 and community, 95 and intimacy, 92-94, 96 Rousseau, 117, 121, 122 Social psychology, 102 social constructivists, 38, 188 Socrates, 25, 27, 168 Sophocles, Antigone, 22 Strong associations, 8. See also Liberal associations Subjectivism, 185 Sullivan, H. S., 82 Sullivan, W., 8, 183, 200 Tawney, R. H., 134, 198 Taylor, C., 3, 5, 14-21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30-33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 65, 77, 78, 136, 138-40, 142, 144, 149, 150, 168, 183, 184, 186, 193 agency, 16 autonomy, 19-21 on community, 14-15, 19, 21 development of the modern self, 15 holistic individualism, 191 Judeo-Christian theism, 20-21 on liberalism, 20 personhood, 16 strong evaluation, 17 Teleology, 15, 21-25, 27 Thompson, D., 105, 123, 196

230 Thoreau, H. D., 135 Tocqueville, A. de, 81, 82, 89, 98, 99, 137, 142, 183, 196 self-interest, 125, 200, 202 Tonnies, F., 130-32 Torbert, W., 101, 194 Totalitarianism, 142, 158, 205 Traditions, sacred, 185-86 Tussman, J., 199-200 Vietnam War, 55 Virtue, and Rousseau, 118, 120, 121 Virtues, 159. See also Liberalism, values and virtues Wallas, G., 123

Index Walzer, M., 102, 124, 125, 136-37, 165-66, 206 Watergate, 55, 58-60 Werner, H., 39 Wilber, K., 43, 45, 47, 189, 203 Wolff, R. P., 95, 145, 191 Wolin, S., 135, 143, 152, 203 Women and self-development, 79-81, 82. See also Gilligan, C. identity, 82, 92 Wood, E. M., 121 Worldview, 129, 139, 140, 143, 144, 163, 170, 188, 191 constructing, 78-79, 84 and pluralism, 158

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