A community-based approach to dealing with anti-social deviants is necessary as well.

I always remember a nice bit in Kropotkin about this, where he says that in present society (for him early 20th cent. of course) we have lost the impulse to ask ourselves “what have WE done to let THIS happen” when somebody commits a crime for example. That is, a sense of community responsibility. When people do awful things, the natural response should be to assume that there is something wrong at the social level that leads people to want to behave like that – and so we need to address the problem as a society, not just “decent members of the community” versus the baddies.

I think perhaps you are getting at something like this, no?

Prevent anti-social arseholes behaving anti-socially is a worthwhile goal. And if this is done democratically through community-based structures, then even better….but the kind of community I want doesn’t just consign said “arseholes” to the scrapheap. We want an inclusive approach to social problems that tries to solve problems at their deep roots which means not just simply punishing or ostracising the anti-social.

I don’t think you need to worry too much about more ambiguous community values that you yourself may be out of step with however. I don’t think there is a risk of a runaway “group think” oppressing people for being different.

Yes I’m sure he would. My point however is more about revealed sentiments and attitudes though.

The sort of communitarianism Cruddas espouses concerns me because it tends to lend itself to a kind of groupthink, a kind of value-conditioning whereby “the community” gets to determine what is and is not acceptable, and that those viewed as on the wrong side of that divide are viewed – and possibly treated – in ways that concern me at an ethical level regarding the integrity of individuals, and the equal concern and respect I think the state should at least attempt to extend to them.

It’s tricky stuff, I know. But think about my concern another way: the kind of community-based value that Cruddas style communitarianism leads to can be troubling. In the case above it isn’t so troubling, because I think we probably could agree that the “bad man” needed to lose in this particular conflict. What troubles me is the possibility of more ambiguous circumstances, or of cases when the community acts in a manner which is prejudicial to the interests of certain “outsiders” and where I don’t find that I’m the side (in terms of values) of the community.

OK I’m not expressing myself very well, but I see liberal rights-talk as trying to prioritise the rights of certain individuals over the values of the community. This doesn’t mean that rights will always be inviolable and never in conflict, but it seems to me a better safeguard against things turning nasty.

It seems that the sort of leftwing communitarianism that Cruddas ascribes to has a built-in optimism about the collective group communally discovering and enforcing “the good” in a way we can be happy with, that I’m not sure I share. I guess it’s about fairly deep ethical dispositions, but I’m now descending into gobbldegook, really.

But does what I’m saying make any sort of sense at all? Or is it just crap?