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Creating a Decent Society
| Article
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17180 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
1,380 Words |
| Author
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Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political
Science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Author of several books, she is the editor of The family in
Political thought and coeditor of Women, War and Feminism. She
is the author of over a hundred essays in scholarly journals
and journals of civic opinion. She has been a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a scholar-in-
residence at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center,
Bellagio, Italy and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow at work
on an intellectual biography of the Addams. |
Christopher Lasch has penned an eloquent lament on our current discontents. Focusing on the invasion of families by markets, Lasch sketches the ways in which that intrusion has undermined the moral imperative of family life. In a manner reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville's classical, Democracy in America, Lasch portrays a cycle of deepening and self-defeating dependencies. In the process, the great American ethos of self-reliance and cooperation is eviscerated. If Lasch is even partly correct, we are in deep water indeed. I believe we are in the midst of a crisis - it is at bottom a crisis of political culture and identity.
Consider briefly Tocqueville's argument. Tocqueville praised the practices of American democracy but feared what might be America's fate. In his view, even as the reality of American democracy freed individuals from the constraints of older, undemocratic structures and obligations, atomism and privatization were also unleashed. Tocqueville's fear was not that this invited anarchy; rather, he believed that the individualism of an acquisitive society would engender new forms of social and political domination. Individual disentanglement from a web of overlapping social bodies invites the tyranny of mass opinion and the growth of centralized political authority. Private acquisitiveness spawns political apathy. All social webs that once held persons intact having disintegrated - including and most especially the family - the individual finds himself or herself isolated, powerless, exposed, and unprotected. Into this power vacuum moves the centralized state.
Although Lasch focuses on the market rather than the state, we surely understand enough at this late date to recognize that we can rely on neither markets nor states to make us decent or to create a decent society. Tocqueville, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, was far more hopeful than Lasch that we might avoid his version of a worst-case scenario. That is, he believed that American democracy could stem the tide, could forestall the move into absolute freedom, on the one hand, and greater control, on the other. The cure was to be found in political liberty, remnants of a civic republican tradition that stressed civic participation, and a moral ethos sustained by churches or other solidaristic groups that sustained social responsibility.
Tocqueville noted the plethora of voluntary political and beneficent associations in which Americans participated. We might call these institutions - families, churches, service organizations, political clubs, neighborhood associations - mediating institutions. They locate us in a world of others. They invite
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