Kwame Gyekye, in his much-acclaimed Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (1997), offered a robust and nuanced defense of communitarianism^[1] that remains rare in African discussions of the idea. It has justly attracted considerable attention in the literature respecting the viability of communitarianism as a socio-political and moral theory in our time. One distinctive characteristic of his rendering of the idea is his valiant effort to push back against critics who contend that communitarianism cannot, when all is said and done, take the individual seriously;^[2] that is, it plays fast and loose with the status of the individual in communitarian arrangements and, to that extent, suffocates the individual in the sometimes unwanted or unwarranted communitarian embrace. For Gyekye, those who so accuse communitarianism fail to distinguish, as he does, between two kinds of communitarianism. He designates them radical and moderate communitarianism, respectively. While radical communitarianism may, indeed, suffocate the individual and trifle with individuality, the moderate version, on the contrary, not only takes the individual seriously, but must take individuality, its recognition and operation as constitutive of its very identity to be plausible, minimally, if not convincing. Making this distinction sets Gyekye apart from the general discussion of communitarianism and makes him almost unique among its African defenders.

In subsequent discussion, we are going to be making an important distinction between individuality and individualism. There are many ways in which we can recognize individuality, make room for it in our social relations and organizing while, simultaneously, not taking it seriously or imposing on its expression such stiff transaction costs that the option is effectively nullified for the individual. There are times when we merely humor an expression of individuality. At other times, we simply entertain individuality as a flavoring. At yet other times, we barely tolerate individuality when we cannot rid ourselves of it for any number of reasons. The most significant recognition of individuality that is germane to the present discussion is when we embrace it and, in appropriate circumstances, and these cannot by any means be rare exceptions, allow it to trump choices that we would prefer were we in a position to suppress this expression, without more. This is the version of taking individuality seriously that would be consistent with the idea of taking the individual seriously that we wish to canvass in the rest of this essay.

Gyekye defends moderate communitarianism which is opposed to and different from a radical version that, all too often, gives communitarianism a bad image. His version has attracted a few critical responses that have tried to show that there is very little difference between the two versions and that the moderate version is no less vulnerable to similar strictures that are placed on extreme communitarianism.^[3]

This paper adds to these critical responses. Although its thrust is related to existing criticisms it opens a different path: Gyekye and other communitarians fudge the issue between them and those that they identify as individualists. I rejoin their arguments from the standpoint of individualism.^[4] Unfortunately, it is not always clear, when communitarians talk about individualism, what they have in mind, beyond offering mere caricatures of the latter or conflations with individuality. Nor do they take care to appreciate the many and not always compatible inflections of both communitarianism and individualism.^[5] By the same token one, like me, who essays to offer some version of individualism as a criticism of communitarianism must offer clarity as to which of the many theses of individualism, too, is in play.

Individualism can be understood as (1) a principle of social living under which social relations are to be denominated by how well or ill they enhance the standing and well-being of an individual; (2) a mode of social ordering by which we mean that whatever arrangements we have, those arrangements are best that compel a community to justify any unauthorized interference with an individual, her person, her preferences, and so on, without her express invitation or consent; (3) a reason for acting whereby it is enough to justify a course of action by citing the preferences of the individual and; (4) a standard for evaluating the appropriateness of an action performed by an individual or against an individual and her interests or preferences. In what follows, I argue that Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism cannot take the individual seriously on any of our four iterations. This is a robust individualist rejoinder to Gyekye’s version.^[6]

First, a clarification is in order. In this discussion, our focus does not turn on individuality. All human communities, even in the most primitive past, worked with some notion of individuality. For example, no communitarianism has been profligate enough to deny that the persons that comprise a community, even the most tightly drawn one, are separate and separable from one another and deserve to have certain forbearances acknowledged or recognized when their co-residents deal with them. So far, I do not suppose that there is anything to separate communitarians from individualists on that score. But individualism is a different order of questions.

Individualism is about a lot more than a simple acknowledgment or recognition of individuality. To draw an analogy from communitarianism, just as it insists that the group is ontologically prior and/or morally superior to the individual,^[7] individualism can be taken to affirm the exact opposite. No communitarian would grant that her challenge to individualism is met once the individualist grants that she recognizes communality and factors it into her understanding of what an individual is or that she only means that the rights of the community should be recognized or not trifle with but that, on balance, the individual is prior to the group since there can be no group without the individuals that make it up. We shall come back to this point anon. For now, it suffices to point out that individualism is not exclusive of community, nor does it completely forbid the community to ever interfere with the individual. To anticipate a later argument, once a community is formed, say, on a contractarian basis, the individual is bound by the dictates of the community so formed in so far as those demands are within the bounds of the contract for that community’s incorporation.

In light of this, we may ask: do the priority and superiority of the group to the individual mean that the interests of the individual must always or most times, if not peremptorily, yield and be permanently inferior to those of the group? If yes, then what can communitarians mean by saying that they recognize the interests of the individual and promote the same in their theory? If the interests of the individual are to be affirmed over those of the group only on occasion, what percentage are we looking at here? Are there any limits to what a group could do to, with and on what pertains to the single individual? If yes, where are these limits? And what would justify them given the metaphysical and moral priority and superiority of the group?^[8]

These questions are important for two reasons. As African countries deepen their engagements with liberal representative democracy, the question of the relationship between the individual and the group, a core element of modernity and its underlying dominant political philosophy, has become ever more urgent. I am not sure that current discussions evince any serious apprehension of this dimension. In a rare occurrence in contemporary African political philosophy, Jare Oladosu has posed similar questions in his critical engagement with the ‘African communalist tradition’ by adopting a Millian approach to determining under what conditions a group might legitimately interfere with an individual’s liberty to order her life however she wants. He believes that John Stuart Mill’s principle of liberty offers a good antidote to growing despotic interferences with ‘the liberties of moral minorities’ by

moral majorities in contemporary African societies. These liberties come under increasing assault, as African democracies transit through the various stages of doctrinal consolidation. A successful domestication of the principle of liberty in Africa requires the removal of one serious conceptual impediment, namely the so-called African communalist tradition and the presumed rejection of all forms of individualism. (Oladosu 2011, pp. 203-204)

He argues that the blanket rejection of individualism by the African thinkers he considers is mistaken and he rejects the tendency to view communalism and the preference for it as if they were natural tendencies for Africans.

Additionally, our questions only arise, for the most part, in the modern age. Neither Plato nor Aristotle would have been impressed by the modern philosophers’ solicitousness on behalf of the individual and the centrality of rights and their attendant forbearances when it comes to the protection of the individual from the collective. Indeed, the core reason why we must be more exercised by the fate of the individual is that, given the collective power and the concomitant lack thereof in the individual, one should be deeply suspicious of philosophers that seem to think that a central concern for the individual is misplaced or unwarranted. Recognition and accommodation of individuality is not what is at stake in the discussion of the debate over the fate of the individual under communitarianism. The opposite of communitarianism as theory is not individuality; it is individualism.

It is not enough to recognize the individuality of individuals: individualism must mean, as a proper contrary of communalism, the privileging of the individual over the group; and that not in a merely episodic manner. Individuality is a quality that attaches to individuals. Individualism and communitarianism, on the other hand, pertain to our judgment of the value of that quality in comparison with and in the context of social relations, social ordering, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. As socio-political and ethical theory, individualism enjoins us not merely to recognize the individuality of members but also, and not on occasion or when it suits our purposes, to make its expression trump or, at least, invite serious transaction costs for collective interference with or overriding the same.

We may not rule this option out of court through various verbal sleights, some of which I examine below. When there is a conflict, the onus falls on the group to justify its interference with the play of individual will. That is, it must include some severe restrictions, beyond not taking the life of the individual, on what may and may not be done with the will, body, and appurtenances of the individual without that individual’s consent. Nor may we make the transaction costs of an individual’s preferences so high that they become prohibitive just because those preferences do not accord with ours or our group’s. If individualism means anything other than the prosaic but not so insightful recognition of individuality, it must include the kinds of restraints just mentioned on the ability of the group to interfere with the individual. But this, precisely, is the individual that communitarian arrangements neglect. When we construe individualism this way, it is easy to see how problematic it is for communitarianism’s defenders to say almost casually that their framework accommodates the individual and takes the individual seriously.

In the rest of this essay, I join issues with Kwame Gyekye’s valiant efforts to defend what he styles a ‘moderate communitarianism’ that, at least, takes very seriously the fate and place of the individual in a communitarian dispensation.^[9] I shall be concluding that his efforts fall short of answering the challenge this discussion poses.

According to Gyekye, under radical communitarianism, ‘the person’ is taken to be

wholly constituted by social relationships. It might be thought that in doing so, such an arrangement tends to whittle away the moral autonomy of the person—making the being and life of the individual totally dependent on the activities, values, projects, practices, and ends of the community—and that, consequently, that arrangement diminishes his freedom and capability to choose or re-evaluate the shared values of the community. (1997, p. 37)

Gyekye attributes this view to a variety of African philosophers including, John Mbiti, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sédar Senghor and Julius Nyerere. Gyekye (1997, pp. 59-62) does not limit himself to his fellow African interlocutors. Rather, he extends his critical purview to Euro-American communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor.^[10] He vehemently repudiates this version of communitarianism.

For Gyekye, however embedded the self may be, ‘the communal structure’ does not set ‘the whole or a seamless set of values, practices, and ends of the individual that will perfectly reflect the complexity of human nature, values, and practices at least some of which, we do change in response to new experiences or situations and so cannot be considered monolithic’ (1997, p.53). The self is not ‘ineluctably and permanently held in thrall by that communal structure’. Finally, the self can always undertake a ‘reevaluation of inherited values and practices’ of the communal structure (Gyekye 1997, p.53). He concludes, ‘Even though the communitarian self is not detached from its communal features and the individual is fully embedded or implicated in the life of her community, the self nevertheless, by virtue of, or by exploiting, what I have referred to as its ‘mental feature’ can from time to time take a distanced view of its communal values and practices and reassess or revise them’ (Gyekye 1997, p.56).

Insofar as we grant that the embedded self is, simultaneously, capable of autonomously separating herself from the communal structure, on occasion, there is no reason to think that communalism has no place for, nor does it need rights. Here, Gyekye argues that the individual, as a self, is capable of distancing herself from her community or group, assess from her location both the arrangements of the group and her place in, relation to, or involvement with, those arrangements. So long as the group does not take away the right of the individual to perform this option, it cannot be said that such communitarian arrangements do not take seriously the individual concerned and her rights and entitlements to exercise her individuality as she deems fit. This is how Gyekye opens the communitarian universe to a discourse and accommodation of individual rights. He contends that radical communitarianism is incapable of similarly accommodating rights. The inability of radical communitarianism to accommodate rights talk and make room for individual rights in its schema is one of its abiding weaknesses. ‘Rights [which] belong primarily and irreducibly to the individual’ allow for the expression of all the good things that we routinely associate with individuality—’talents, capacities, and identity’. Yes, they are best expressed in a social framework, but they may not, in a credible communitarianism, be denied or reduced to ‘a secondary status’ (Gyekye 1997, p.62).

Since Gyekye’s strictures on radical communitarianism are well-founded, I would not be taking issues with them. His main charge against the radical version is that it smothers the individual to the point of extinction. Thus, the dividing line between the two versions of communitarianism turns on how each handles the individual. What recommends the moderate version is that it makes room for the individual and, for that reason, is a better theory than the radical one.

Moderate communitarianism ‘acknowledges the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual human person and recognizes individuality, individual responsibility and effort. The recognition is most appropriate, for, after all, the naturally social human being has will, personal initiative, and an identity that must be exercised, if his or her individuality is to be fully expressed and actualized’ (Gyekye 1997, p.40).  How might we construe Gyekye’s assertion? I would like to suggest that there is tension in this formulation. Ato Sekyi-Otu who, in a recent discussion of this same section of Gyekye’s account, reads it as a defense of individualism that is rare in African communitarian discourse, may have missed this tension (2019, pp.189-204). This may be because he has not posed similar questions that we do respecting what it is to take the individual seriously. I suspect that given the robustness of Sekyi-Otu’s conception of individualism and his recognition of it as something that encompasses much more than simple recognition of individuality, it is unlikely that he would come to a different conclusion from ours. The key is in drilling down into what these proclamations on individual rights really amount to in handling heterogeneity and heterodoxy in Gyekye’s communitarian framework, especially in the cultural contexts he adduced in its support.

If by individuality Gyekye means ‘the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual human person’, almost by definition, this cannot emanate from the sociality of the individual nor membership of any particular group: it is ‘intrinsic’ and, to that extent, independent of society and other individuals. Are there limits to how and by how much this individuality is expressed? The plausibility of moderate communitarianism is in part dependent on how it answers this and previous questions. I shall be arguing that moderate communitarianism may not fare as well as Gyekye and Sekyi-Otu think it does.

The importance of individuality and the relevance of rights and its associated discourse and practices are the two core elements that Gyekye claims distinguish his moderate communitarianism from its radical alternative. There is a connection between individuality and rights. One of the ways in which the ‘intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual human person’ is indexed in the modern age is through their recognition as bearers of rights. And as such, in the modern environment, however much we affirm and recognize the sociality of the individual, the rights of the individual may not be despotically infringed upon without more, even if the larger interests of the community would be served by such abridgement. This is the core of Famakinwa’s argument in ‘The Moderate Communitarian Individual and the Primacy of Duties’ (2010 b) where he argues that by affirming the primacy of the duties that the individual owes to her community on account of her sociality, Gyekye’s ‘recognition of the rights of the individual’ falls short of what a serious commitment to the rights of the individual entails.^[11] Recall the criteria we set for individualism above. How convergent are they with Gyekye’s stipulation?

On the surface, moderate communitarianism does not ‘neglect’ the individual. But not neglecting the individual is not the same as taking the individual seriously. For example, when we humor or we trifle with her preferences, neither would be an instance of neglect nor one of taking the individual seriously. We may also do so episodically, and this will not be good enough. If individualism is what is at stake, his assertion that there is no rupture between communitarianism and individualism becomes problematic. On Gyekye’s formulation of moderate communitarianism, there is no radical rupture between it and individualism. The difference between the two is not one of kind but of degree. Gyeke writes,

There is some truth in the view that communalism as applied to a social arrangement is a matter of degree. For this reason, we should expect a human society to be either more individualistic than communal or more communal than individualistic. But, in view of the fact that neither can the individual develop outside the framework of the community nor can the welfare of the community as a whole dispense with the talents and initiative of its individual members, I think that the most satisfactory way to recognize the claims of both communality and individuality is to ascribe to them the status of an equal moral standing.^[12]

This passage introduces another tension into the account. If, indeed, this is the case, then it should not matter which one of them we embrace; the difference would only be a matter of taste. It should not be the case that communalism is held to be preferable to individualism in Gyekye’s estimation. The severity of the disagreement between a Gyekyean communalist and an individualist opponent like me, usually located in ‘the Western tradition’ and considered one of its philosophical denizens, should not be what it is. As was just indicated, individualism is much more than the recognition of individuality in just the same way that communalism is not limited to the recognition of communality.

Communalism, as a doctrine, privileges the ties of community; demotes to secondary status the place of the individual; insists that where the interests of the individual conflict with those of the community, the individual should yield or be made to yield; contends that a life that tends to the ends of the individual and not the common good is a less desirable way of being human; and, finally, those societies are best that are organized on communalist principles and less than best that are founded on individualist ones. Given the foregoing, it is befuddling how one can claim that individualism and communalism have ‘equal moral standing’.

At every point in his discussion, Gyekye explicitly affirms these hierarchies between individualism and communalism. I cite only two instances. ‘It is true, I think, that in a communitarian society rights may not be asserted or insisted on with belligerency, for communal values such as generosity, compassion, reciprocities, and mutual sympathies may be considered more important than one’s rights’ (Gyekye 1997, p. 62). As we indicate presently, it is dubious to assume that the values iterated are necessarily identified with communitarianism. After a few nods to individual rights in a moderate communitarian context (Gyekye 1997, pp. 62-64), he affirms: ‘With all this said, however, it must be granted that moderate communitarianism cannot be expected to be obsessed with rights’ (Gyekye 1997, pp. 65).^[13] I do not know of anyone who takes rights seriously insofar as they relate to individuals who would agree that there is ever a time that ‘the common good of the society justifiably trumps individual rights’ (Gyekye 1997, p. 66).^[14] Rights are normally trumped by other rights, not ‘the common good’. Adjudicating these conflicts of rights is what judicatures are set up to do in regimes of rights.^[15]

Doubtless, if our only alternative to being ‘obsessed with rights’ is riding roughshod over them when the common good would be better served or merely granting them in what are benign areas of personal taste, Gyekye’s point would not be problematic. But we know, as he confesses later, that historically individualist societies are obsessed with rights for very solid reasons emanating from what he identifies as an abiding humanism. There are serious implications for how, both as individuals and societies, we handle the dignity of the lowliest individual and not imposing unacceptably high transaction costs on our respective deployments of our individualities is key to handling this dignity in the best way possible.

Dismas A. Masolo makes a similar point respecting the relationship between communalism and individualism. This is despite his own communitarian sympathies. ‘To put it in rhetorical form, the issue is whether communalism has no regard for at least some individual rights and whether, inversely, liberalism is the denial that we can be obligated to some values because they promote community regardless of what they do to us as individuals’.^[16] He proceeds to show the many ways in which individuality is subverted in African societies by the play of communalist principles and processes. According to him, authorities in customary laws and regulations justify them (and direct their subjects to consent to them) by either citing the superiority of the interests of the community over private interests—for example by stressing the possible disintegration of order and the onset of chaos upon deviation from the common norm—or by threatening them with sanctions if they do not conform. Either way, individuals are made to consent—read as ‘give in’—to practices that privately they would likely not have wanted to participate in. Thus, consent to play by the prevailing rules of a group usually camouflages a vicious system of coercion that denies participating individuals the chance to exercise their capacity to make fair and reasoned deliberations and choices. Finally, customary teachings and practices are often based on values that transparently promote various forms of inequity or outright oppression, such as those based on gender or age.^[17]

Part of what Masolo (2010) flags in this passage are the points we raised earlier concerning the relationship between an individual’s desire to be different and the transaction costs their communities impose on them and their preferences. Note the strong terms he uses to characterize some of those methods: ‘a vicious system of coercion’, seeming to hold the puny individual somewhat responsible for the destruction of social cohesion just because they choose to be different and promoting ‘various forms of inequity or outright oppression based on gender or age’.^[18] Unfortunately, there is no evidence of these possibilities exercising Gyekye’s mind. Hence, he could not have dealt with them. Communitarians must show that these problems are not important or do not have the implications that we draw from them respecting how the theory deals with the individual in any regime authorized by it.

Certainly, Gyekye can always rejoin that it is communality and individuality that he places on the same pedestal, not communalism and individualism. If this is the case, then it is open to doubt whether the distinction he claims between moderate and radical communalism can be sustained. The animating principles each of communalism and individualism are radically at variance with those of the other when they are both considered as modes of social living and principles of social ordering. But Gyekye’s preference is for the supremacy of the community over the individual. This is exactly the kind of transformation that ‘ism-izes’ community and lifts it above a concomitant ‘ism-ized’ individuality that individualism is. As Sekyi-Otu insists in his recent reclamation of the idea of individualism and attributing it to Frantz Fanon and, lately, Paulin Hountondji, ‘the family name for this persistent solicitude for the person and her agency is individualism’.^[19] I am arguing that there is no room for such ‘persistent solicitude for the person and her agency’ in Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism.

To start with, he argues that community is central, and the individual cannot be construed in any other way than as a communal being. ‘Communitarianism immediately sees the individual as an inherently communal being, embedded in a context of social relationships and interdependence, never as an isolated individual’.^[20] An individualist confronted with this ontological affirmation would be right to think that this definition does not allow her to affirm the negative, viz: the individual is not an inherently communal being. There is no such way out in Gyekye’s discussion. No sooner than this ontological claim is asserted than the political and moral credo is built on it without any heed being paid to the problematic connections that are then established. The way the individual is does not tell us how we ought to value her or what the limits are to what burdens we may place on her or how her preferences ought to be treated by the community. That is, the line from the ontological affirmation to communalist moral and political injunctions is neither obvious nor necessary.

Community, understood as the product and context of a ‘shared life’ is, on this account, pre-given; it is natural. This ontological claim is a contested one in the history of philosophy. Other philosophers argue that the community is nothing more than the sum of the individuals that make it up. This latter view is ignored, routinely caricatured, by Gyekye as if the communalist claim is accepted by all or most philosophers, including African ones. Following from this claim, we are told,

Members of a community society are expected to show concern for the well-being of one another, to do what they can to advance the common good, and generally to participate in the community life. They have intellectual and ideological as well as emotional attachments to their shared goals and values and, as long as they cherish them, they are ever ready to pursue and defend them.^[21]

These are very problematic claims. The common good is always a subject of much controversy and unless your referent is the simplest of societies, it is without question that a complex, segmented society is likely to have cleavages when it comes to designating the boundaries and content of the common good and how it is best secured. Gyekye writes as if the societies on which he based his idealizations were not societies that were dominated by hierarchies that were not always just or consented to by all or most of their members. If this is the case, it is problematic to speak of attachments to shared goals that are vulnerable to varying degrees of contestation among the many sub-groups that make up the society.

Furthermore, his claims concerning the common good are empirical claims based on the ontological presupposition that the individual is inherently communal by nature. But this is by no means self-evident nor even largely uncontroversial. In fact, in many parts of Gyekye’s discussion, it is hard to resist the feeling that this is being made true by definition.^[22] Here is an example.

The common good literally and seriously means a good that is common to individual human beings—at least those embraced within a community, a good that can be said to be commonly, universally, shared by all human individuals, a good the possession of which is essential for the ordinary or basic functioning of the individual in a human society. It is linked, I think, to the concept of our common humanity and, thus, cannot consist of, or be derived from, the goods or preferences of particular individuals; thus, the common good is not a surrogate for the sum of the different individual goods.^[23]

To show the many ways in which, when all is said and done, what I have just quoted has the character of a tautology, will take us too far afield of our discussion. It suffices to point out that if Gyekye is correct, by definition, either there are no individual human goods or, as he says at the end of the quote, they have no role to play in the constitution of the common good or the common good cannot be conceptualized in any other way. This is making it true by definition. For, as I am sure Gyekye, given his erudition, was aware, the idea of the common good is one of the most contested in social and political philosophy.

Granting Gyekye’s description as correct does not follow that its implications are plausible or adequate. The requirement that ‘members of a community show concern for the well-being of one another’ cannot be a natural expectation even if we agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mencius, or Gyekye that human beings tend to be compassionate by nature.^[24] Outside of thinkers like James Mill or Robert Nozick and Loren Lomasky, in our day, there is nothing that has been said here that an individualist needs to protest.

To begin with, many diehard individualists make clear that theirs is a heuristic device where the explanation of social phenomena is concerned; or a principle of social ordering when it comes to which should have priority between the individual and the group; or a mode of social living where the allocation of public goods and how the individual should be treated by the group are involved.^[25] For example, in the social contract tradition, even though humans start out as autonomous, self-defining individuals, their coming together, under the aegis of a covenant, to form a community, gives rise to precisely the kinds of ‘concern for the well-being of one another’ and the individuals concerned that Gyekye talks about. For, having signed on as participants in this covenant, they do cede to the public body—the state—thus formed the power to compel them to perform. This, surely, can count as one of those ways in which individuals who are otherwise embedded communally and culturally can decide to reconstitute the grounds of their coming together without drawing their justification from their ‘natural sociality’. In certain contemporary jurisdictions, e.g., Australia and New Zealand, where this contractarian tradition is institutionalized, and where individualism is both a mode of social living and the dominant principle of social ordering, a duty to rescue is imposed on these putatively non-caring individuals under what are generally called Good Samaritan laws.^[26] I do not know of any similar mandates in so-called community societies like Gyekye’s native Ghana or my native Nigeria.

Many of the functions that are all too facilely attributed to communalist social orders are usually present in societies dominated by individualism, too. In other words, it is implausible, possibly false, to suggest, as Gyekye does, that ‘in a noncommunity social context, neither the advancement of the common good nor the demonstration of concern for the well-being of others is normatively perceived as a socioethical testament, principle, or requirement’.^[27] Although I do not do so here, I am convinced that one can easily demonstrate, with empirical evidence, the implausibility, if not the falsity, of Gyekye’s empirical claims in this respect. Were Gyekye right, it should be the case that other-regarding actions, non-self-interested behavior, would be rare or only occur under compulsion in noncommunity social contexts. But that is not so.^[28]

A Gyekyean critic can always retort that these acts are motivated by instrumentalist considerations. That they fall short of moral requirements since they are motivated by self-interested, maybe even selfish, considerations. Additionally, she could argue that given the self-preference that is ever present in individualist actions, it is difficult to see how such acts could pass moral muster. No doubt, these are objections that are standard fare in the ethics literature respecting whether egoism could be a morality. That issue is yet to be definitively resolved and, outside of clearly selfish acts, and assuming that one is not a Hobbesian or, in our day, a Randian, the immorality of self-interested actions is not established.

More importantly, not all individualist-inflected, other-regarding acts are motivated by self-interest. And ethical discourse in the contractarian tradition has its fair share of deontological theories that devalue self-interested behavior. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is one such individualist-inflected, other-regarding theory that excludes precisely those kinds of acts. One must then wonder whether Gyekye’s communalist claims have not been purchased at too high a price: the distortion—willful or unwitting, it does not matter—of the opposing point of view.

And this challenge is not met by insisting that the difference between individualist and communalist societies is only a matter of degree. We know, for instance, that in individualist-inflected social orders, the community always is the party that must justify any uninvited interference with an individual and whatever pertains to her. Such are usually dominated by ‘the persistent solicitude for the person and her agency’ (Masolo 2010, p. 108). As we will find below, this is an outcome that Gyekye cannot accept.

Furthermore, the situation is not helped by selecting as representative one slice of a complex philosophical tradition such as individualism and then knocking it down as if the tradition of which it is a part is that easily dispatched. Jeremy Bentham may have dismissed the common good as nothing more than ‘the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it’.^[29] But John Stuart Mill did not. Neither did Georg W.F. Hegel, the philosopher of corporatism, or Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of the Categorical Imperative.

The crux of the matter lies in the repeated misdescription of the individualist position and the constant refusal to take seriously the heterogeneity of its defenders. It is inadequate to characterize individualism thus:

To understand the individualist one must understand the normative or ideological impulse to that notion: individualists start out by considering the individual to be prior to the community and equipped with conceptions of the good perhaps totally different from the purposes of the community, individual conceptions of the good wholly and always arrived at independently of the system of values available in a community (Gyekye 1997, p.45).^[30]

Consistent with the prior claim that the individual is essentially a communal being, Gyekye implicitly assumes in this passage that the claim that the individual is prior to the community must be false. Given this, I suspect that the emphasis on ‘wholly’ and ‘always’ is meant to hint at the absurdity involved in thinking that an individual could wholly and always arrive independently at conceptions of the good life. Yes, there are individualist philosophers who make such extravagant claims. But not all do. Nor is it necessary for individualists to claim that individuals always and wholly arrive independently at their theories and conceptions. I do not know why Gyekye did not acknowledge that individualists, too, can be divided into radical and moderate camps. The fact is, they can and do so divide themselves. The role of the individual varies between, to use contemporary examples, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls’s iteration of contractarian individualism yields the Difference Principle that makes the welfare of the worst-off individual the only justification for interfering with holdings—a stand into which some have read socialism—while Nozick’s ‘minimal state’ makes it illegitimate to interfere with holdings outside of transfers between individuals on mutually agreeable terms. So, the debate is not helped by attributing easily refutable views to one’s opponents.

When we shall have peeled away the ideological predilections respecting individualism of Gyekye’s communalism, what we would be left with is the simple fact that when individualists make claims, their claims can fall under any one or a combination of the theses of individualism ranging from the ontological to the axiological to the methodological. To that extent, when individualists embrace the advancement of the common good or refrain from so doing, they do so for no less normative reasons for their choice that happen to be different from the sorts of reasons for acting that a communalist would offer. Just like communalism, individualism, too, is more than its ontological construal. It is often also offered as a guide to action as well as a reason for acting. When the latter are the case, it is a question of different justifications. For the communalist, advancing the common good is dictated by considerations that originate in some notion of communalism; for the individualist, it is because the individual is thereby prospered. Who has the better reason is a matter for philosophical debate. And the debate is part of the warp and woof of philosophy, broadly speaking.

Finally, however much Gyekye claims that the justification, e.g., promotion of the common good, for actions in the community context is communal, the fact remains that the thinking that eventually became sedimented as collective values always originated in the lone individual mind, sometimes in discourse with others; at other times, as flashes of inspiration that are shared with and entered into the collective sharing that is the common inheritance. So, if this is true, it is not outlandish to talk about individuals having their own conceptions of the good life that are at variance with those of others that have become sedimented over time as the preferred conception of the good life among a people. Indeed, we know that in communities where what might at first appear to be individual whims are outlawed or discouraged social change often is stymied.

If Gyekyean communalism were to take seriously its professed recognition that ‘the naturally social human being has will, personal initiative, and an identity that must be exercised, if his or her individuality is to be fully expressed and actualized’ (Gyekye 1997, p. 40), it would have to pay more than lip service to heterodox thinking and embrace eccentricity, whimsicality, and the occasional display of caprice by the individual. Rigging the definition of the individual as ‘inherently communal’ is prima facie eviscerating the notion of the individual. We have seen this before. If Euro-Americans had continued to follow Aristotle and the rest of the ancients that the human being is naturally social, the alternative individualist ontology would not have emerged.^[31]

Thus far, I have argued that Gyekye’s communalism cannot take the individual seriously and that his moderate communalism cannot escape the pitfalls he identifies with radical communalism when it comes to how communalism, generally, deals with the individual. In the rest of this discussion, I show why Africa cannot afford to continue to shun individualism or treat it lightly as its thinkers have done to date.^[32] There are practical implications for this critical engagement with communalism as a socio-political theory. It is why I am fundamentally opposed to Gyekye’s fudging the issue of his stand on individualism. Simply put, the individual in Africa needs to be liberated from the suffocating embrace of communalism. Philosophy has a major role to play in this process. This is a similar sentiment to that expressed by Paulin Hountondji who has been an indefatigable pathfinder in the line of reasoning represented in this paper:

What I denounce in, and through, ethnophilosophy, and that I find strangely behind the revolutionary appearance of the populist discourse of our new critics is the ideology of group domination or, more precisely, of a certain idea of the group imposed by a handful of intellectuals and rhetoricians, the ideology that crushes the individual, and by the same token promotes all forms of fascism and neo-fascism from the most subtle to the most vulgar. What is at stake today in the critique of unanimism is, on the one hand, the possibility for our people to evolve, to transform themselves by overcoming, through an autonomous movement of transcendence, the multiple weaknesses that made their defeat by the West possible at a time in history. At issue on the other hand is the status of the individual in modern African societies, the question of democratic liberties, and in particular freedom of expression. I cannot prevent anyone from seeing in this double need a ‘struggle for domination’. It has to be added, however, that this struggle, if struggle there is, does not oppose, as it has been believed, ‘professional philosophers’ on the one hand and the ‘popular masses’ on the other, but takes place for now between intellectuals each as ‘acculturated’, as ‘Westernized’, as petit bourgeois as the other. The political stakes of this ‘struggle’ concern in the final analysis, the fate of our people.^[33]

Hountondji was responding to critics that came from the left. I am arguing that the defence of African communalism, like Gyekye’s, is a thinly veiled conservatism wrapped in authenticity designed to frighten Africans, for fear of being dismissed as ‘Westernized and deafricanized’, from laying hold of individualism as both a principle of social ordering and a mode of social living and deploying it to deal with the contemporary crises of life and thought in Africa. Communalism is often preferred on account of its being more in tune with indigenous African ideas for social living and organizing society. But this view may not be as dominant or widespread as its purveyors would have us believe (Oladosu 2011, p.208).

I do not claim that only individualism can work. Only that Africans should be free to engage individualism as one of the tools for moving Africa forward. Its success or failure should be established in practice and on its coherence as a theory. Foreclosures of alternative options should never be entertained. That is, we should be open to debating the relative merits of the many theses of individualism, especially in the sphere of value theory. The individual-collective relationship has been late in receiving the kind of withering critical scrutiny that it requires if it is going to be a part of Africa’s march to progress especially in the ongoing struggle with the installation of liberal representative democracy and the regime of rights in various countries.^[34]

The modern notion of the individual, the one in which consideration for the individual is primary and where the individual is deemed sovereign and presumed to be the owner of inalienable rights that are external and antecedent to community, has been all too easily, if not cavalierly, dismissed in African communalist discourse. Gyekye, at best, fudges it (1997, pp. 61-70). Because of the unrelenting focus on and need to affirm the primacy and superiority of the community and its interests, Gyekye’s communalism barely recognizes, much less defend subjectivity and its implications in politics, sociology and ethics. The self is respected in its singularity only insofar as its interests or preferences do not conflict with those of the community.

It is not enough to say that ‘Individual rights to expressions that are of a strictly private nature may not be disallowed, unless there is overwhelming evidence that such expressions can, or do, affect other innocent members of the society’ (Gyekye 1997, p.65). In individualist society, what ‘affect other innocent members of the society’ is a matter of complex legal and political processes, wrangling even, mandated by a primary commitment to the inviolate dignity of the singular individual. Even then, Gyekye immediately claws back this benign nod to the individual by demanding that the exercise of individual rights ‘be matched with social responsibilities’ (Gyekye 1997, p.65).^[35]

Efforts are made to dress up indigenous institutions as democratic and respectful of individuals and their choices.^[36] When V.G. Simiyu attacked the so-called traditional political system in African communities for not being democratic, Gyekye was quick to sidestep Simiyu’s main criticisms and substitute some nimble logic chopping. Simiyu criticized the system from the standpoint of modern liberal democracy founded on the sovereignty of the individual, the principle of merit, and the equality of all. Nothing in Gyekye’s rejoinder suggests that the absences pointed out by Simiyu are not there or do not bear the weight he put on them.^[37] According to Gyekye,

Humanism, the fundamental principle and the intellectual, perhaps also ideological, engine of modernity, placed the ultimate value in individual humans and in their rationality. It placed a premium on the creative capacities of the human being and on the concern for her leading an abundant life in this mundane world. Humanism can certainly be regarded as the foundation of the doctrines of individual rights, individual freedom, the need to allow the exercise of individual capabilities and endowments and other features of the value of individuality, and the cult of reason—all of which constituted the intellectual background of modernity.^[38]

It is instructive that Gyekye opposes communalism to this humanism. I contend that it is this overwhelming centrality of the individual and the inordinate lengths that modern social formations go to protect that individual from the predations of groups—her fellows and/or the collectives they form, especially the state—that Gyekye ought to show is accommodated by his formulation. This never happens. Gyekye concedes communalism’s guilt on this score. ‘One of Western modernity’s principles or basic ideas is individualism; another is supernaturalism, which, in the Western conception, is closely linked with humanism. These principles would hardly find embrace in the bosom of the cultures that resiliently value community life and consider the religious life intrinsic to—inseparable from—their total way of life’ (Gyekye 1997, p.270). This is where the pedigree dimension of Gyekye’s case is clearly demonstrated. It is a stance that is inconsistent with his earlier conceptual elucidation that admitted of no geographical or cultural denominations. It is time that Africans took individualism, as described so well by Gyekye, seriously and in a conscious way (Táíwò 2014).

The identification of individualism-as-humanism with ‘Western modernity’ and its opposition to what I presume Gyekye and others call African communalism may, in part, explain why they are reticent to take the claims of individualism seriously. They probably regard talk of individualism as an integral part of the racism-denominated colonial legacy they are eager to distance themselves from.^[39] But if we take communalism as an idea and philosophical model that is widely distributed across cultural, racial, and geographical boundaries, unified in the main by its material infrastructure in the mode of production that those communities share that embody it, what recommends it must be other than its cultural or geographical provenance. Concomitantly, individualism does not stand condemned because it is ‘Western’. Communalism then loses its appeal as something essentially or primarily African. Communalism is a historical idea with empirical analogues across the spectrum of human societies at equivalent times when they were dominated by specific modes of producing their material lives.

I do not see in Gyekye’s moderate communalism a serious engagement with the historicity of the idea. What is required is for us to engage critically the claims of the idea in its diverse realizations. Does it enable us to make sense of the individual-collective conundrum, serve the divergent interests of individuals and groups without sacrificing one for the other, and so on? Unlike other African defenders of communalism, Gyekye acknowledges the ‘negative features of our African cultures’ and their impact in contemporary Africa; for example, the role of the extended family system in the proliferation of corrupt practices (Gyekye 1997, pp. 242-258).^[40] But he believes that communalism has within it the solution without sufficient detail being given as to how to shake the individual loose and reconstitute social relations on new foundations.

Contrast that with Kwame Nkrumah who also cited the retrograde aspects of our indigenous culture as part of the explanation for our lack of progress in the modern era and was clear that we have to make a decisive break with communalism.

Customs which extol the virtues of extended family allegiance sustain nepotic practices, and regard the giving and taking of ‘presents’ as implicit and noble, because they promote the family welfare. They encourage indolence and bribery, they act as a brake upon ability, they discourage that deeper sense of individual responsibility which must be ready in a period of active reconstruction to accept obligation and fulfill trust. Above all, they retard productivity and oppose savings, the crucial factors in the rate of development. Polygamy donates its quota to these retarding influences, while our laws of succession and inheritance stifle the creative and inventive urge (Nkrumah 1963, p.104).

He did not stop there. He devoted a whole chapter to the idea of freedom in the same book.^[41] If the above are true, to claim that communalism offers us a theoretical model with which to make sense of African phenomena or offers a model of social organization that might resolve some of the problems afflicting the continent, at the present time or in the near or far future, without indicating how the individual will be freed from the suffocating embrace of dated principles of social ordering and modes of social living, is to engage in a futile exercise, at the formal level.

I conclude that communalism, moderate or radical, does not offer us a viable theoretical model for coming to grips with perennial philosophical questions raised by the community-individual relationship. Why is this so? For one thing, we no longer have a communalist-inflected society across much of the continent. Only African scholars do not or refuse to know it. When they do, they seem to think that the new forces that have been unleashed in our history—modernity and its tenets—can be forced into the old categories without any violent remaking of our world.

I take history seriously. This makes it imperative that we recognize the historical transformations that have occurred in Africa.^[42] Most African cultural traditions have since moved on, as do indeed others of their kind in other parts of the world. While what scholars describe as communalism may exist in different pockets, it is by no means the case that this is as pervasive as our scholars would have us think. And even if one wishes to defend it as a methodological or axiological thesis, one still has the responsibility of showing that its plausibility rests on solid grounds in the empirical world. The continuing diffusion of communalist thinking in African philosophical discourse has the pernicious consequence of stunting serious thinking needed for more sophisticated responses to the challenges of life and thought in Africa.

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