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Rx for the 'Me' Society
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18755 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1991 |
2,599 Words |
| Author
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Robert L. Spaeth
Robert L. Spaeth is professor of liberal studies and
codirector of the Christian Humanism project at St. John's
University, Collegeville, Minnesota. He is coauthor (with R.W.
Franklin) of Virgil Michel: American Catholic (Liturgical
Press, 1988) and the author of Exhortations on Liberal
Education: A Dean Speaks His Mind (St. John's University,
1988); The Church and a Catholic's Conscience (Harper & Row,
1985) and No Easy Answers: Christians Debate Nuclear Arms
(Harper and Row, 1983). |
THE GOOD SOCIETY
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen,
William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991
333 pp., $25.00
One hundred fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans. This young and perceptive French visitor said, in effect: Citizens of the United States, recognize the dangers of your individualistic spirit and strengthen those forces in your society that can counteract it. Tocqueville admired America in many ways, but when it came to our individualism, he was politely hut firmly telling us to save ourselves from ourselves.
Tocqueville both discerned and named individualism. He defined the concept in the second volume of his celebrated Democracy in America (1840): "Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends." And the immediate result of this American disposition? "With this little society formed to his taste, [each citizen] gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."
But Tocqueville then sounded an ominous alert against further consequences of indulgence in individualistic habits: "Individualism at first only dams the springs of public virtues, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others too and finally merges in egoism." Can anything in the American soul be more fearsome than a disposition that, if allowed free rein, will ultimately destroy all the virtues?
In our time, Tocqueville on individualism is more quoted than understood. Individualism as Tocqueville understood it is often confused with individuality, or individual initiative, or individual rights. Thus misperceived, the spirit of "individualism" can readily be taken as representative of the best, not the worst, in America. Worse yet, such misunderstanding can blind us to the fact that what Tocqueville cautioned against has grown more and more powerful in the century and a half since he wrote--so powerful that it can destroy not only our virtues but our hard-won accomplishments.
Yet at the same time some of our better social philosophers and sociologists have taken Tocqueville seriously and read the signs of the times accurately. Today there are none better in this
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