Chapter two

Nation and Community

Renan, I have argued, points us in the right direction when he insists that two things – cultural heritage and subjective affirmation – make a nation.⁵ But it is very hard to blend those two things into a single understanding of nationhood as long as we continue to rely upon the conceptual dichotomies, such as the distinctions between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or tradition and modernity, that shape most contemporary conceptions of community. For these dichotomies encourage us to divvy up these two elements of nationhood between two mutually exclusive models of association. Cultural heritage they identify with the affective ties and celebration of ancestors associated with models of Gemeinschaft and traditional society. Subjective affirmation they identify with the contracts, instrumental reasoning, and impersonality associated with models of Gesellschaft and modernity. Viewed in light of the perspective of these dichotomies, the nation is bound to look like some sort of anomaly, a large impersonal society masquerading as a small intergenerational community or two distinct forms of association, ethnic and civic communities, mistakenly treated as one.

But once we correct these dichotomies, the nation becomes much less difficult to understand. For it then becomes clear, I argue, that the combination of objective and subjective factors that has made it so hard to conceptualize nationhood is characteristic of community in all its forms, rather than a peculiarity of nations. Indeed, one reason that conceptions of nationhood are so controversial may be that our conceptions of community have not been controversial enough. In others words, we need to challenge familiar conceptions of the genus, community, if we want to make sense of its most hotly contested species, the nation.

This chapter presents the results of such a challenge. Hopefully, my alternative understanding of community will aid in the analysis of a variety of social phenomena. But I offer it here primarily as a first step toward a better understanding the role that nations and nationalism play in modern political life.

Sharing and Social Friendship

Let us begin with ordinary language. We use the word community to refer to a tremendous variety of social groups. We speak of everything from the business or academic community to the ethnic or international community, from gay or Jewish communities to urban or rural communities.

There are two ways of bringing some order into the use of a concept that we rely on to characterize such a wide range of social groups. We can try to narrow its use to a smaller and more coherent set of associations or we can look for some common phenomena that might justify our using the same concept to characterize such a wide range of social groups. Social and political theorists have usually pursued the first of these two options when trying to make sense of community, most often inspired by the belief that the modern world has been moving away from the relatively small and tightly integrated structures that they associate with the concept.⁶ In this chapter I pursue the second option. I try to make sense of community as a generic concept rather than as a term of distinction that helps us characterize the world we have lost in modern times. I pursue this course because while the identification of community with relatively small and tightly knit forms of association has helped us focus attention on some of the distinctive features of modern and pre-modern society, it has obscured the much more common form of human connectedness that I shall try to conceptualize here.

In taking this generic approach to the concept of community I am inspired, in part, by the way in which Aristotle deals with the subject. Aristotle, unlike modern social theorists, was not confronted with the problem of how to explain the new and unusually individualistic forms of association that were developing in modern Europe and North America. As a result, he was comfortable beginning with a single generic concept of human association, koinonia (which is best translated as community), rather than with the kind of conceptual dichotomies that ground most modern social theories.⁷ Of course, this generic conception is not the only useful way of characterizing community. But it is especially helpful in dealing with social phenomena, such as the nation, that seem to defy the conceptual dichotomies upon which most modern social and political theories rely.

Clearly, there are at least some things that the variety of social groups we describe as communities have in common. First of all, they all consist of groups of individuals who share something, be it a belief, a territory, a purpose, an activity or merely the lack of a quality that some other group is thought to possess. When we speak of the human community we are referring to all the individuals who share membership in the human species. When we speak of the gay community, we are referring to all the individuals who share a particular sexual orientation. When we speak of an urban community, we are referring to people who share a densely inhabited area, and so on.⁸

In addition to sharing something, however, the members of each of these groups are connected by feelings of social friendship that dispose them to devote special attention to each others’ needs. Human beings always share their species characteristics with every other human being, but the sense of belonging to a single human community comes and goes. Heterosexuals may share a sexual orientation; but they lack the sense of connection to each other as objects of special concern that leads us to talk about a gay community.⁹ And city-dwellers may share a common space and certain forms of interdependence; but it makes little sense to talk of an urban community if they close themselves off from each other in a cloak of mutual indifference or hostility.

Sharing something with others, I am suggesting, does not make you a member of their community unless you imagine and affirm it as a source of mutual connection. Conversely, feeling connected to the members of a community does not make you a member if yourself – like the proverbial “white Negro” – you cannot share the things that generate the sense of community in the first place.¹⁰ Of course, you may be treated by others as a member of a community even when you lack this sense of social connection. But that is likely because you share something with the members of the community – religious beliefs, social customs or skin color, for example – that is widely treated by them as a source of mutual loyalty and concern.

It is tempting to add a third feature, a sense of exclusion, an awareness of boundaries that divide ourselves from others, to this list of defining features of community. After all, opposing ourselves to others is one of the most powerful ways of establishing social connections. For focusing on the qualities that distinguish other groups from ourselves allows us to ignore or discount the qualities that distinguish us from each other. All the obstacles that, for example, keep us from imagining the whole of humanity as a single community would probably melt away were we ever to be confronted by alien invaders.

Nevertheless, while opposition or differentiation certainly can help transform sharing into a sense of connectedness and mutual concern, it is not required to do so. Shared purposes and activities often promote a sense of community regardless of whether or not one is competing with the purposes and activities of others. Even a universal human community could be generated in this way were we to recognize some equally shared purpose or danger, such as the desire to avoid imminent and universal environmental collapse. So rather than treat a sense of exclusion as a third component of community, I treat it as a particular form of sharing, i.e. the sharing of a sense of being distinguished from some group of others. This form of sharing often reinforces other sources of community where they exist and sometimes creates new sources where they do not exist.

Community, as I understand it, thus has two key features: sharing and a sense of social connection or friendship derived therefrom. A community is a group of individuals who imagine themselves connected to each other as objects of special concern and loyalty by something that they share.

As such, communities rest on a combination of objective and subjective factors, something shared and something felt. You can argue that the members of a group do not really share the thing that leads them to think of themselves as having a special connection to each other – for example, that they are not really being persecuted by their neighbors or that they are not really descended from the same distinguished ancestors. But you cannot argue that they do not really feel connected to each other, if they say that they are. For although there are objective ways of measuring whether people actually share things, the only measure of social friendship is subjective.¹¹

Communities come in so many different forms because human beings can share and have shared so many different things: descent, territorial proximity, beliefs, purposes, rituals, forms of expression, to cite just some of the commonest among them. Some of the things that we share in communities are natural and necessary, such as our species, our common ancestors or, perhaps, our sexual orientation. Others are contingent on the accidents of historical change, like our cultural heritage. Still other things are chosen, like the beliefs that might lead us to enter a monastery or join a political party. All such forms of sharing, including those that we choose for ourselves, have sustained forms of community, since they all can be imagined as sources of mutual connection among individuals. Indeed, some of the most selfless forms of communal life, as in many religious or utopian communities, grow out of the shared choice to live in a certain way.

Moreover, forms of communal life are constantly changing, not just because old forms of sharing disappear and new forms are always emerging, but because of the way in which familiar forms of sharing gain or lose significance in new circumstances. A slightly different outcome in a battle or a different choice of royal marriage partner hundreds of years ago might have preserved old forms of sharing that have disappeared in our day. And new communities, even intergenerational communities like nations, can emerge quite suddenly as contingent events – a bloody riot or a successful invasion, for example – focus our attention on one rather than another form of sharing.¹²

I speak of sharing in my characterization of community rather than identity in order to emphasize the heterogeneity that is an essential part of communal life. Community, I suggest, involves awareness of difference as well as commonality. In other words, communities are composed of individuals who focus their attention on something that bridges, rather than erases, their differences. Erase these differences in the pursuit of unity or identity, and, as Aristotle argues in his critique of Plato’s Republic, you erase community itself. ¹³ Plato, hoping to promote the kind of unity associated with family life, suggests that we try to turn the just city into a single family. But if you make unity or identity the defining feature of community, Aristotle asks, why stop at a family? Why not a single individual as the model for community? Indeed, Plato accepts the point, for he suggests that his ideal society would share “a community of pain and pleasure,”¹⁴ a community so unified that when my neighbor is poked with a sword, I would feel its point. A single organism, however, is not a community, except in an analogical sense, just as a community is an organism only in an analogical or metaphorical sense.¹⁵ Both possess internal differentiation and common purposes or activities. But a community, unlike an organism, is formed by individual members that can survive and experience life apart from others and thus experience their connection to others as transcendence of difference rather than identity or unity.

We need to emphasize this aspect of communal life given the way in which communitarian rhetoric, and the theories it shapes, harps on unity and collective identity. Such rhetoric makes it seem that the heterogeneity of individuals is an obstacle that community must seek to overcome. But that need not be the case if community connects individuals by promoting mutual feelings of special concern and loyalty rather than by submerging individual difference in a collective will or identity.

Of course, the submergence of individual identities into a collective identity can be a powerful force in human life, particularly in conflicts between communities. But it is a much rarer and more transient social phenomenon than community. As Hans Schmalenbach suggest, we need to distinguish community from what he calls “communion (bund).”¹⁶ Communion is that intense experience of the loss of self in the collective that orators often seek to induce and the disenchanted often recall with nostalgia. It can occur in all walks of life, among members of a bowling team sharing an exciting victory no less than among soldiers sharing the adversities of life in the trenches.¹⁷ It is a powerful experience that can inspire high levels of self-sacrifice and greatly enhance the collective power of communities, which is why orators so often seek to promote it. But it is hard to maintain for any length of time, which is why I do not include it in my definition of community. Shared memories of a moment of communion, as recalled by, say, participants in revolutionary struggles, World War I trench battles, or even athletic triumphs and tragedies, can become the basis of communal attachments.¹⁸ But communion itself, the loss of individual identity in the collective, is too transitory and unreliable a phenomenon to hold communities together for any length of time.

As for social friendship, I use that term to characterize the communal bond because it captures the peculiar kind of mutual commitment that community inspires.¹⁹ Friends, as Aristotle suggests, do what they can for each other, rather than what they are obliged to do.²⁰ That means they mark each other out as objects of special concern and loyalty. If they can, they will do somewhat more than they are obliged to do for each other – though if they are not in a good position to help each other, they will want each other to do less than they are obliged to do. The disposition of friends to do what they can is most visible in its most familiar forms, family ties and personal intimacy. But it can also be found, I would argue, in much less personal and familiar forms of community. How far we are willing to go to do what we can for each other will depend very much on the source of friendship in any particular community. For the members of some communities, we are disposed to sacrifice a moment, for others, our lives. But in each case what ties us to each other is a sense of mutual concern and loyalty. Our lives are lived within a rich patchwork of more or less intense social friendships.

The term solidarity is much more commonly used than friendship to conceptualize the sense of mutual connectedness that constitutes communities. But solidarity is too suggestive of social unity to capture the complexity and flexibility of communal ties. At any given time we are connected to others in a complex pattern of overlapping and often competing ties. We sort out these connections by weighing and balancing their tugs on our affections – just as we do with the conflicting loyalties generated by personal friendships – rather than by standing in solidarity first with one group then the other. It is much easier to talk about our friendship with two competing groups, because friendship involves mutual concern rather than the fusion or “solidification” of identities. For this reason I believe that the complex pattern of communal attachments is therefore much better captured by the concept of social friendship than by the concept of solidarity.

Having characterized social friendship or a sense of mutual concern and loyalty as one of community’s two basic elements, let me emphasize that I am not suggesting community is grounded in the mutual affection characteristic of personal friendships. As in family relations, we need not have any special affection for the other members of our community in order to express special concern for their well-being. Nor am I suggesting community is an especially harmonious form of association. Special feelings of mutual concern and loyalty generate their own distinctive and nasty forms of conflict, since they often raise expectations of solicitude that we are in no position to meet.²¹ Moreover, expressions of special concern are often annoying and unwanted, as anyone who has had to deal with unsolicited advice from friends, family, and acquaintances, will no doubt attest. Social friendship is one of the primary means by which we maintain our associations with each other. But it is very far from a guarantee of agreement or harmony.

Friendship, Norms, and Interest

Understood in this way, community is one of the basic building blocks of human society, rather than the tightly integrated form of association so prominent in pre-modern societies. Or, to change metaphors, it is one of the elements we use to mix what Jon Elster calls “the cement of society.”²² Human society, I suggest, is held together by a mixture of self-interest, norms of justice, and social friendship. In other words, three motives inspire us to cooperate with each other: calculations that it will ultimately serve our own interest, beliefs about what we owe each other, and feelings of special concern for the well-being of the people with whom we share things. Community provides the last of these three motives, although it is often overlooked.²³

Self-interest is impossible to overlook and is easily extended as an explanatory tool by means of hypothetical calculations. Beliefs about justice, whatever their origins, play a role in countering and channeling self-interest that seems no less difficult to ignore. But social friendship, doing “what we can” for people to whom we feel connected, seems to establish much vaguer and more unreliable standards than doing the right thing or what is prudent. It lacks the specificity that comes from either the calculation of means to a self-interested end or the measurement of a particular action against a general rule or principle. But while that makes social friendship hard to track, it should not keep us from recognizing that it provides a third force, alongside the calculation of interest and beliefs about what we owe others, in the creation and maintenance of social ties among human beings. As researchers in social psychology have often demonstrated, even the most arbitrary and trivial forms of sharing seem to be capable of generating strong feelings of connection to one’s group.²⁴ Even when nothing much is at stake or there is little reason to believe that we owe others special attention, we tend, it seems, to develop feelings of special concern and loyalty to the people with whom we are aware of sharing things.

There are good reasons for treating this disposition to social friendship as natural to human beings.²⁵ For one thing, it seems to be one of the rare features of human experience that seems to be universal. In addition, it seems, according to modern biological studies, to be an evolutionary acquisition that our species shares with most other primates. These studies usually focus on evolution of a disposition towards altruism, since the willingness to sacrifice oneself for others seems to be the hardest thing to explain in terms of a theory of natural selection that emphasizes the survival and reproduction of genetic mutations. For our purposes, however, it is the fact that concern for others expresses itself not only to other individuals, but to members of groups, the small bands common among many primates, that is most interesting. For while community occasionally demands self-sacrifice, all that it ordinarily requires of us is the treatment of a group of individuals as objects of special concern and loyalty.

Evolutionary theorists have been coming up with ever more sophisticated explanations of how our species developed its other-regarding dispositions. In particular, they have shown how natural selection could favor the development of dispositions towards caring for kin and reciprocity towards group members, even if such other-regarding behavior might harm a particular individual’s chances for survival.²⁶ Interestingly, they have made significant use of game theory and other rational choice models in doing so.²⁷ Nevertheless, this does not mean that we should treat social friendship as an expression of instrumental rationality. Indeed, it is precisely because a disposition towards cooperation has evolved among human beings that we do not need to explain the evolution of cooperation in society in terms of an aggregation of individual rational choices. For if human beings have developed a certain limited disposition towards altruistic or cooperative behavior, then that means that the calculation of self-interest has to compete with – or balance or reinforce – a very different source of social connectedness among human beings.

The conflation of two distinct beneficiaries of selfishness, genes and individual organisms, often obscures this point among both biologists and social scientists.²⁸ Theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism sometimes explain the altruistic dispositions of individual organisms by focusing on the “selfish” interests of the genes that shape them. In other words, these theories show us that “selfish genes sometimes produce selfless individuals to achieve their ends.”²⁹ But if this is so, then it cannot possibly be true that people “inevitably and always pursue what is best for themselves” and that “good things are done for bad motives.”³⁰ For it is precisely the existence of our good motives, our disposition to do things for the good of others rather than ourselves, that these theories explain.

When biologists and social scientists move back and forth in this way between self-seeking genes and self-seeking individuals – and, thereby, between evolutionary game theory and rational choice theory – they ignore this distinction. They forget that “the evolutionary causes of our motives cannot be judged as if they are our motives.”³¹ The evolution of our genes may not itself rely on “altruistic” motives, (i.e. a disposition to aid the replication of other genes).³² But the individual organisms that they produce do display such motives, and that means that any attempt to explain social cooperation solely in terms of rational calculation of needs and interests is extremely unrealistic.³³

What distinguishes social friendship as a source of human connection is that it is a sentiment of concern for others rather than a calculation of means to selfish ends or the imposition of a belief about what we owe each other. As such, it is, like love or spontaneity, a byproduct of our choices and experience, rather than the object of our choices. In other words, while you can choose to share things with others, you cannot choose to feel connected to them by ties of social friendship. Of course, some objects of sharing, such as a home, ancestors or religious beliefs, for example, are much more likely than others to inspire a sense of connection to others. But even in these cases ties of social friendship do not necessarily follow from sharing things, as the expression “strangers under the same roof” vividly suggests. Moreover, even those who, like modern “nation-builders,” consciously set out to expand and intensify a particular form of communal friendship, generally do so indirectly. Rather than try to persuade people, say, that France rather than Brittany makes a better object of communal loyalty, they try to change the habits of language, education and custom that promote as its byproduct a sense of national community.³⁴

I emphasize this point in order to clarify the relationship between community and rationality as well as the complexity of our moral dispositions. The bonds of social friendship that connect us to each other in communal life are not irrational in the sense of a primitive force of instinct that blinds and overwhelms reason. They are, however, a-rational, in the sense that they do not owe their origin to calculation and choice. Some rational choice theorists have argued otherwise, suggesting that we should see our attachments to particular communities, to local sports teams as well as competing nations, as rational solutions to the problem of coordination. These theorists often argue that if individuals seek a good like the thrill of cheering with thousands of others for a home team, it is quite rational for them to accept conventions that allow them to settle on a particular shared object of loyalty.³⁵ But it is the motives rather than the products of human action that are at issue here. In other words, it is the source of human connectedness, rather than its purposes, that we are trying to identify. Even if common objects of loyalty solve problems of coordination, the question we are asking now is how do people come to focus on such objects: through an aggregation of individual choices to pursue that end or as a sentimental byproduct of the experience of sharing a location, afternoons at the stadium, and stories about past greatness? The fact that shared sentiments can sometimes provide us with rational solutions to our problems should not blind us to their independence from rational calculation as a force in our lives.

Forms of Membership

A sense of belonging or social membership almost always accompanies our participation in communities. But community represents only one of a number of ways of imagining our membership in groups. Membership, after all, is a metaphor that likens the social relationship between individual and group to the organic relationship between the body and its individual parts or members. Its significance therefore varies with the different ways in which we think of our social relations as resembling the bonds that connect the parts of organisms.

In sets or species, membership refers simply to likeness. To be a member of a set or species you need only possess some characteristic, such as a set of genes, a belief, or location, which seems significant enough to be used as a term of distinction among human beings. When, for example, we describe human beings as members of a species or a race or a culture, we are pointing to something that we believe each of them possesses, regardless of their feelings toward each other. In this sense, the members of the set of all French speakers or all relatively dark-skinned people need not feel any more sense of community than the members of the set of all prime numbers. Cultural community, in contrast, has a subjective component that a set or species, such as a culture or a language group, need not possess.³⁶ For example, Finnish and Hungarian speakers, are regularly classified as members of the same language – and thus, to a certain extent, cultural – group. But no one would suggest, at least so far, that they are members of the same cultural community.

In communities, it is social friendship, mutual feelings of special concern and loyalty among people who share things, that gives membership its distinctive character. In organizations, such as a team or a club – or, for that matter, a state – membership refers, in contrast, to our participation in a group that combines or coordinates the actions of numerous individuals. At their best, organizations like symphony orchestras coordinate the actions of many individuals so smoothly that it becomes very difficult to distinguish the contribution that each makes to the whole. At their worst, organizations act with all the efficiency of a congressional ethics committee. Membership in organizations connects us by sharing the obligations and benefits of coordinated actions, regardless of one’s feelings toward other members. Many forms of organization, e.g. “fraternal” organizations such as lodges and secret societies, also inspire a sense of community among their members. But a sense of community is not a necessary accompaniment of membership in organizations. It is the coordination of individual activities toward shared or collective ends, rather than social friendship, which characterizes membership in an organization.

Group membership, by definition, involves membership in a set, since it always involves some kind of sharing. But membership in organizations and communities involves social connections as well, connections that often make great demands on individuals. Communities make their demands by means of the depth and intensity of the special concern for others that they inspire, while organizations make their demands by means of the level of obligation that they impose as the price of the benefits produced by collective action. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children because they feel more concern for their children’s welfare than their own. Members of organizations, like a team or a state, sacrifice themselves when they think that the shared or collective good that the organization can provide is more important than their own.

Of course, the same group may be both a community and an organization and thus draw on both sorts of connections to others. Nevertheless, it is important to keep these two forms of membership distinct, especially if one is interested in the rise of nationalism in the modern world. For nationalism, it should be clear, grows out of the relationship between a relatively old form of community, the nation, and the relatively new and extraordinarily powerful form of organization that we call the modern state. In particular, it grows out of efforts, on the one hand, to harness communal loyalties to increase the power of states and, on the other, to legitimate and control that power by treating the state as the creature and servant of some pre-political form of community. The modern state is probably the most important of the wave of new forms of organization that have emerged in recent centuries. But, like these other organizations, it has modified and reordered rather than displaced our sense of community.

How Community is Imagined

If communities are constituted by our sense of being connected to other human beings objects of special concern and loyalty, then they are all, to appropriate Benedict Anderson’s famous expression, “imagined communities.” In other words, every community, small face-to-face groups no less than large and impersonal societies like modern nations, relies on the imagination to connect its members to each other as objects of special concern and loyalty.

After all, shared ancestors, let alone shared genes, do not make a family. A family is a group of individuals who imagine themselves connected by shared ancestors and descendents. Accordingly, there are as many forms of family community as there are ways of imagining ancestry, marriage, and descent. Similarly, it takes more than shared space and frequent interaction to make a village community, since familiarity can breed contempt and diffidence as easily as a sense of connection. In a village community shared space and daily interaction inspire a sense of connection that bridges the differences that could easily provide the focus for smaller communities and distracts attention from the forms of sharing that could inspire larger ones. For even the smallest communities contain differences – of age, gender, and social status, for example – that cannot be ignored or erased. If a sense of community emerges despite these differences, it is because we are capable of imagining the things we share as a source of connection that transcends them.

Anderson coined the expression imagined communities in order to characterize forms of community, like the nation, that connect people who never meet or interact with each other. He wanted to remind us that in many communities we have nothing but a mental image of most of our fellow members, since these communities connect us over space and time to distant individuals, as well as to past and future generations.³⁷ This point is well worth emphasizing. But it is, in the end, a point about imagined compatriots, rather than imagined community. In other words, it helps us distinguish communities in which fellow members are present and familiar from those in which we must conjure them up by an act of imagination. If we want to talk instead about imagined community, then we need to look more closely at the way in which we imagine the connections that bridge our manifest differences.

How then do we imagine community? In two different ways, each of which can provide the starting point for the other. On the one hand, we picture some of the things that we share as sources of connection that make particular individuals objects of special concern and loyalty. On the other hand, we sometimes wonder what it is that we share with the people to whom we feel connected by a sense of social friendship. In the first case, the “what” leads to the “who;” the sense of sharing some good or practice or purpose leads us to imagine ourselves connected to a particular group of individuals. In the second case, the “who” leads to the “what;” the sense of connection to others leads us to try to specify what it is that we share with them. In other words, community involves imagining connections to those with whom we share things as well as imagining the things that we share with those to whom we feel connected. The first process creates communities as objects of imagination, the second leads to their development.

Promoters of globalization and a global community, for example, start from a new form of sharing that they strive to bring to our attention: the interdependence that they believe is being created by new forms of technology, commerce, and communication. In moving from shared interdependence to talk of a global community, however, they picture this new form of interdependence as a source of connection that bridges the differences that have previously divided the peoples of the world. Promoters of a European community, in contrast, start with the sense of connection among Europeans and then try to picture what it is that Europeans share as a community. The older forms of sharing that originally established this sense of connection among the different communities within Europe, the sense of being the center of Christendom or the origins of civilization or the home of the world’s superior race, are not acceptable bases of community in present circumstances. That leaves the members of the European community with a sense of connection to each other, but considerable uncertainty about what they share as a community. Similarly, Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II left the Japanese searching for a new understanding of what they shared. The disasters of the war had discredited the old leadership and old values, but left intact a strong sense of connection to each other among most Japanese, the meaning of which they were eager to explain to themselves, even to the point of talking about a “community of remorse.”³⁸

Each of these two ways of imagining community can provide the starting point for the other. For the specification of new or even slightly altered objects of sharing can significantly alter our sense of the range of people to whom we are connected, which in turn can lead us to wonder what is that connects us, and so on. The founding of the United States, for example, established a new nation, a new political object of sharing that eventually inspired the former colonists and their descendants with a sense of connection to each other. But having established that sense of connection, it leaves Americans wondering about what it is that connects them, what it means to be an American.³⁹ Those who answer this question by referring to the constitution or a set of political principles and examples or a kind of rugged individualism might find themselves expanding the range of individuals to whom they feel connected. Those who cite European origins or Anglo-Protestant culture will probably contract the range of people with whom they feel associated. There is, however, no reason for the process to stop there. People who believe that commitment to popular sovereignty makes an American may come to the conclusion that people of African descent are incapable of exercising that commitment. And people who believe that it is Protestant morality that makes an American may come to the conclusion that such a morality requires them to emphasize what all people, whatever their race or religion, have in common. The process of imagining community never stops, as Americans move from a sense of what they share to who they are and back again.

And this process goes on even in communities, like the family, that lack a public forum for debate and self-examination. Families may start with a particular sense of shared ancestry and descent. But in establishing connections of mutual concern and loyalty to a particular group of individuals, families also open us up to things that we might ordinarily reject as foreign. Loyalty and concern for a gay son, an atheistic grandchild, or a sister who enters an interracial marriage can broaden our understanding of what we share with people who are otherwise seem alien to us.⁴⁰

The process by which people move back and forth between questions about who is connected to whom to what is it that actually connects us helps explain the continuity of communal identities in spite of wholesale transformations and even inventions of their understanding of what they have in common. An invented tradition, such as the adoption of Highland cultural symbols by Lowland Scots, represents a new answer to the question of what constitutes the cultural heritage shared by members of a national community. The fact that Lowlanders now adorn themselves with symbolic attire that their ancestors would have despised as “the dress of a thief” does not mean that they lack a genuine sense of community.⁴¹ It just means that there has been a revision in the sense of just what it is that ties “we” Scotsmen and women to each other. Highland symbols and rituals, often reshaped and inflated, provided a conveniently striking and colorful way of distinguishing the Scots from the English, even though they only became attractive when the power of the clans had been forever broken. The elevation of these symbols and traditions to a prominent role in the Scottish national heritage changes the sense of what connects members of the national community to each other. But this process of change and development goes on throughout the lifetime of every community.

Community then is indeed imagined or constructed, as we are so often reminded today. But it is imagined or constructed by people who share things and/or feel connected to

each other, not by independent and disconnected individuals.⁴² This does not mean that we are bound to reproduce the communities that have been handed to us. We could not do so, even if we were so inclined. For events and changing circumstances are constantly undermining old forms of sharing and bringing to the fore new ones, as well as compelling us to confront tensions and inconsistencies within the patterns of communal attachments that we receive. Moreover, as we have seen, the very existence of a sense of loyalty and concern for others can promote a changing image of community by leading us to reconsider what it is that we share with them. It does mean, however, that the contingencies of birth and history provide us with much of the material from which we construct our images of community. For we construct these images by focusing our attention on one rather than another form of sharing that we find in our world or by changing our minds about exactly what it is that sustains the connections among a particular group of people. The particular patterns of sharing and social friendship that we encounter and internalize thus have a powerful impact even on the way in which we reconstruct community in our imaginations.

Patterns of Communal Life

Another crucial influence on the way in which we imagine community is the way in which we imagine the relationships between the various things that we share with each other. It is easiest and simplest to imagining sharing as a source of social connection when we share a number of things that line up with each other, as in the village communities that provide the model for gemeinschaftliche conceptions of community. In these communities people share a variety of things – such as regular interaction, proximity, rituals, customs, and perhaps a sense of descent – that reinforce each other in a way that promotes an especially strong sense of mutual connection.⁴³ But even here people cannot imagine community without dealing with competing forms of sharing that extend beyond or fail to reach the village borders. For example, while the members of a village community may all share religious beliefs and institutions with each other, they usually share them with many more people in the larger society, which means there is at least one form of sharing that is out of line with the others and can thus provide the basis for imagining a much broader community. Similarly, there are forms of sharing in such a community, such as family or occupation, that could easily become the material for imagining much narrower communities.

One way of introducing some regularity into the competing and overlapping forms of sharing and the communities that grow up around them is by subsuming them within each other: the family within the village, the village with the Christian community, the Christian community within the human species, the species within creation, and so on. Montesquieu provides an excellent example of this way of dealing with competing communities in his celebrated Pensée about the scope of his duties.

If I knew something useful to myself and detrimental to my family, I would reject it from my mind. If I knew something useful to my family, but not to my homeland, I would try to forget it. If I knew something useful to my homeland and detrimental to Europe, or else useful to Europe and detrimental to mankind, I would consider it a crime.⁴⁴

Stoic philosophers formalized this practice of subsuming one community within another in their image of the community as a cosmopolitan circle of circles in which we move from the particular and conventional ties that bind local communities to the universal and natural ties that bind all rational beings.⁴⁵ But subsumption can work in the opposite direction as well, as when we treat more extended communities as weak echoes of the sense of connection that familiarity and regular interaction creates. That is the intuition that inspires Rousseau’s ripostes to Montesquieu and Stoic cosmopolitanism: “the sentiment of humanity weakens and evaporates as it is extended over the whole world.” “Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great lengths in their books to discover duties that they do not deign to fulfill around them. Such a philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared loving his neighbors.”⁴⁶ In Rousseau’s vision the more extensive forms of sharing and social connection are imagined as ever weakening echoes of the strong and reliable form of community based on familiarity and a shared political life. Both forms of subsumption, the particular within the universal and the universal within the particular, play a significant role in the production of our images of community.

Another way of imagining community arises from focussing our attention on the points where forms of sharing overlap and away from the points where they diverge. John Rawls’s famous concept of an “overlapping consensus” provides a fine illustration of this way of imagining community.⁴⁷ Rawls asks us to think of the political community as a group of individuals who, despite their tremendous divergences when it comes to thinking about what constitutes a good life, share a commitment to certain basic principles of justice. Imagined in this way, the political community does not include or subsume within it more limited forms of sharing. It represents, instead, the point at which otherwise distinct groups intersect. This way of imagining community recognizes that we are separated by differences that we cannot subsume in a broader vision of community, but urges us to focus, nonetheless, on the principles that we share when thinking about political community.

Focussing on overlapping forms of sharing is one way of dealing with the many situations in which we recognize that we share things with very different groups of people. More often, however, we tend to focus instead on the points of difference, building a sense of connection to a particular group of individuals by emphasizing what distinguishes us from another group. We are not like them – the people across the river, the immigrants, infidels, etc. – is probably the commonest refrain in the litany of community.⁴⁸ It is important to note, however, that this refrain only makes sense when we actually share something with the people from whom we are distinguishing ourselves. Canadians work to shore up their sense of national identity by distinguishing themselves from Americans, not Koreans. Contrasts shape community by focusing attention away from things that we share with other groups, such as territory, language, interaction, and religion, towards what we or they lack. If there is nothing shared between two groups, then contrasting their differences adds nothing to the sense of connection that their members feel for each other.

Indeed, the mere insistence on the lack of a distinctive quality shared by others often becomes a strong source of connection among people. Consider, for example, the way in which the term “white” has been understood in the United States, as the lack of a changing set of physical indicators of race. Building community in this way, by focusing on the distinctive qualities “we” lack, often bridges the differences among otherwise divided groups of people. For sharing the absence of some quality that we disdain often leads us to ignore the presence of other qualities that distinguish us from each other. At the same time, however, it can lead us to discount or ignore forms of sharing that could connect us to a wider range of people.

Finally, we often simply abstract from competing and overlapping forms of sharing when we imagine community. In other words, we often develop a sense of connection to others with whom we share things by selectively focusing on particular forms of sharing, rather than by lining up, subsuming or contrasting different forms of sharing. That helps explain why we seem capable of maintaining so many competing and overlapping patterns of connection to each other. We generate such connections by focusing on competing forms of sharing in abstraction from each other, rather than as part of a larger, more consistent pattern of parallels, contrasts, and circles of circles. For example, when we think of ourselves as members of families, we rarely picture ourselves as family members as opposed to citizens or as family members within a larger or overlapping circles of community. We tend, instead, to picture our family apart from these other forms of community and deal with its relationship to them only when events arise that compel us to do so. As with our competing or overlapping circle of personal friends, we start with a variety of communal connections and tend to confront the tensions and inconsistencies among them only when we have to.

This process of abstraction and the inconsistent patterns of social friendship that it supports are regularly decried by moral philosophers, who repeatedly urge us to introduce greater order into our sense of connection to each other. But while this tendency to ignore the inconsistencies in the way we connect ourselves to others, undoubtedly contributes to social tension and conflict, it has some compensating advantages. For it allows us to develop a greater variety of connections to others than would be possible if we were compelled to impose consistency on our sense of social friendship.⁴⁹ This variety of connections to others can be of great use in dealing with social conflicts by providing us with a variety of ways to encourage people to express some concern for each other. Imposing consistency and order on our sense of social friendship thus blocks as well as opens paths to mutual concern. For this reason, an irregular and overlapping pattern of social friendship is a moral resource as well as a potential source of conflict.