The Poverty of Satisfaction:
Partnership and the Responsible Republic

Sean P. Donlon

Issue 361, vol.91, Spring 2002

It results from sacrificing community values to the mere accumulation of material things; its symptom, in language, is a preoccupation with terms connoting individual achievement and self-fulfilment - the unbalanced pursuit of which goals can make “it difficult for people to sustain their commitments to others, either in intimate relationships or in the public sphere”. And this climate of thought can ultimately be traced to a political philosophy of laissez-faire liberalism.

This liberalism (heir to Locke and Kant), by “putting the self beyond the reach of politics, makes human agency an article of faith rather than the object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement”.

As a counter-weight, in recent years in the United States there has arisen the “communitarian” movement (whose chief exponent is Amitai Etzioni: President Clinton endorsed the Communitarian Network). Precisely because the relationship between self and society is mutually constitutive, communitarians counsel attention to the common good as the guarantee of individual liberties and well-being. Their ideological lineage goes back to the colonists’ reverence for the “common weal” or res publica. (Contrary to its image of rugged individuals, the United States has always enjoyed a community-binding ethos).

Communitarians hold (along with Catholic social thinking) that the “economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around” and that the “moral measure of any economy is how the weakest are faring”. So communitarianism places a high value on equal participation in community for all. As a corollary, it espouses “subsidiarity” (administrative devolution of responsibility to active local self-government): civic associations, churches, families - all voluntary, mediatory institutions -may sometimes even function as checks against the excesses of state and market.

In many ways, Ireland also now faces a poverty of satisfaction: “immersed in materialism, we have forgotten about our deeper human needs and those of others”. The question for the country then is: Where can it find a language to critique that same dominant liberal political philosophy - and, even more importantly, a language to articulate a vision for the future? Because the Church is perceived as authoritarian, the language of Catholic social teaching may not be acceptable. Because Irish republicanism is perceived as nationalistic, the language of civic or social republicanism is not available. Happily, mainstream European social - or Christian - democracy is not unknown. Combining this with ideological streams like communitarianism (and like “virtue ethics”, “Third Way politics”, and others), we may hopefully succeed in making current for Irish usage concepts like “human rights”, “solidarity”, “social capital”, and, of course, “the common good”.

Seán Patrick Donlan, J.D., is completing a Ph.D (Law) at Trinity College.