The answer to the question “Why not communitarian socialism?” was ironically provided by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of modern socialism. Although human nature has remained essentially the same, the circumstances of human life have changed.
The biggest change is obvious: we no longer live in small, independent family bands held together by mutual need and led by a family patriarch. Instead, we live in large multicultural and multiracial societies united only by a distant government. Practices that make sense for small, closely knit bands with a common ancestry and culture cannot be replicated in larger societies. Hence, the welfare-state utopia Rousseau envisaged in The Social Contract ([1761] 1997) would remain resolutely small and intimate; everybody in it would know everybody else.
Rousseau’s followers unfortunately have not listened to his sage warning. In the century just passed, ill-considered attempts to impose “brotherly love” socialism on vast polities of unrelated peoples produced holocausts of a scale never before imagined—150 million dead and counting—and even now too horrible to contemplate with equanimity. Furthermore, we know why they did so. Although we human beings are not naturally selfish psychopaths capable of loving only ourselves, we are also not natural Christians filled with indiscriminate charity for all our fellow human beings. We have a capacity for altruism, but it is extremely limited. So forcing us to contribute to the welfare of people we do not know or love goes against the grain.
It is politically incorrect to say so, but the plain fact of the matter is that we human beings are tribal animals whose spontaneous altruism is normally limited to kith and kin. We cannot readily be made to share limited and insecure resources with those we do not know and may not love. Try to make it our duty to do so, and some of us will shirk that duty, and others will exploit it, thereby subverting it. Try to prevent the corruption of personal character and social order that dependency on state largesse creates, and you will merely foster resentment while promoting increasingly oppressive and corrupt government. The once putatively benevolent and providential state either will eventually become insolvent as rapidly growing entitlement costs exceed diminishing assets or will turn into an intolerable tyranny helpless to prevent the dissolution of society and the moral degradation of its members.
Does this problem have a solution? Yes, but as the tragic failure of attempts to turn unwilling and resentful subjects of coerced redistribution into willing altruists has made painfully obvious, socialism is not up to the job. Communitarian socialism might be made to work, given a radical change in the human genome sufficient to make humans into self-sacrificial drones or given a return to a division of mankind into small, closely knit clans. Although collective welfarism worked very well in the extended families that roamed some parts of the earth as recently as a few hundred years ago, we may safely say, given the evidence, that it cannot be made to work in the societies that now contain the bulk of our species.
What can be made to work in these societies are Lockean negative rights. These rights work where welfare states cannot because they impose on their citizenry only minimal duties that are acceptable to all alike and so create less resistance. To live in Lockean regimes is to be left alone as far as is practicable to pursue your life as you see fit, assured that you will not be wantonly killed, enslaved, robbed, or cheated. Because these assurances benefit all, they are also welcome to all. In contrast, positive duties to share one’s substance with unloved and often unworthy strangers benefit only some at the expense of others. These duties are welcome to their beneficiaries, but not usually to those who must bear their costs.
Because negative Lockean rights benefit all, protection of them requires only a minimal state employing minimal coercion; so this state promotes liberty and the many good things that go with it, including general prosperity and individual responsibility. In such a state, people still have positive duties to provide welfare assistance to family, friends, and neighbors, but because such duties already accord with natural human dispositions, they need no enforcement by an incompetent but oppressive state. Charity, which begins at home, can stay there. It can remain a matter for local group morality rooted in the bonds of consanguinity.
(Max Hocutt, "Rights: Rhetoric Versus Reality," The Independent Review 17 [summer 2012]: 51-64, at 61-2 [italics in original; footnotes and parenthetical references omitted])
