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.

Indeed, one could even go so far as to insist that it is incorporation, enfolding, within a single body that makes meaningful diversity possible. Our differences must be recognized if they are to exist substantively at all. We cannot be "different" all by ourselves. A political body that simultaneously brings persons together, creating a "we," but enables these same persons to separate themselves and to recognize one another in and through their differences as well as in what they share in common--that was the great chal lenge. If debates in recent years between the individualist and communitarian positions, as these have been tagged, are any indication, the problems generated by the need for unity that goes beyond mere "law and order," as well as the quest for diversity that goes beyond mere "tolerance," has become ever more acute. There is, then, an unresolved tension embedded in our history and our primary documents between individual rights and immunities and the vision of "we the people."

This ambiguity is inherent in American political culture and has persisted since the time of the founding. It is an ambiguity encoded in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in a simultaneous commitment to a "we" and to protection of the "one," and it is at one and the same time a source of strength and a cause for concern. Current individualist and communitarian debates are not, therefore, engagements between traditionalists and anti-traditionalists, or liberals and restorationists. Rather, the intensity of, and interest in, this discussion is best understood as a contestation over the appropriation of tradition itself. The Founders were Enlightenment figures who rejected traditions embodied in monarchical absolutism, but they also thought in some very traditional ways: natural law and natural right were not their invention. Preoccupied from time to time with classical republican precedents, the Federalists and anti-Federalists struggled with a general fund of ideas, a repertoire of stock concerns and understandings, much as contemporary interlocutors do.

Modern American political culture is neither an a la carte menu nor a fixed dinner. No one among us could participate in all the possibilities contemporary culture spreads before each human subject. Neither is it really workable to be so totally immersed in one fixed mode that no alternative to this conception, this belief, this way of doing things ever presents itself. Traditions exist; they are never created de novo. To "think" a tradition is to bring matters to the surface, to engage in debate with interlocutors long dead or protagonists who never lived save on the page and, through that engagement, to elaborate alternative conceptions through which to  apprehend one's political culture and the way that culture represents itself or is represented. The meaning and rationale of the most basic things about us--we the people--as well as each one of us taken singly is at stake.

Thus Robert Bellah argues for a vision of community that opposes both radical individualism, on the one hand, and a flattened-out, homogenous union that obliterates differences, on the other. Michael Walzer reminds us that much of the strength of our tradition is its protesting, separating, even privatizing tendency, with the Bill of Rights the touchstone of this robust individuating dynamic. We look to a second prong, our "federal" or constitutional tradition, to help to create and to revitalize associative life, a process subject to a number of pitfalls. Specifically, according to Walzer, despite "its anticipation of collective action, the Constitution has turned out to favor something else, nicely summed up in the twentieth-century maxim about doing your own thing. In this essay I begin by building on Bellah's and Walzer's insights, but from a somewhat different angle of vision. I go on to offer reflections on an epoch in our history, the Progressive Era, which was the point at which a rather loose, federated union moved in the direction of building and justifying the need for a powerful, centralized, bureaucratic order. That, in turn, helps to set the stage for my turn to two evolving traditions--Catholic social thought and the democratic theorizing of civil society emerging from Central Eastern Europe--as sources of insight and strength for American political thinkers who, with me, have grown weary of the stark alternatives, individualism versus collectivism, or choice versus constraint, choices all too often presented to us when the philosophic debate over tradition takes actual shape in our political rhetoric and public policy alternatives.

A preliminary discussion is needed to frame the horizon for my consideration of the ways in which the quest for national unity under the auspices of the state has, over time, exercised a corrosive effect on America's regional and localist images of community and, as well, on a once deeply and widely shared, religiously grounded concept of the human person, the "exalted individual," in the  words of political theorist Glenn Tinder. Tinder has argued that the idea of an individual whose ontological dignity is such that he or she deserves "attention" and is not to be "grossly violated" is fundamental to the Christian standpoint, which is constitutive of our political institutions and culture at its best. Were the horizons of our political life to cease being framed in this way, that is, through an insistence that the destiny of each and every individual matters, that life would become what it now is only in part, "an affair of expediency and self interest." Communitarians focus on civil society, "the many forms of community and association that are not political in form: families, neighborhoods, voluntary associations of innumerable kinds, labor unions, small businesses, giant corporations, and religious communities." Some may cavil at the notion that such associations are not "political," but theorists of civil society would insist, in response, that this network and the many ways we are nested within it lie outside the formal structure of state power. Walzer claims that the Bill of Rights aimed specifically to promote and to protect such associative group rights, not merely or solely individual immunities or entitlements. There is no sharp dichotomy between state and society in this understanding; rather, a complex dialectic pertains, or ideally ought to pertain, between the two. State and society are intimately intertwined--at least this is the assumption that guides the most thoughtful constructions of that relationship.

By contrast, the statist, one whose thoughts and hope culminate in and are designated by a powerful centralizing apparatus, wants to thin out the ties of civil society and the plural loyalties and diverse imperatives they give rise to and sustain. State-dominated ieology identifies us primarily as beings available for mobilization by a powerful centralized mechanism, rather than as friends, families, neighbors, members of the social club or a feminist health cooperative, activists trying to save the African elephant from extinction, participants in a reading group, Baptists, and so on. Statist politicians and  philosophies often design programs and policies aimed at destroying alternative loyalties and the many identities they provide.

Civil society, by contrast, is a realm that is neither relentlessly individualist nor collectivist. It is a movement to construct a good in common that we cannot know alone, a possibility that our associative relationships as well as our identity as citizens makes possible. It is a world evoked, at points, by the anti-Federalists in debates over the ratification of the United States Constitution. From time to time, anti-Federalists no doubt pushed an idealized image of a selfcontained and self-reliant republic that shunned imperial power and worked, instead, to create a polity modeled, in part, on classical principles of civic virtue and a common good. Writes a historian of this argument: "Anti-federalists saw mild, grass-roots, small-scale governments in sharp contrast to the splendid edifice and ambition implicit in the new Constitution--and, indeed, heralded by Publius and its other proponents. The first left citizens free to live their own lives and to cultivate the virtue (private and public) vital to republicanism, while the second soon entailed taxes and drafts and offices and wars damaging to human dignity and thus fatal to self government." Despite the often roseate hue with which anti-Federalists surrounded their arguments, they were onto something, as we like to say. They hoped to avoid, even to break, a cycle later elaborated by Alexis de Tocqueville in which highly self-interested individualists, disarticulated from the constraints and nurture of overlapping associations of social life, require more and more checks, balances and controls from above in order that the disintegrative effects of untrammeled individualism be at least somewhat muted in practice.

To this end, the peripheries must remain vital; political spaces other than or beneath (it is almost impossible not to deploy spatial metaphors as a kind of lexicon of power-talk) those of the state need to be cherished, nourished, kept vibrant. They had in mind local councils and committees and they had in mind to avoid concentrations of power at the core or "on the top." Too much centralized power was as bad as no power at all. Only small-scale civitates would enable individuals, as citizens, to cultivate authentic civic virtue. For such virtue turns on meaningful participation in a powerful ideal of community. Too much power exercised at a level beyond that which permits, indeed demands, active citizen participation is destructive of civic dignity and, finally, fatal to any authentic understanding of democratic self-government. Anti-Federalist fears of centralized and over-nationalized power presaged Tocqueville's later worry that imperial greatness bought through force of arms is "pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people" because it sends out lightning bolts of "vivid and sudden luster, obtained without toil, by nothing but the risk of life."

 

 Communitarians think about a dilemma articulated by Tocqueville in his classic work, Democracy in America. Tocqueville worried that even as the reality of American democracy freed individuals from the constraints of older, undemocratic structures and obligations, individualism and privatization were also unleashed. Tocqueville's fear was not that this invites anarchy; rather, he believed that the individualism of an acquisitive commercial republic, especially one bent on a course of empire, would engender new forms of social and political domination. All social webs having disintegrated, the individual would find himself or herself isolated, exposed and unprotected. Into this power vacuum would move the organized force of a top-heavy, centralized state. This Tocquevillian anxiety has spurred thinkers in the communitarian tradition to score American individualism and to urge upon us a more communal ethic. My worry is that critics of excessive, atomistic and acquisitive individualism often do not distinguish carefully enough between the phenomenon grasped in the 1980s slogan, "greed is good," and the strengths of our tradition of individuality, of respect for the human person, taken as single, unique, an irreplaceable self.

I ask the reader to return with me, for just a moment, to the Greeks, to that classical world dominated by the ideal of the citystate, the polis. One sees a world in which war is construed as the natural state of mankind and an imperious source of communal loyalty and purpose. The Greek city-state was a community of warriors whose political rights were determined by the fundamental privilege of the soldier to decide his own fate, to choose death  nobly. There was a direct line of descent from the Homeric warrior assemblies to Athenian naval democracy. The franchise was restricted to those who bore arms--hence the exclusion of women. One reigning definition of justice, repeated by Thrasymachus in his sparring with Socrates in the first book of Plato's Republic, was "the interest of the stronger." The Greek citizen army was an expression of the Greek polis, its creation one of the chief concerns and consequences of the formation of the city-state. In Sparta, the army organized into mess groups was substituted for the family as the basic element of the state. Another custom of the male group, homosexuality, was developed and institutionalized, most systematically at Thebes in the fourth century, to create a aacred band of fraternal lovers fighting side by side. Such institutions served to insure that fellowship was deemed a prerequisite of disciplined courage in war, of the willingness to risk death together.

The human body in Greek, then Roman, antiquity was wholly conscripted into society, an insight I owe to the great historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown. His is an important point. His argument in many books, including The Body and Society, is as follows: The pre-Christianized individual was not free to withhold his or her body from conscription into the extant social order. One could with Socrates endorse withdrawal of the soul from the body but one could not take oneself out of the group--one could not constitute one's body as a protest against its conscription into the social body in the form of warrior, slave, or householder. The classical view is that the city-state should have complete control of human bodies for the purposes of labor, procreation, and war.

The body, hence the self, existed at the behest of the wider social order. St. Augustine argues that Rome perfected the regime of cupiditas run rampant, the triumph of the lust to dominate. The distinctive mark of Roman life as a civitas terrena, a city of man, was greed and lust for possession, which presumed a right of exploitation. This became a foundation for human relationships, warping and perverting personality, marriage, the family, all things. Augustine writes: "For he who desires the glory of possession would feel that his power were diminished, if he were obliged to share it with any living associate ... he cherishes his own manhood."

 

The political importance of Christianity, one marked by an impressive array of analysts, critics, and political theorists (including Sheldon Wolin, Michael Walzer, Robert Bellah, Gilbert Meilaender and many others) is that Christians created a new vision of community, one that sanctioned both each life as well as everyday life, especially the lives of society's victims, and granted each member a new-found dignity. The warrior politics of the ancient world found itself put on trial. Writes Tinder: "No one, then, belongs at the bottom, enslaved, irremediably poor, consigned to silence; this is equality. This points to another standard: that no one should be left outside, an alien and a barbarian."

 

Christianity introduced a strong principle of universalism into the ancient world even as it proclaimed a vision of the "exalted individual," brought into being by a loving creator--not, therefore, the mere creature of any government, any polis, any empire. Although early Christians saw themselves as a very particular community, theirs was a community open in principle to all. Had not St. Paul proclaimed that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female? As early as Monica's death in 377 A.D., ( Monica, of course, is St. Augustine's indefatigable mother), Christian universalism had taken strong hold. As Monica approached her death on foreign soil, far away from her city, Carthage, she renounced a "vain desire" to be buried in that soil next to her husband. She was not frightened at leaving her body so far from her own country, for "Nothing is far from God--he knows where to find me.". Augustine himself declares in The City of God that a person's body "belongs to his very nature," and is no "mere adornment, or external convenience." Thus, human beings were not instruments to be put to a civic purpose over which they had no say; rather, persons qua persons "deserve attention." There is a minimum standard of care and concern for every person who "has been immeasurably  dignified." To be sure, as Tinder almost wearily suggests, this ideal is often "forgotten and betrayed" but "were it erased from our minds, our politics would probably become altogether what it is at present only in part--an affair of expediency and self-interest."

 

The heady drama of this moral revolution in the ancient world is a story that has lost none of its excitement or importance. The legitimacy once accorded automatically to the claims of the city-state and the empire upon the human body of each and every one now had to make its case and could not be assumed unproblematically. The human body could withdraw from the demands placed upon it by society. The sexual-social contract could be broken. Freedom of the will could be brought to bear on the body itself as a tangible locus, a sign, of a newfound relation of the self to the social world. An elemental freedom was endorsed. Liberated individuals formed communities to validate their new-found individualities and to shore up the transformed, symbolically charged good represented by the new social body: the body is one but has many members.

It is important to be clear about the nature of this freedom. The body was not exempt from a self-imposed discipline. To be a member of the faithful, one embraced this discipline as one's own. The aim was to be "truly alive," to slough off the "deadness" of abuse of the body through an ontology of lust and domination. The human will--and the concept of "will" is unknown before Christianity, most importantly St. Augustine--freely imposed a discipline on itself as a visible sign, a semiotics, of freedom: freedom from the abuses of one's time; freedom for involvement in an alternative construction of self in community. For Christian thinkers, as Hannah Arendt observes, "Free Choice of the Will" was a "faculty distinct from desire and reason" and Augustine is "the great and original thinker" who posited two active principles, willing and nilling, as constitutive of the "faculty of Choice, so decisive for the liberum arbitrium ... to the choice between velle and nolle, between willing and nilling."

 

 The Christian life was not primarily a solitary life, but a communal one. Nevertheless, the principle introduced by Christians is one in which persons are irreducibly individuals--but this individuality is exquisitely social. The person is neither absorbed totally into a communal order, having no identity outside its boundaries, nor is he or she defined wholly apart from the society of others. The Christian ideal of community not only departs radically from that of the classical city-state, it also challenges the revivification of this ideal of fraternal order in the civic republican tradition associated most importantly with Machiavelli and Rousseau. Rousseau scorns any particular interest that might block the general will. He lambastes Christianity as a notion wholly at odds with that of "republic." For the polity must be as one; the national will must not be divided; citizens must be prepared to defend civic autonomy through force of arms; whatever puts the individual at odds with himself is a threat to "la nation une et indivisible." I call this version of the republican ideal one of "armed civic virtue," for the human virtues are given a strong civic description and culminate in bearing arms for the republic. Although never embraced in any full-blown form in the United States, in part because of the breaks to its attainment encoded in the Bill of Rights, enlivened in Tocquevillian associations, and enshrined in Christian ideals of individuality and sociality, we have flirted with and even witnessed moments of "armed civic virtue" extolled as an ideal of a community coterminous with a great nation-state unified and speaking with one voice.

Now join me on the shores of the New Land. The founders have done their work. Federalist arguments have won the day though anti-Federalist fears simmer just beneath the surface of things. By the nineteenth century, the Christian ideal of the exalted self has taken on a solitary profile in the thoughts and writing of such important celebrants of individual freedom as Thoreau, Emerson, Anne Hutchinson, and others. In contrast to the strong Puritan ideal of a commonwealth, this refurbished American self stands out more and more in bold relief against a showy and less and less distinctive social background. Philip Abbott has elaborated the peculiarly American ideal of "perfect freedom," the freedom of a self apart from community rather than not-wholly-dominatedand-defined-by an overarching civic body. Americans began to revel in the celebration of an ahistorical privileging of personal experi ence, whether political, social, or sexual, a celebration that involved a highly evolved, romantic "reading" of both the Lockean and Christian traditions.

 

This mirror of freedom is held up beautifully, even chillingly, in an essay by the great Elizabeth Cady Stanton called "The Solitude of Self." In common with many American thinkers and activists, Cady Stanton embraced a bewildering smorgasbord of different civic and personal philosophies--liberal, republican, utopian, scientific, and nativist--throughout her long life. As with many Americans of her epoch, she praised the free market yet longed for a community of like-minded souls. She is thus both a representative figure and, as one of the movers and shakers of early feminism and the suffrage movement, an exceptional one. As a representative, even quintessential American thinker of her time, she did not break new intellectual ground, nor did she articulate a coherent system of thought that launched new fields of inquiry or altered the way human beings see their world. She is, however, justifiably regarded as a feminist philosopher whose work embodies an eclectic synthesis and often uncritical embrace of philosophies of individualism and social harmony, laissez faire and social cooperation.

But when she got down to brass tacks philosophically, Stanton embraced an ideal of almost perfect freedom, framed from the standpoint of a self she declares sovereign. She--correctly in my view--locates this ideal in "the great doctrine of Christianity," namely, "the right of individual conscience and judgement." You will not find an ideal of the sovereign self in "the Roman idea ... that the individual was made for the State." As a vision of the self alone, hers is a very selective appropriation of "the great doctrine of Christianity." One could, of course, line her up against other Christian thinkers--particularly those in the social gospel tradition--in order to chasten her robust, romantic embrace of the soul alone. But that is beside the point for my purposes. I call upon Stanton as one of the foremothers of contemporary individualism, particularly in its expressivist variation.

 

 The individual is preeminent, first and foremost, Stanton argues, deploying the Robinson Crusoe metaphor to characterize women on their solitary islands. After the sovereign self comes citizenship, then the generic woman, and last the "incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter." But such incidental social relations are not essentially constitutive of self. The self is prior to social arrangements. She speaks of the self-sovereignty of women and men and calls human beings solitary voyagers. We come into the world alone. We go out alone. We "walk alone." We realize "our awful solitude." Life is a "march" and a "battle" and we are all soldiers of the self who must fight for our own protection. In "the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone." Ideally, she notes almost off-handedly, this complete individual development is needed for the "general good." The exalted individual is one who exults in her own solitude, and Christianity's specifically socially and communal features recede.

Stanton's words conjure up a universe stripped of meaning save what the individual gives to it and its objects. She aims to dis-enthrall the self, to dis-encumber it in the sure and certain hope that a lofty and invigorating ideal of freedom will be the end result--and redound to the general good. But this admittedly bracing ideal of the self is too thin to sustain any notion of a social good, of a civic virtue we experience "in common together" that we cannot know alone. Because, in Wolin's words, the political is based on a possibility of commonality, on "our common capacity to share, to share memories and a common fate," a recognition of our common being is "the natural foundation of democracy" for "we have an equal claim to participate in the cooperative undertakings on which the common life depends." Stanton attempts to construct commonality based upon a vision of isolated, Robinson Crusoe-like, sovereign selves. Her social project falters for this reason. She failed to see the irony embedded in proclamations of a totally individualistic ontol ogy that would, she optimistically trusted, enter unproblematically into a politics of the common good, a politics of civic virtue.

When America entered the twentieth century, it was a society driven by dreams and fears of rapid industrialization and commercial expansion, dreams and fears of empire, dreams and fears of perfect freedom, dreams and fears of community. I will pick up the story of these tangled threads and themes in the World War I era when the siren allure of an overarching, collective civic purpose took a statist turn that seemed a cure for what ailed the republic, at least on the view of those who lamented our excessive diversity. Stanton's ideal self, together with throngs of diverse immigrants, invited a centralist response. Nationalizing progressives, disheartened at the messy sprawl that was American life, appropriately outraged at the excesses of corporate capitalism, and desirous of finding some way to forge a unified national will and civic philosophy, saw the coming of World War I, championed by President Woodrow Wilson, as a way to attain at long last a homogenous, ordered, and rational society. The central organ of progressive opinion, The New Republic, had long inveighed against "unassimilable communities," a fear prompted by the enormous surge in immigration during the waning decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.

'To be great' wrote John R. Commons, a progressive labor economist, "a nation ... must be of one mind." Walter Lippmann decried the "evils of localism" and fretted that American diversity was too great and had become a block in the way of "order, purpose, discipline." Even before Wilson committed American troops to the European War, Lippmann and other progressives claimed that war would be good for the state. Writes one critic of Lippmann and progressives in general: "His conception of both [reform and civic good] presupposed a monolithic, static social structure in which a scientific elite directed a docile, relatively homogenous public." A unity engineered from the top must, argued the nationalizers, triumph over pluralism, diversity, excessive and necessarily backward localisms.

 

 World War I was to be the great engine of social progress, with conscription an "effective homogenizing agent in what many regarded as a dangerously diverse society. Shared military service, one advocate colorfully argued, was the only way to yank the hyphen out of Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans or other such imperfectly assimilated immigrants." President Wilson, who had already proclaimed that "any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic," and who championed universal service as a way to mold a new nation, now thundered in words of dangerously unifying excess: "There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life... . Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out... . The hand of our power should close over them at once." Armed civic virtue had found a home on the shores of the new land and this mobilized and manipulated common good proved very common indeed.

A few brave, dissenting voices held out against the tide of xenophobic unity championed by academics and politicians alike. Most important among them was Randolph Bourne. Bourne bitterly attacked his old idol and master, John Dewey, for going for the war and talking blithely of its "social possibilities." His essay on "The State" retains its force nearly fifty years after he left it incomplete at his untimely death in the flu pandemic of the winter of 1918-1919:

War--or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy--seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity... . In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification.

 

 

Bourne championed the "trans-national" state. He yearned for a civic unity, a politics of commonalities, that cherished and celebrated the bracing tonic that perspicacious contrasts offer to the forging of individualities and communities. He called for an experimental ideal where each of us is free to explore in a world of others; where we can act in common together and act singly. Such an ideal is necessarily hostile to any overly robust proclamation of civic virtue that demands a single, overarching collective unity to attain or to sustain its purposes.

If one cherishes and champions individuality and community, diversity and commonalities, what resources are available in our contemporary civic repertoire that push in this complex direction? We -- late-modern or post-modern citizens of the United States -- are no longer naive. We have witnessed and are witnessing the corrosive effects of acquisitive individualism as well as those of the hypernationalistic, collective fevers that have occasionally run rampant in our history. With Bourne's saving and healing irony ready at hand, I will conclude this essay with intimations of a chastened version of civic virtue, one that embraces civility as a feature of that virtue yet also endorses, quite heartily, a fractious, even rumbustious politics.

I will draw from two perhaps unlikely sources -- Catholic social thought and the theorizing of civil society that has emerged in a rapid and heartening transformation of Central Eastern Europe. This move seems to me politically and discursively justified because we are all citizens of the Occident, shaped by Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the Reformation. One emergent feature of our current pluralism is the growth in numbers and public visibility of Catholics in a culture still riddled with anti-Catholic prejudice. Patterns of recent immigration are adding more Catholic citizens to our numbers. It behooves us to pay attention. We are dominantly a Protestant and not a Catholic nation. But mainline Protestantism has lined itself up a modernist project that tilts, finally, so far to the expressivist-individualist pole, that it is increasingly difficult for its spokesmen and spokeswomen to address questions of community and searching for common goods. Once again, what is at stake is not jettisoning a tradition -- robust Protestant individualism -- in favor of some other; rather, I have in mind to chasten  the project of the untrammeled self with alternative reading of Christianity and civil society as traditions of discourse.

If one turns to recent Catholic social thought one finds, first, adamant criticism of "superdevelopment, which consists in an excessive availability of every kind of material good for the benefit of certain social groups." Superdevelopment "makes people slaves of possession and of immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication of continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the so-called civilization of 'consumption' or 'consumerism,' which involves so much 'throwing away' and waste."

 

The "sad effects of this blind submission to pure consumerism," argues Pope John Paul II, is a combination of materialism and a relentless dissatisfaction, as "the more one possesses the more one wants." Aspirations that cut deeper, that speak to human dignity within a world of others, are stifled. John Paul's name for this alternative aspiration is "solidarity," not "a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people" but, instead, a determination to "commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual because we are really responsible for all." Through solidarity we see "the 'other' ...not just as some kind of instrument...but as our 'neighbor,' a 'helper' (cf. Gn. 2 2:18-20), to be made a sharer on a par with ourselves in the banquet of life to which we are all equally invited by God." The structures that make possible this ideal of solidarity are the many associations of civil society "below" the level of the state.

To the extent that John Paul's words strike us as forbiddingly utopian or hopelessly naive, to that extent we have lost civil society. Or so, at least, Alan Wolfe concludes in his important book, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. Wolfe updates Tocqueville, apprising us of how far we have come, or how rapidly we have traveled, down a road to more and more individualism requiring more and more centralization of political and economic power. For all our success in modern societies, especially in the United States, there is a sense, desperate in some cases, that all is not well, that  something has gone terribly awry. We citizens of liberal democratic societies understand and cherish our freedom but we are "confused when it comes to recognizing the social obligations that make... freedom possible in the first place."  This confusion permeates all levels, from the marketplace, to the home, to the academy.

The political fallout of our current moral crisis is reflected in the irony of a morally exhausted left embracing rather than challenging the logic of the market by endorsing the relentless translation of wants into rights. Although the left continues to argue for taming the market in a strictly economic sense, it follows the market model where social relations are concerned, seeing in any restriction of individual "freedom" to live any sort of lifestyle an unacceptable diminution of choice. On the other hand, many conservatives love the untrammeled (or the less trammeled the better) operations of the market in economic life but call for a restoration of traditional morality, including strict sexual scripts for men and women, in social life. Both rely either on the market or the state "to organize their codes of moral obligation" when what they really need is "civil society -- families, communities, friendship networks, solidaristic workplace ties, voluntarism, spontaneous groups and movements -not to reject, but to complete the project of modernity."

 

Wolfe reminds us that early theoreticians of liberal civil society were concerned to limit the sphere of capitalist economics by either assuming or reiterating a very different logic, the moral ties that bind in the realms of family, religion, voluntary association, community. The market model, Adam Smith insisted, should not be extended as a metaphor for a process of all-encompassing exchange. Were we to organize "all our social relations by the same logic we sue in seeking a good bargain," -- and this is the direction we are pushed by the individualist project -- we could not "even have friends, for everyone else interferes with our ability to calculate conditions that will maximize self-interest."

 

Nor is the welfare state as we know it a solution to the problems thrown up by the operations of the market. The welfare state  emerged out of a set of ethical concerns and passions that led into the conviction that the state was the "only agent capable of serving as a surrogate for the moral ties of civil society" as these began to succumb to market pressure. But over forty years of evidence is in and it is clear that welfare statism as a totalizing logic erodes "the very social ties that make government possible in the first place." Government can strengthen moral obligations but cannot substitute for them. As our sense of particular, morally grounded responsibilities to an intergenerational "we" falters and the state moves in to treat the dislocations, it may temporarily "solve" delimited problems broadly defined, but these solutions, over time, may serve to further thin out the skein of obligation.

Wolfe today, just as Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, appreciates that a societal crisis is also an ethical crisis. Although he presents no menu of policy options, Wolfe calls for a "third perspective on moral agency different from those of the market and the state," one that "allows us to view moral obligation as a socially constructed practice negotiated between learning agents capable of growth on the one hand and change on the other."

 

This formulation is similar to one offered by David Hollenbach, S.J., when he endorses a "pluralist-analogical understanding of the common good and human rights." Hollenbach with Wolfe, recognizes that social and institutional change is not only inevitable but needed "if all persons are to become active participants in the common good, politically, economically and culturally."

 

At this point, Catholic social thought, here represented by Hollenbach, makes contact with American experiences and theories of community, association, and local autonomy. Latter-day Tocquevillians and Catholic social thinkers share communitarian hopes that the social practices in which individuals engage in their everyday lives in modern American democracy are richer and reflect greater sociality than atomistic visions of the acquisitive, unencumbered self allow. Perhaps, they muse, most of us usually do not govern our lives by principles of exchange, despite the totalizing logic of rational-choice contractarians and hard-core individualists. The call is  not for some utopian vision of participatory democracy but for a more effective, more authentic form of representative democracy embodied in genuinely viable, overlapping social institutions.

As well, the notion of rights central to the American tradition becomes the counterpart of responsibilities. Rights are not "spoken of exclusively as individual claims.... Rights are intelligible only in terms of the obligations of individuals to other persons." This understanding of persons steers clear of the strong antinomies of individualism versus collectivism. Catholic social thought begins from a fundamentally different ontology from that assumed and required by individualism on the one hand and statism on the other -- assumptions that provide for individuality and rights as the goods of persons in community, together with the claims of social obligation. This version of individuality makes possible human unity as a cherished achievement and acts as a brake against coerced uniformity.

Or take these words from the U.S. Bishop's Pastoral Message on the economy: "The dignity of the human person, realized in community with others, is the criterion against which all aspects of economic life must be measured." All economic decisions must be judged "in light of what they do for the poor, what they do to the poor and what they enable the poor to do for themselves." The Bishops draw upon the principle of subsidiarity, central to Catholic social teaching, when they speak of the "need for vital contributions from different human associations," considering it a disturbance of the "right order" of things to assign to a greater and higher association what a "lesser" association might do. In this way, institutional pluralism is guaranteed and "space for freedom, initiative and creativity on the part of many social agents" is made possible. Hollenbach calls this "justice-as-participation," noting that the Bishops' contribution to the current, deadlocked "liberal/communitarian  debate" lies in the way justice is conceptualized "in terms of this link between personhood and the basic prerequisites of participation.

 

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, the richest theorizing of democratic civil society in the past decade or more has come from citizens of countries who were subjected for forty years or more to authoritarian, even totalitarian statist regimes.

Consider Solidarity theorist and activist Adam Michnik's characterization of democracy. In an interview, he insists that democracy "entails a vision of tolerance, and understanding of the importance of cultural traditions, and the realization that cherished human values can conflict with each other.... The essence of democracy as I understand it is freedom -- the freedom which belongs to citizens endowed with a conscience. So understood, freedom implies pluralism, which is essential because conflict is a constant factor within a democratic social order." Michnik insists that the genuine democrat always struggles with and against his or her own tradition, eschewing thereby the hopelessly heroic and individualist notion of going it alone. Michnik here positions himself against our contemporary American tendency to see any defense of tradition as necessarily "conservative"; indeed, he criticizes our rigid distinctions between right and left. He proclaims: "A world devoid of tradition would be nonsensical and anarchic. The human world should be constructed from a permanent conflict between conservatism and contestation; if either is absent from a society, pluralism is destroyed."

 

One final, vital voice, that of Vaclav Havel's. For years an oftimprisoned champion of civic freedom and human rights, as well as Czechoslovakia's premier playwright, Havel became the President of the Czech Republic. In an essay on "Politics and Conscience," he writes: "We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must see these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their 'private' exile and as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community." Havel addresses himself to the successful liberal democracies of the West. Perhaps, he muses, we can  remind you of our common legacy, the importance of individual responsibility for the common good. He adds: "I favor 'anti-political' politics, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative."  Nor in truth, do I.

At the conclusion of Public Man, Private Woman, I articulated a vision of an "ethical polity." I was not thinking specifically of diversity and unity, individuality and solidarity, as I wrote, but that seems to have been what I was all along aiming for. I wrote: "Rather than an ideal of citizenship and civic virtue that features a citizenry grimly going about their collective duty, or an elite of citizens in their public space cut off from a world that includes most of us, within the ethical polity the active citizen would be one who had affirmed as part of what it meant to be human a devotion to public, moral responsibilities and ends." For the body is one but has many members.