The Tyranny of the Moderns by Nadia Urbinati

Author:Nadia Urbinati
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300189957
Publisher: Yale University Press

VIII

Identitarian Community

The communities will never have men in them, but only halves and quarters. They require a sacrifice of what cannot be sacrificed without detriment. The Community must always be ideal.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1842

Isaiah Berlin said that it is more stimulating to engage with ideas that are remote from, different from, and even opposed to our own than with those that resemble them, if only because acquaintance with the former helps us to keep the critical spirit alive and to be on our guard against the temptation to treat our own convictions as dogmas. This is sound advice, and especially helpful when ideas at variance with our own are endorsed by majority opinion. Of particular interest in this regard is the official website of the Movimento giovani padani, an epitome of communitarian ideology and of the entrepreneurial ethos; a mixture, to echo Tocqueville, of egoistic individualism and communitarian identification with those who are nearest at hand; the outcome of the stance of wishing “to stand apart” from one's neighbors so as to separate oneself from the “wider” society and to overcome a sense of alienation.1 The document in question combines a sense of the crisis of politics as action taken in and for a wider public (founded upon relationships of mutual trust and upon juridical ties) and a sense of individual opportunity and economic liberalism; a mixture of concern with technological innovations and with the opportunities offered by the global market and also of criticism of the condition of isolation suffered by individuals precisely through their being absorbed by work, career, and consumption. Marx had given this condition the name “alienation,” proposing a revolutionary solution: to overturn relations of power in order to transform the innovations of modernity into instruments of emancipation; not so as to fall back upon anachronistic feudal communities, but in order to realize in a coherent fashion the promise of the Enlightenment by rendering it a possibility for everyone, a promise of the fulfillment of individuality, nothing more and nothing less than what the nineteenth-century liberals were proposing, albeit with different conceptual and political tools. In the perspective offered by the Movimento giovani padani, however, the Marxist diagnosis of alienation is employed in order to find antiuniversalist and identitary cures to possessive individualism, whose influence, benefits, and indeed whose logic this same movement in fact accepts, since the community it champions has a possessive vision of political space. Taking as its point of departure an admission of the loss of identity, in part because of the existential and social costs imposed by the market economy, this modern reaction to democratic individualism proposes to recover loyalty to local identities and to ascriptive communities, confirming the diagnosis offered thirty years ago by Robert Bellah, who had maintained that individuals in liberal societies defend communitarian attachment on the grounds that it fosters sentiments of belonging and emancipates them from solitude, even though nurturing associations which reflect the qualities of the society which they are criticizing; it proposes not communities of alternative values but aggregations that are nonetheless voluntary and instrumental.

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