Civil Society Watch

The question of the one and the many, of unity and diversity, has been posed since the beginning of political thought in the West. The American Founders were well aware of the vexations attendant upon the creation of a new political body. They worked with, and against, a stock of metaphors that had previously served as the symbolic vehicles of political incorporation. As men of the Enlightenment, they rejected the images of the body politic that had dominated medieval and early modern political thinking. For a Jefferson or a Madison such tropes as "the King's two bodies" or John of Salisbury's twelfth century rendering, in his Policraticus, of a body politic with the Prince as the head and animating force of other members, were too literalist, too strongly corporatist, and too specifically Christian, to serve the novus ordo saeclorum. But they were nonetheless haunted by Hebrew and Christian metaphors of a covenanted polity: the body is one but has many members. There is, there can be, unity with diversity.

A sociological prize of sorts ought to be given to the member of the TV audience who, during a show about the savings and loan mess exclaimed, "The tax payers shouldn't pay for this, the government should!" He reflected quite well a major theme in American civic culture: a strong sense of entitlement, demanding the community to give more services, strongly upholding rights -- coupled with a relatively weak sense of obligation, of serving the commons, and without a feeling of responsibility for the country. Hence: Americans recently called for more government services but showed greater opposition to new taxes; they express their willingness to show the flag anyplace from Central America to the Gulf, but a great reluctance to serve in the armed forces; and they even have a firm sense that one ought to have the right to be tried before the jury of one's peers, combined with frequent maneuvers to evade serving on such juries.

One of the hallmarks of communitarianism is its sensitivity to cultural and historical differences that may differentiate one community or subcommunity from another. And in precisely that spirit, I must introduce a question: how much can Europe learn from America, and how much can America learn from Europe, if what differentiates us is arguably as important as what unites us?

From a communitarian perspective, a fascinating problematic has been established, which is an empirical question that cannot be resolved philosophically or ideologically. But it is nevertheless a question I have reflected on through the exemplary person of Alexis de Tocqueville, who has traveled back and forth across the Atlantic bearing misunderstood messages from one culture to another.