So I’m back from Providence, R.I. (quite a lively place these days), where I ran a conference (with Dan Mahoney) sponsored by both the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Liberty Fund.

The point of the readings (which I didn’t choose) for the conference seems to have been to reflect on the distinction between Community and Society (see the sociologist Tonnies). From the communitarian point of view, in the beginning there was communism (or the complete identification of the particular human being with the Community) and human “progress” has been the direction of a world in which all human connections are calculated, consciously constructed, and superficial. The movement is also from the small agrarian community to the big industrial city. It is also, of course, in the direction of the rootless cosmopolitanism of the rich sophisticate. Said sophisticated or enlightened person sets the standard for Society, which is really a ruthless competition for status and money under the veil of politeness.

In the view of Tonnies, Society becomes, as it were, all head and no heart, pits emotionally distant classes against each other, and eventually self-destructs. Along the way, there may be a period of socialism — which is the conscious management of everything. Socialism is infinitely distant from natural communism.

For Tonnies, there’s one possible way to resist the full emergence of this unsustainable world “after virtue”: the conscious cultivation of the remaining islands of Community in the midst of Society. Community can become a matter of choice, which, of course (according to this way of thinking), it never was before.

The choice of Community in our time would depend on affirming a truth about human nature that can’t completely be transformed by social or historical forces. Tonnies, being basically a 19th-century romantic historicist, often preferred the logic of historical-social development to empirical evidence. And we have a lot more of that evidence these days.

Tonnies great debts are to Marx and Hobbes. He learns from Marx that urbanizing “capitalism” drowns in the icy waters of egoistical calculation all illusions about the beauty or insrinsic goodness of virtue. And he thinks, again with Marx (and Rousseau before him), that the war-of-all-against-all that Hobbes describes as the natural condition of human beings is actually the “purely social” condition of bourgeois or cosmopolitan individuals.

Marx looks forward to the revolution that can, in a way, restore primitive communism on a completely conscious basis. We will have all the benefits of communism without all the repression and scarcity. Because he’s as “forward looking,” in his way, as techno-sophisticates such as Peter Thiel, he is heartless enough to diss rural idiocy. Tonnies and Rousseau want us to be selectively nostalgic for rural idiocy. (Another possible position: Rural idiocy is actually the invention of capitalism, which causes all the brains to move to the city to run the centralized operations that have rural branches. People in small towns used to run their own banks, hardware stores, and stuff.)

The economist McCloskey gave us some thoughtful criticisms of the more apocalyptic applications of the Community-versus-Society distinction. First off, “bourgeois virtue” is not an oxymoron. Second, the romantic views of Community ignore all the murderous, exclusivist cruelty that was characteristic of our more rural and unenlightened past. In some ways, people really have gotten less cruel and more gentle. There may well be less hate in the world. And it’s far from clear that there’s less love. The connection between love and marriage, after all, is a modern ideal, and someone might even claim that modern workplaces are more emotionally satisfying on the personal level than those of the past. Not only that, those silly economists who really believe that people or businesses can be understood solely or even mostly in terms of utility maximization are just as unempirical as those who think they long for primitive communism. Our world is a sustainable mixture, McCloskey claims, of Community and Society.

McCloskey’s tale is more than a bit of a lullaby, it seems to me. Still, she’s useful for freeing us from the various illusions of romanticism.

Our conference’s bottom line remained: Classical liberals or libertarians or whatever you call them are not conservatives because they privilege the forward-looking, techno-liberation of Society — meaning the liberation of the free individual — over the political-cultural repression of Community. Insofar as they affirm some Community, they do so instrumentally as a means for the progress of Society.

Have said all this: My objection to the distinction between Community and Society is that neither captures the the free and relational being found in the Biblical/Christian “anthropology.” Being free and relational is more than a “compromise” between Society and Community.

One more thing: The very smart and altogether admirable young people at this conference came disproportionally from large families headed up by loving and capable parents. Their formative experience, to sample Tonnies, was of the communism that is characteristic of a highly functional family. So they almost all thought that Society exists for the benefit of Community. They almost all also thought, however, that one sign of the progress of modern Society is the liberation of women to choose to be productive and political beings just like men. They were still, in this respect, “communist” enough that I had to courageously defend what’s true about Ayn Rand (even from a Christian view). That didn’t take me very long, and I wasn’t intending, after all, to produce Randians or even Hayekians. Maybe Tocquevillians.