COMMUNITY NO LONGER EXISTS IN BRITAIN TODAY

Community no longer exists in Britain today

Community no longer exists in Britain today

The lure and trap of 'Community'

Words such as 'society' and 'community' seem to be commonplace at moment: friendly 'hurrah' words that make people feel warm and safe. They hold out promise of, contrary to chilling view of fate of individual propounded by atomistic libertarianism, the social system where each individual will be part of something bigger and better; the something that will love, honour and obey, in sickness and in health (albeit with no chance of divorce).

But it is no surprise that general notion that people can only find hope in collective is so popular: ideology has been relentlessly churned from every conceivable source, not least universities. Whilst hero of social sciences used to be individual, with rise of anti-individualistic ideologies from end of 19th century, in Germany (mystical nationalism) and then in Russia (Bolshevism), and their incorporation into social sciences, collective has become dominant force (Todd, 1985: p. 99). It is surely true that, with their consistent contempt for individual consciousness and their insistence on importance of collective in determining events (Todd, 1985: p. 99), most (Marsland, 1995: p. 2) latter-day social scientists are ironically real heirs of various 'fascists' etc. that they so commonly denounce.

An Historical Tangent: The Rhetoric And Reality Of Margaret Thatcher's Most (In)Famous Saying

No other statement was held to define Margaret Thatcher's ideology more than her statement that “There is no such thing as 'society'.” It seems likely that some of outrage generated by her comments was the product of the almost visceral hatred of her and what she stood for (Flew, 1991: p. 62). This hatred was partly based on the syllogism which ran something like this: A neo-liberal (Thatcher) has been Prime Minister since 1979; social problems have increased since 1979; therefore these social problems have been caused by neo-liberalism.

If taxation as the proportion of GDP provides the good measure of relative size between individual versus collective choice (Flew, 1994: p. 3), then at the figure of around 40% throughout this time Britain can hardly be said to have been in thrall of rampant libertarians in any absolute sense. Regrettably, gap between Thatcherite rhetoric and reality is unbridgeable. But carefully nurtured impression that between 1979 to 1997 we were living under the 'anti-society' government remains. This myth has been the powerful weapon in arsenal of statist true-believers.

Community: Why It Does Not Exist

If individualism is held to be wrong, either from the normative moral position or the purely utilitarian one, there must therefore be something else for it to be compared with: presumably collectivism of some sort. But Society is just the figment of collectivist and bureaucratic imagination: when psychologically disturbed were 'released back into community' — last being the even friendlier-sounding synonym for Society — they quickly found that it did not exist (Duncan and Hobson, 1995: pp. 300-301).

Taking the Popperian view of it, one must require of ...