A Sociological Enquiry into the American Culture and History

20世纪80年代，一组被视为批判理论的思想在美国学术界崭露头角。本研究旨在从社会学的角度探讨社群主义在当时美国得到不少倡导的历史事实背后的社会和历史背景。社群主义思想根据其倡导者的专长可分为哲学社群主义理想和大众社群主义理想两类。作为对罗尔斯自由主义的批判，哲学社群主义主要应用于正义、权利、自由等主题的哲学和伦理争论中。虽然这两种类型的社群主义是高度相关的，但在本研究中，更流行的社群主义被选为中心研究对象。大众社群主义的主要主张被认为是一种意识形态观点，认为美国社会目前遭受的社会疾病是由于过度的个人主义造成的。它声称，个人主义出现于20世纪70年代，是在美国价值意识中广泛盛行的共同原则衰落的结果，而共同原则有助于美国社会的整合。社群主义者，特别是大众社群主义的倡导者，强调社群在伦理意义上规范人们行为和维护正当社会秩序的功能。加州大学伯克利分校名誉教授罗伯特·贝拉是一位著名的社群主义倡导者，他在我的采访中提到，他对罗斯福新政时代美国社会的健康状态抱有怀旧的钦佩之情。共同体主义观点的这种“向后看”的性质虽然被批评为弱点，但在本研究中被解释为社会意识形态的指标，这是理解以个人主义和自由主义为民主基础的现代社会变革方向所必需的。少

A group of ideas taken as a critical theory under the same of communitarianism became prominent in American academic realms in the 1980s. This research aims to explore, from a sociological point of view, social and historical backgrounds underlying the historical fact that the communitarianism obtained not a few American advocates in that time. The communitarian ideas are grouped according to specialties of its advocates into the two types : philosophical and popular ideals of communitarianism. The philosophical communitarianism is applied primarily in philosophical and ethical arguments of such topics as justice, rights, freedom as a criticism of the Rawlsian liberalism. While the two types of communitarianism are highly correlated, it is rather the popular communitarianism that is picked up in this research as the central research target.The major claim in the popular communitarianism is characterized as an ideological opinion that the social diseases American society currently suffe … More rs from are due to an overwhelmed individualism. The individualism, it claims, appeared in the 1970s as a consequence of declination of the communal principles that prevailed widely in American value consciousness and thus contributed to integrate American society. The communitarians, in particular advocates of the popular communitarianism, stress functions of community to regulate, in ethical sense, people's behavior and to maintain a justifiable social order. Robert Bellah, Professor Emeritus of University of California, Berkley, and an eminent advocate of the communitarianism, mentioned in my interview his nostalgic admiration of a healthy status of American society in the age of the New Deal. This nature of looking backward' of the communitarian perspective, though criticized as a weak point, is in this research interpreted as an indicator of social ideology that is necessitated to understand the direction of change of modern societies with democratic basis of individualism and liberalism. Less