The Library and the Workshop by Andersson Jenny;

Author:Andersson, Jenny; [Andersson, Jenny;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804772921
Publisher: Stanford UP
Published: 2011-07-27T05:00:00+00:00

Community

Part of New Labour’s modernization project was the attempt to rethink the social sphere and domesticate or settle the chaos of social life into something more coherent and organized. The notion of community, which it placed at the heart of Labour ideology with the rewriting of the Labour Party constitution in 1994, captured this quest for social harmony.7

Community is a concept with complex historical legacies in British political culture, from the ethical socialism of Tawney to elements of liberalism, social democracy, and social conservatism. The concept might best be described, as other parts of New Labour ideology, as a number of subplots, ideologies, and counterideologies ranging from the socially authoritarian in discourses on crime and asocial behavior to radical and even utopian discourses on the transformative role of architecture in the city landscapes of Glasgow and Liverpool or increased citizen participation in politics and services through the use of ICT.8 However, while the notion of community has complex origins, New Labour’s communitarianism has drawn very selectively on some elements in the communitarian tradition, thus silencing others. As the philosopher Sarah Hale has pointed out, New Labour leaned on Tawney’s fraternal notion of community but silenced his critique of affluence and his call for socialism in favor of an approach to communitarianism that drew on governing individual behavior in the name of the common good.9

New Labour’s platform was the idea of a widespread social crisis. Its very first policies in office—the New Deals for the unemployed, working families and communities, and the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit in Downing Street—were attempts to counter social degeneration. New Labour framed this social crisis in specific terms, which departed from social democratic class analysis. From the outset, New Labour put in place a framing around social problems that was distinctly cultural and, in important parts, familiar to American discourses on poverty.10 As many critics of New Labour have argued, its ideas of the social came with a stereotypical dichotomization of individuals into deserving and undeserving and with pervasive notions of the poor as deviant, dependent, and dangerous. The cultural emphasis on breaking with vicious circles of exclusion by creating a culture of learning and aspiration carried with it a deeply disciplining approach to individual deviance and policies explicitly designed to change individual behavior and attitudes. To New Labour, social crisis was not only the result of economic decline, Thatcher’s attack on society, and decades of underinvestment into crucial public services but also the result of the erosion of fundamental social values. It was a crisis narrative explicitly concerned with social order and with a social fabric “tattered and torn.”11

Communitarianism made a direct appeal to the moral virtues of citizenship, defined by the duties and obligations we owe each other as morally and socially responsible individuals. Social virtues—such as the work ethic, a love of learning, and the sense of obligation—were seen as being fostered in reciprocity and recognition, in the trust relationships that create social order and that provide the basis for a prosperous economy.

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