"Individualism supplied the nation with a rationalization of its characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and aspirations, It endowed the past, the present and the future with the perspective of unity and progress. It explained the peculiar social and polticial organization of the nation--unity in spite of heterogeniety~~and it pointed toward aan ideal social organization in harmony with American experience. Above all, individualism expressed sathe universalism and idealism most characteristic of the national consciousness. This concept evolved in contradistinction to socialism, the universal and messianic character of which it shared."

Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American ldeoIogy (1964)

"Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but [their] peculiar and exclusive possession."

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1888)

Course Description: Individualism is perhaps the pnmary concept that, transcending

such categories as race, gender, class, age and region, unites Americans across time

and space to give coherence to the national experience. From the earliest beginnings

of the republic to the post-modernist present, the rights of the individual citizen and

his or her place in the scheme of things has been of primary importance to American

philosophers, artists, political theorists, theologians and others concerned with

articulating national values and principles. Communitarian ideas rise from time to

time to challenge individualism, but none have yet been successful in seriously

weakening its hold on American culture. Incorporated into American "common-sense

thinking," the philosophy of individualism becomes in the popular mind the very

essence of what being an American means.

http://personal.bgsu.edu/~wgrant/homepage/individualism.htm

Individualism and Commitment in American Life

Robert N. Bellah

 

Books such as Habits of the Heart are not easy to summarize if at all. This talk, though nothing new, provides a brief summary of some of the motifs of Habits. As a cultural analysis of American society, Habits pays close attention to the way people talk. While the authors recognize that there are serious structural problems-economic, social, political, and institutional-in American society, they argue that there is also a problem of language. This is a complex argument that takes a book to spell out. But in short, Bellah and his co-authors argue, with the rise of a radical form of individualism we find it increasingly difficult to express the moral reasons for our social commitments to a whole range of social relations-from intimate to large-scale institutions as well as, by implication, the natural environment. What they mean concretely is fleshed out in the book and rehearsed here in a compact way. That Bellah would be agitating for individualism if he were in a Japan, a society he has studied a great deal, is an illuminating qualification to his and his co-authors' critique of American individualism. For that reason, the question and answer period that followed this talk is included, even though some of the questions are inaudible. Rae Ann McLennan tape-recorded the lecture. Sam Porter produced and edited the transcript, and wrote this introduction.

 

As those of you who have taken a look at Habits of the Heart know, the title for my lecture here is the subtitle of the book and I do want to rehearse some of the themes pointing up, perhaps in a condensed way, what we were trying to do in that book and the issues we were trying to raise.

Another title for this lecture that might be a little more startling is, "Is America Possible?" Is America in any continuity with its original self-understanding as a society governed with the consent of its members, as a democratic republic, still possible in the face of the realities of the late twentieth century? This is a question that was asked 150 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. In that much revered and little read work, Democracy in America, he raised the question, Will Americans be able to sustain their free institutions? Or, will they gradually allow their free institutions to drift into what he called sometimes, "administrative despotism," sometimes even more ironically, "democratic despotism." He even pointed out that it would be possible for us to maintain virtually all the forms and symbols of a free republic while in fact becoming a despotism including, for example, free elections. Tocqueville, looking ahead to that moment when this specter of democratic despotism might in fact have taken place, says, "They will rise from their torpor every four years to elect their masters and then sink back into slavery." Think about it. It isn't entirely obvious that it isn't coming true. And the theme that Tocqueville raised, which gave him great pause as to our capacity to sustain our freedom, was the theme of individualism, which we pursued in talking to our fellow citizens.

By "we" I mean Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton who share the authorship of Habits of the Heart and share what I'm saying this afternoon. We decided in the fall of '78 or the spring of '79 to embark on an effort to discover whether what Tocqueville was talking about was coming true. Are Americans still citizens? is another way of asking the question of, Is America in its essential democratic form still possible? Or has the individualism that worried Tocqueville become so dominant that we really don't have the capacity to sustain our freedom?. So I'd like to start by raising the question of what Tocqueville meant by individualism.

First of all, to remind you, as Tocqueville himself puts it, individualism is a word recently coined. And in fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance of the word "individualism" in English is in the English translation of Democracy in America. And it doesn't appear in volume one. It's only in volume two, that is, in 1835. That is surprising to us because we imagine individualism so endemically American that probably John Winthrop and the Pilgrims were talking about it as they got off the boat and certainly the drafters of the Constitution were talking individualism, individualism, individualism. No! Not one of them ever used that word because it did not exist. And while I don't want to put too much stock in this kind of semantic history, it isn't an accident that the word becomes common and central in the middle of the 19th century and not earlier.

Tocqueville says our fathers only knew about egoism. Now we have this new thing: individualism. "Individualism," and this is one of the places where he comes as close as he ever does to defining it,

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; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look out after itself.

As this tendency grows, he wrote,

there are more and more people who though neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs. Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.

And, finally, such people come to "forget their ancestors" but also forget they will have descendants and even lose touch with their contemporaries. And he closes this remarkable section with the sentence: "Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."

Such a notion of an isolated existence in which one is completely self-sufficient is already a bit on the nutty side even in the 1830s and '40s. In the enormously interdependent world that we live in, where anything that happens anywhere in the world affects almost all of us, it is perhaps even more amazing that many of those sentences Tocqueville wrote describe so accurately the mentality of the American middle class today. It was the isolation of this form of individualism that Tocqueville saw as undermining our free institutions because, if the citizens withdraw into their "little circle of family and friends," if they turn their backs on the public world, if they do not participate in the structures, voluntary and public structures, then, indeed-by sheer abdication-we will be ruled by administrative despots and not by ourselves. Tocqueville worried that our obsessive concern for material betterment and economic advancement was what drove us in this direction. He saw us as, of all peoples in the world, the ones most concerned with material comfort and economic advancement.

But he also saw that there were a number features of our society that operated to offset and mitigate the tendencies we've so far been describing and pull us back, so to speak, from our isolation into a concern for others and for the public good. Indeed, he was one of the first to make several observations that still have a lot of truth to them. For one thing, Tocqueville observed that Americans are great joiners, that voluntary associations are a vigorous form of social life in America, that when Americans are disturbed about something they get together to do something about it. And the statistics, comparatively speaking with other advanced industrial nations, suggest that we are still a nation unusually prone to become involved-our citizens-in voluntary associations of several sorts. Andrew Greeley, in a

somewhat bizarre review, argued that the thesis of Habits of the Heart was that for 150 years we have been losing our capacity to act in public. I don't think he read the book very carefully. We show, in the whole second half of the book, the way in which people are today actively involved. But they are involved in the face of many pressures and temptations to privatistic isolation. And it is the dialectic that we are interested in rather than any simple straight-line curve. Among the forms of civic involvement that Tocqueville pointed to is our tendency to get involved in local government. In Berkeley we have 13 neighborhood associations, which will yell and scream anytime City Hall does anything affecting their area. Obviously every place is not like Berkeley. But there is still a great deal of involvement and we show in the book how people are concerned about what is occurring in their communities and how they do various things to make a difference in that regard.

A second and perhaps in Tocqueville's mind even the first institutional factor-which helps to mitigate the isolation of our tendency towards privatistic withdrawal-is religion. And it is somewhat startling to hear Tocqueville saying, "Religion is the first of their political institutions." He was thoroughly aware of the First Amendment. He was a strong believer in disestablishment. He wanted the church disestablished in France. So that's not what he meant. He meant that religion in America operates as a school for citizenship both in practice and through its teachings. Let me illustrate that for just a minute. He pointed out that American religion is peculiarly democratic and republican by which he meant it involved active participation of the local congregation. And he pointed out that even the American Catholic Church which, after all, had a hierarchical-rather than say the Baptist Church, a very decentralized democratic-polity, even the American Catholic Church involved a much more vigorous participation of the laity in the life of the local parish than would have been common in Europe. So it was characteristic of American religious life that members of congregations and parishes come together, join committees, learn how to raise money-go through all of those procedures that teaches them how to participate in public life.

More important even than that, although he thought that was very important, is that the content of the teachings of Christianity constantly reminded people that they were not self-sufficient, that they had an obligation to their neighbors, which pulled them out of their self-concern and into concern for the whole world. Here again, though we can assess the quality of what it means-it isn't so clear, entirely, what it means-we still find that Americans are, compared to virtually any other advanced industrial nation, a very religious people with religious membership around a high 60 percent. Maybe just below 70 percent. And 40 percent of Americans telling us in polls that they went to church last Sunday. Very remarkably high according to most other societies.

The third area that Tocqueville saw as moderating our tendency towards privatistic isolation was the particular form of the American family, which he noted was the strongest family in the entire world. Whether we can say that the indices on that one are still as high is another question. Tocqueville says that if there is one key to the success of American democratic society it is the nature of the American woman whom he saw as upholding an ethic other than that of sheer privatized selfishness, teaching that ethic to her children and restraining her husband from his proclivities simply to pursue his own private interest. While describing this tension, he doesn't say how it's going to come out-and we don't say in Habits of the Heart how it's going to come out. But the tension is there and if anything it's stronger today than it's ever been before.

While pointing out the deep inner tensions in our society-some pulling us towards citizenship and active participation in a free society and some pulling us away from that-he also analyzed our character, our kind of national psychology if you want to put it that way. He comments-remember already in the 1830s he sees these things-on our intense

competitiveness, on our restlessness in the midst of prosperity. "In America," this is a direct quote,

I have seen the freest and best educated of men in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures because they never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.

And they didn't even have television to show them all those things in the 1830s. This restlessness and sadness in pursuit of the good life makes it difficult, he says, for Americans to form strong attachments between each other. The efforts and enjoyments of Americans are livelier than in traditional societies, but the disappointments of their hopes and desires are keener and their "minds are more anxious and on edge," he says. Of such restless, competitive and anxious people Tocqueville writes, "they clutch everything and hold nothing fast." No flatterer. He holds a mirror up to us-showing us admirable traits and problematic traits.

I think it's interesting to take a look at an American making some of his first important public statements precisely in the 1830s, whom Tocqueville never mentions but who illustrates vividly what Tocqueville is writing about. And that is Ralph Waldo Emerson who is also beginning to write about American individualism, the difference being that whereas Tocqueville is worried Emerson is simply celebratory. His very positive feeling about individualism is expressed already in the famous Phi Betta Kappa address of 1837, "The American Scholar," where Emerson too talks about something he sees as new, just coming into the world. "Another sign of our times . is the new importance," writes Emerson,

given to the single person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual-to surround him with barriers of natural respect so that each man shall feel the world is his and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state-tends to true greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help comes from our own bosom alone.

Emerson's devotion to what he calls the capital virtue of self-trust makes him leery of the dependence of the self on others but also of others on the self. Again, he writes, "A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men who all catch at him and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger they will drown him."

The conclusion of these views for social ethics is clear enough. In the famous essay "Self-Reliance," perhaps the single most famous of all of Emerson's essays, he wrote,

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

I could hardly find a starker rejection of the ethic of the New Testament. Emerson of course resigned from the pulpit and delivered his own revelation to the Americans.

What is surprising about this quick look at the teachings of Tocqueville and Emerson about individualism is, again, as I have already indicated, how accurately they describe our condition today. The contemporaneity of these issues and of the figure of Emerson is well brought out in a literary controversy last year about Emerson's meaning that took place between John Updike and Harold Bloom. Updike, in a long essay in The New Yorker

["Emersonianism," June 4, 1984, pp. 112-132] in which he desperately tries to like Emerson-he tells of carrying the essays on the Boston subway and reading industriously and so on-finally says he's just too coldly self-absorbed to be very helpful to us today.

And then Harold Bloom-responding in The New York Review of Books, clearly answering Updike in an essay significantly entitled, "Mr. America" [November 22, 1984, pp. 19-24]-glories in just those aspects of Emerson's teachings that Updike deplores. Brushing aside Updike's objections as "church wardenly mewings," dismissing Yale University President Giamatti's remark that "Emerson is as sweet as barbed wire," Bloom goes on to praise Emerson for proclaiming the only God in which Americans can any longer believe, the god of the self.

Many of the people that we talked to haven't necessarily read Emerson or if they did they don't remember that they did and yet the term "self-reliance" comes easily to their tongue. The notion that help comes only from one's bosom is a commonplace of contemporary middle class culture. As one of the therapists we interviewed put it, "In the end, you're really alone and you really have to answer to yourself.." And indeed we find, as we probe the characteristics of American middle class culture, a form of life organized around a restless and relentless pursuit of individual autonomy. A quest for the self, for leaving the past and the social structures that have previously enveloped us, for stripping off the obligations and restraints imposed by others, until at last we find the true self which is unique and individual, entirely different from anyone else.

I might just tell you, as an aside, the language in which Americans express their uniqueness is among the most stereotyped language of any we got in the interviews: "We're all different." But it seems we're all different in exactly the same way. Here is a great irony, of course, that the common sense meaning of individualism, "I'm not doing what anybody else wants me to do"-but we live in a culture that relentlessly tells us not to do what anybody else wants us to do.

One of the strongest imperatives of our culture is that we must leave home. Unlike many peasant societies-for instance, in Japanese society, which I've spent a good bit of my life studying, at least in its traditional form-there is no notion that the ideal would be to stay and live with their parents, inherit the farm, carry on the worship of the ancestors. For us, leaving home is the normal expectation and childhood is in many ways one long preparation for it. However painful the process of leaving home, for parents or for children, the really frightening thing would be the prospect of the child never leaving home. The key to this process of leaving home is finding the kind of employment, which will make one self-supporting, and starting a family of one's own. Although the implication that that is necessarily the norm has weakened considerably over the last thirty years.

A very important part of this whole process of becoming independent is going away to college, and this often implies leaving of course one's local community, one's neighborhood, as well as one's parents. Here part of what's going on is the necessity to take care of one's self without relying on the older generation to do all of those things. But an equally important aspect is taking responsibility for one's own views. And very often this means not only leaving home but leaving church as well. One may not literally have to leave the church in which one grew up but certainly one has to come to one's own conclusions about that tradition. One cannot defend one's religious beliefs by saying they are those of the family in which one grew up. Interestingly enough, even today in Japan when you ask, "What is your religion?", you get a blank stare. When you ask, "What is your family's religion?", then they understand what you mean because the context of religion is collective and not individual. For us, it is just the polar opposite.

Of course, traditionally, Protestant piety expected, somewhere in late adolescence usually, a conversion experience. As we hear so much today about being born again-which is of course a term deeply embedded in the New Testament-conversion was often very carefully culturally stereotyped, however deeply felt by the people going through it. But today I think the pressure for autonomy in this sphere even is greater than those older emphases. We were certainly not surprised, on the basis of our interviews, that a recent Gallop poll found that 80 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that "An individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue." Apparently we look inside in the depths of ourselves and come to our own autonomous understanding of these things and then we go to the church or synagogue of our choice. At least that's the cultural formulation, even though, in fact, of course most of us do get our religious beliefs from churches and synagogues.

I don't want to imply that it's uniquely American that people growing up have to come to terms with their independence and their separation to some extent from parents and from teachers. That's normal in any culture. It's that our culture pushes, emphasizes, and intensifies it beyond, I think, virtually any culture I know about.

We could talk further about the importance of finding an occupation that both gives you a sense of self-respect and provides the resources to live an autonomous life. We talk in Habits of the Heart, about these issues-how for many Americans, at various levels in the occupational hierarchy, the job somehow doesn't prove adequate in fulfilling one's autonomous self and often becomes a means-an instrument-to the acquisition of those resources which will allow one to live in a private lifestyle that will somehow fulfill this expectation that we will find this unique person-who we really are-and attain self-realization, self-fulfillment, happiness. The terms are several but they all point in the same direction.

But when we press the question, "What are the criteria that tell us what happiness is or that define the wants that when they are satisfied will lead to self-realization?", then the confident tones that we have been hearing begin to falter. And instead of any clear notion of any content there is simply the reassertion of "Whatever for you that fulfillment or happiness may be." It is not surprising that Americans turn to psychology as the place that is focused on that inner self. As Robert Coles says, psychology in this instance means a concentration, persistent if not feverish, upon one's thoughts, feelings, wishes, worries, bordering on if not embracing solipsism-the self as the only or main form of reality. To the point where, in the book, we speak of ontological individualism. That is, the self is the only real thing in the world. I am real. All of you are more or less fictitious. I know what I feel but I don't know for sure what you feel.

Frequently it is at just this moment in the conversation that Americans will start talking about values. But again, when we press, values turn out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible thing that the individual chooses when he or she has thrown off the last vestige of external influence and reached pure contentless freedom. The improvisational self chooses values to express itself and they are defended on no grounds other than arbitrary choice. At this point it is clear that the language of values is not a language of value, that is, not a language about moral choice. When people talk about values they are not beginning a moral conversation. They are ending one! When you say, "Those are my values. You have your values", that's the end. There is nothing more to talk about. There are no criteria other than sheer inner validation that might give us the capacity for reasoning together about moral things. This is what Alasdair Maclntyre in After Virtue calls "emotivism."

I want to make it clear that we got to know the people we talked to well enough to know that they by no means have the empty selves that their language would imply. Most of them are

serious, engaged people deeply involved in the world. So there is some kind of hiatus going on here. In so far as they are limited to a language of radical individual autonomy, as many of them are, they cannot think of themselves or others except as arbitrary centers of volition. They cannot express the fullness of being that is actually there.

As my colleague at Berkeley, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, pointed out, the classical figures in modern thought have undertaken what is known as, what Paul Ricoeur and others refer to as, "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud lead us to doubt whether anyone's noble or moral language is really to be taken at face value because it's really just a mask for economic interests, will to power, or libidinous impulse of some sort. And what Bert Dreyfus points out is that curiously, in Habits of the Heart, we are reversing the hermeneutics of suspicion by suggesting not that the language is more noble than the action but the other way around. People are not as bad as they talk. This too was something Tocqueville picked up in a passage in which he says even when Americans are behaving in an extremely altruistic way, if you probe their motives, they will tell you it's out of self-interest-as if they were embarrassed that there might be anything else that motivated them. So this is not entirely new.

We suggest that the languages that help us think of ourselves in connection with others-the languages that come from the biblical and civic republican traditions-have weakened and are less available than they once were. And the language of radical individual autonomy in our common life has become stronger, even though in many ways we continue to act out that civic republican and biblical concern for others. Certainly nobody that we talked to imagines that life lived entirely alone would be satisfactory. The people we talked to, as we know from surveys that are much more representative than our sample, want connectedness. We know that something in the vicinity of 94 percent of all Americans have-as an ideal-the idea of spending your life with one other person. When you ask them, "Do you expect that will really happen to you?", the figure drops to something like 45 percent. So there's a dramatic difference between ideal and reality. But the notion that connectedness is a good is certainly still alive.

There is a problem with people who conceive of themselves as self-sufficient individuals in figuring out how they can establish and sustain relationships to others. Radical American individualism seems to contain two conceptions of human relatedness that, again, look perhaps at first incompatible but seem to be held simultaneously by many of the people to whom we talked. And here, again, is the continuity. We find both of these eloquently expressed in Emerson.

Thinking about individuals as sovereign states, as that passage from Emerson pointed out, one might imagine that the only relations possible between them would be by treaty, that is, by contract. And of course contract is an important form of social relationship. But of late it becomes not simply something that occurs in the business world but begins to invade the private world. And some of the psychological advice sounds like it came out of a course in business management so that the concern is for making sure that you are going to get a fair return on your investment-emotionally as well as in terms of money.

The other idea that we also found widespread, and which seems at first glance to be so radically different, is that after all, down at the bottom, at the deepest level of these autonomous selves, there is something that is fundamentally the same. Emerson would've called it nature. Our language is more various. The idea that, at certain moments at least, certain expressively intense situations such as romantic love or even in larger contexts such as a rock concert or when the Chicago Bears win the Super Bowl, a spontaneous fusion occurs maybe between two people, maybe even sweeping through a whole city, in which-for

a moment-it is our identity, our commonness, our fusion that's important and not the calculations of our interest in the contractarian model.

Of course these two models don't apply to the same spheres, precisely because the expressive intimacy, the emotional fusion is necessarily brief and very special.

More and more of our relationships are translated into contractual terms, even in marriage and friendship. As one of the young therapists we interviewed put it,

Commitments take work and we're tired of working. When we come home from work the last thing I want to do, you know, is for people to sit down and say, 'Well, let's sit and work on our relationship. Let's talk about it.' Yes, but I worked eight and-a-half hours today, you know. Let's just sit down and watch the boob tube.

His protest ends in a confession: "It's like you periodically ask yourself, 'Is this worth my effort? Is this worth that?'" Faced with ongoing demands to work on their relationships as well as their jobs, separate and equal selves are led to question the contractual terms of their commitments to each other. Are they getting what they want? Are they getting as much as they are giving? Are they getting as much as they could get somewhere else? This is a classic mode of the pattern of American individualism, "If you don't like it here go somewhere else", to another town, to another job, to another wife, whatever it may be.

Again, many people who talk like this don't act like it. A successful California lawyer who has sustained a long marriage and was accustomed to explain all his action in cost-benefit terms was finally pressed in our interview to see that no interest maximizing calculus could really account for what was in those terms an irrational commitment. In other words, no marriage that lasts thirty years is that exciting all the time. And so at last he affirmed that his happiness with his wife comes from "proceeding through all of these stages together. It makes life meaningful and gives me the opportunity to share with somebody, have an anchor, if you will, and understand where I am. That, for me, is a real relationship." Here he is groping inadequately but groping, I think clearly, for words that would express the sense that his marriage is a genuine community of memory and hope-a context that actually helps him define who he is, part of his identity, and not merely a forum in which an empty self maximizes its satisfactions.

In another case, a woman who had recently renewed her commitment to Judaism at first seemed to explain that in highly individualistic terms. She assured us that it wasn't because she believed in God because she doesn't. But joining a synagogue and even keeping kosher, which she was not raised to do, provides "structure" in a chaotic world for her children and herself and her husband. In her highly educated mentality it was as though communal ties and religious commitments could be recommended only for the benefits they yield, for the social, emotional and cultural functions that they performed. Perhaps she had had a course in the sociology of religion and succeeded all too well. But there was a moment in her conversation when she transcended these presuppositions. She told us,

the woman who took care of my daughter when she was little was a Greek Jew. She was very young, nine, ten, eleven, when the war broke out and was lying at the crematorium door when the American troops came through. So that she has a number tattooed on her arm. And it was always like being hit on the stomach with a brick when she would take my baby and sit and circle her with her arm, and there was the number.

In that moment she wasn't talking about how much she was getting out of Judaism. She knew herself as a member of a people that includes the living and the dead, parents and

children, inheritors of a culture and a history that tells her who she is and that she must nurture through memory and through hope.

I can only allude to the fact that in spite of the powerful culture of radical, privatized autonomy that I have been describing so far, there are many, many Americans actively engaged in concern for others in a variety of civic, political and religious organizations. The whole second half of Habits of the Heart describes a series of people who I think can be called heroes and heroines of everyday life. People who are genuinely dedicated to the common good not out of some sort of martyrdom but out of joy in the dedication. But they are also not infrequently afflicted with a sense of question as to what it all means and how it can all work out in the end.

There are deep structural problems in our society: economic, political, social, institutional. What we are suggesting is there is also a problem of language-of having lost touch with, or finding it increasingly difficult to express, those impulses, those commitments that really do tie us to one another, that identify us through those ties and commitments, not against them.

 

Questions & Answers:

Question: Inaudible

Bellah: The first part of the question I think I can answer. And that is we argue in the book that the problem with American culture of late is not selfishness. It is not what it was called during the seventies, "me-ism," in the sense of some kind of psychological preoccupation with sheer self-interest. What we are really talking about is a cultural habit, which defines reality in terms of individual selves. There are lots of people who behave in ways that are far from selfish and don't fit that me-ism stereotype. Nonetheless, in the language, and to some extent even in the form of life, we find a separating, isolating individualism. Now I don't think that's a particularly optimistic analysis either.

What we in effect are arguing is that in a genuinely free society there needs to be a capacity to come together with some kind of common criteria for answering the question: What is the common good? And it's precisely this cultural language of radical individualism that makes it impossible to talk about the common good. The common good is seen only as the sum of the individual goods or the individual rights of however many millions there are of individual citizens. And that, we think, is very ominous. We are not thrilled with that.

We are more optimistic about kinds of political involvement that bring people into a continuing organization where they can work out together what they are trying to do-argue, even fight with each other but sustain some kind of long-term commitment rather than writing the check for the single issue that happens to fit my mood at this moment. Or answering a telephone poll in one's private living room and then having those opinions summed as an argument about what Americans believe when none of those Americans have ever discussed those things with anybody and come to a reasoned decision. So that isolating kind of intervention in politics is certainly not something about which we feel optimistic.

Q: I was wondering how you feel all this relates to contemporary politics and the Reagan administration. It seems that when you say that individualism isn't selfishness, I was wondering how you'd look at things like the decline in concern with poverty in America and the social issues.

B: Yes. I'm not saying Americans aren't selfish. I think selfishness is one of those things that is probably there most of the time. It's not something that gets worse or better terribly much. We do things better and worse but not because we are more or less selfish but because we have the cultural and social forms to do things better. It isn't just our private motives.

There is much about the present situation that I think is troubling. For example, the type of politics which is organized around thirty-second television political ads which cannot do anything except either entice you to some desire or frighten you to some fear-to respond not through any rational political discourse but in the pure privacy of one's momentary feelings into this candidate is good or this candidate is strong or whatever the image trying to be projected is. I think there's much of that in our political life today, which is certainly alarming. The problem with the political agenda, which dominates the present administration, I think is that it seems to be a coherent argument. It also seems at the moment to make sense emotionally. And I think it can only be countered by better arguments and by persuasion to other positions that I think in the long run will prove to be more coherent in terms of the world in which we live. The form of our politics doesn't make that kind of conversation very easy but it doesn't make it impossible.

Q: Inaudible

B: I was trying to illustrate that all through my talk. It is precisely the notion that there isn't any moral language except how I feel, what I prefer, what I feel comfortable with. There is an inability in most of educated America to have any moral conversation about what is good because it is considered inappropriate for you to make a statement that anything in particular is good. You have to preface it with: I think, I feel. You have to subjectivize it. That undermining of any possibility of coming to a common moral understanding of the world I think greatly weakens our capacity to be citizens.

Q: What would be the major difference?

B: Interestingly enough, not only is the first translation of Habits lined up for Japan but there is a group of Japanese social scientists who are embarking on a Japanese Habits of the Heart project. So we will know in a couple of years what the comparable findings are, so to speak. Not that it's an easy study to replicate in another culture. There is one other group, and that is in French speaking Quebec, that is trying to do a Habits of the Heart study following our book as a model.

What I think one would find in Japan-indeed, if I were Japanese and I were writing this book I would be singing the praises of individualism because I think in Japan the problem is not too much individualism but not enough. The whole modern history of Japan has been involved with intellectuals who try to understand what on earth this thing that westerners keep talking about-the individual-really is because it doesn't even make any sense in Japan, although there's a strong yearning and kind of wish for something like that. So, in some respects, Japan and the United States are at the opposite ends of the polarity on most of these issues. What I would consider a reasonably healthy society ought to be somewhere near the middle. This is why I particularly don't care for the notion that Americans, because it works economically, should adopt the Japanese model.

http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_4.htm

American Individualism – Really?

April 19, 2010 by csf

(A revision of this post appeared in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section, June 6, 2010.)

In a March, 2010, essay, National Review writers Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru asked: “What do we, as American conservatives, want to conserve?” They continued, “The answer is simple: the pillars of American exceptionalism. Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.” The problem with President Obama, they wrote, is that he is trying to undermine that American exceptionalism.

There is much right and much wrong in this important essay. Here, I focus on the crucial element, the claim which they take as pretty self-evident that America is “more individualistic . . . than any other nation on earth,” that our exceptionalism is centered in our commitment to liberty.

There is considerable evidence that Americans are not more individualistic – in fact, are less individualistic – than other peoples. I mean “individualism” in the sense that Lowry and Ponnuru seem to mean it, that Americans give priority to personal liberty.

The Evidence

Valuing liberty means valuing the individual’s interest, purpose, and conscience over the demands of groups, authorities, and custom – over feudal lords, churches, states, bosses, even household patriarchs. The colonists, presumably, sought to get out from under the thumbs of all those traditional oppressors.

Emerson gave voice to these values in “Self-Reliance” (1841): “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” “I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. . . . I will do strongly . . . whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” Emerson rejected any suggestion that the individual submit him- or herself to the control or even the influence of any group or its traditions.

Survey organizations have asked people around the world questions that get at whether they hold values such as individualism. One of the longest-running is the International Social Survey Programme. (Another major one, with comparable results, is the World Values Survey.) Here is a sample of relevant findings from the ISSP  – there are more along the same lines – that assess how much respondents value individual liberty. I compare Americans to people in those western European social democracies that Lowry and Ponnuru claim do not value liberty as highly as Americans do, the social democracies they say Obama wants to imitate. (I use all such countries that were polled for each of the questions. This post builds on an earlier paper [pdf], as well as on Made in America.)

personal conscience

The ISSP asked in 2006, “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” The percentages who would occasionally place conscience above law are displayed here, by nation:

Americans were the least likely to endorse personal conscience.

Here’s another question about the moral primacy of the individual, asked in 1991: “ Right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience,” strongly agree to strongly disagree. The percentage who agreed is displayed here:

Americans were nearly the least likely to endorse personal conscience.

individual versus country

Emerson would have us resist group pressure, including demands of nationalism. Here are the answers to the question, asked in 2003, “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong,” strongly agree to strongly disagree. The percentage who disagreed, who upheld the moral over national allegiance, is shown here:

Again, Americans were least likely to stand up against the group, in this case, the nation.

individual versus family

The ISSP and such surveys allow us to also see how people weigh personal liberty against other groups, such as the family, church, workplace, and neighborhood. Here are a couple of illustrations with regard to family.

A 1994 question asked how much respondents agreed or disagreed with this statement: “Even when there are no children, a married couple should stay together even if they don’t get along” – that is, whether the individuals should sacrifice themselves to custom and the institution of marriage.

Americans and the Brits were least likely to uphold the individual interest.

Along the same lines is the subject of personal sexual liberty — a liberty some of the Founding Fathers, like Franklin, especially enjoyed). In 1998, the ISSP asked respondents to say whether “a married person having sexual relations with someone other than his or her husband or wife” is “always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all.” The percentages who endorsed this kind of personal liberty, saying it was either sometimes or always not wrong are shown here:

The French were most accepting of this liberty, but the Americans were least likely to endorse liberty from the conventions of marriage, down there next to the socialist Swedes.

Explanations

Why don’t Americans’ answers to these questions about personal liberty fit the claim of American exceptionalism?  Americans appear to be the least libertarian folks in the West. Lowry and Ponnuru might answer in several ways:

* They could say, “This just shows how low we’ve sunk. Americans used to hold up the torch of liberty, but we’ve been brought down, down below the level of the social democracies.” Perhaps, but we do not have comparable data for the 18th century, so that remains speculation.

* Or they might answer: “This is not the sort of individualism we mean; we mean something else.” It is true that in answers to some related questions, other patterns emerge. Americans show much more hostility to government and social programs than Europeans do. Also, Americans are much less likely to endorse public assistance for the needy than are Europeans, in effect, saying, “You’re on your own, buddy.” Both positions are consistent with individualism. However, they are not the same thing as individualism.

The first position is basically anti-statism. You could also find great suspicion of central government among, say, clansmen in tribal societies, or could have found it among petty lords in feudal societies, and neither were cultures of liberty. The second position derives from a laissez-faire, pro-business view of economic life, to which Americans do seem especially committed.

But this sort of economic social darwinism seems unconnected to general libertarianism. These two positions are special cases, not evidence of general individualism.

* Or, Lowry and Ponnuru might say: “Americans are too individualistic, but they are other things as well – in particular, religious and moralistic – and these other things outweigh individualism.” This answer is consistent with the survey data, with, for example, Americans’ concerns about family and their shyness about sexuality. To make this argument, however, is to concede that American exceptionalism is not centered on personal liberty. If liberty ranks only second or third, then our exceptionalism is centered on something else, perhaps on faith or community.

* Yet another possible reply would be that American individualism is found not in the views of its people but in its governing institutions. Whatever Americans believe, their system, more than others, establishes freedoms of speech, privacy, enterprise, and the like. Consistent with this view are the findings that it is American elites, not the general population, who strongly uphold civil liberties. If this would be Lowry and Ponnuru’s reply, however, they would then face the paradox of revising their claim of American exceptionalism, in effect saying that America is exceptional in its undemocratic libertarianism.

* I’ll suggest one more answer: What makes Americans culturally exceptional is not their historical commitment to individualism, but their historical commitment to voluntarism. Voluntarism is about being part of a community, but belonging voluntarily. Americans have long held that people can and should join or leave groups – families, congregations, clubs, townships, and so on – of their individual free will. But Americans also insist that, as long as individuals are members of any such group, they owe their loyalty. “Love it or leave it” seems to be the dominant ethos. Thus, getting divorced may be OK if the person really needs to leave a marriage (although see the graph above), but while a person is married pursuing sexual liberty is definitely not OK.

Implications

So, if  Lowry and Ponnuru are wrong, if individual liberty is not the core of American exceptionalism, but something else is – say, perhaps, community and committment – are President Obama’s policies moving us away from or perhaps closer to the core values of the nation, to, say, being our brothers’ keepers?

Update 4/20/10:

A few letter writers have suggested that there is less contradiction between describing Americans as especially individualistic and their answers to these survey questions than I contend.

Robert Bellah and Marion Fourcade both wrote that Alexis de Tocqueville described the Americans he saw as being especially conformist and especially individualistic. They were individualistic in the sense of having been freed from the rule of tradition and feudal authority, but lacking those guides to behavior, they ended up slavishly following public opinion.

Omar Lizardo contrasted an 18th century, Lockean sense of individualism which “is fairly compatible with stodgy . . . positions in the realms of law and order, religion and morals; and that alignment is essentially what contemporary American conservatism is built on.” The other form, 19th century, romantic, expressive individualism is the kind Americans don’t express.

I am not sure whether these reformulations resolve the paradox of survey findings such as those above, but I am pretty sure they don’t resolve the problem such data pose for the Lowry-Ponnuru declaration of American exceptionalism.

http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/american-individualism-%E2%80%93-

really/

Individualism and Commitment:"America's Cultural Conversation"

 

Robert N. Bellah

 

I want to frame my argument by contrasting what Lawrence Haworth, in a very interesting 1963 book called The Good City that the authors of The Good Society had the misfortune not to discover until after our book was published, calls the two essential ingredients of a good city (by which he also means a good society and a good world): opportunity and community. Opportunity and community are parallel terms to individualism and commitment, but they help us to see that things we take as opposites belong together at a deeper level. After I have spelled out my general argument I will consider how it plays out in America's cultural conversation today, a conversation that has changed even since I agreed to give this lecture. Opportunity and community are words we often hear in our public discourse, but they may be less clear than we think. We hear a great deal about opportunity in our political rhetoric: America is the land of opportunity; opportunity is what makes America great. Both our political parties speak a great deal about opportunity. We heard at the last Democratic convention about Bill Clinton's humble beginnings in Hope, Arkansas. At a previous Democratic convention we heard about Mario Cuomo's immigrant father running a small grocery story and barely making ends meet. Even George Bush has his version of the same story, however unhumble his beginnings: Bush went out to Texas and made it all on his own. I would not want to discount too readily such stories. They are the stories of millions of Americans of humble background who have made good from the beginnings of our history and they tell us something important about our society.

Opportunity is one of the highest goods a modern society can offer. It is almost always individual opportunity that is implied: we are the land of individual freedom, and I for one would not wish it otherwise. Opportunity is the possibility of making something of ourselves, of freely choosing our occupation, our mate, if we choose to have one, our place of residence and work, our church or synagogue and many other things. It is part of the richness of our culture and our national life. And if there are individuals or groups denied opportunity in any of these forms it is a sign of the failure of our society.

But, says Haworth, opportunity is only possible in a modern society if it is balanced by community. He gives to community a rather special meaning, one close to that of the authors of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, that I want to spell out further in a minute. But first I think it may be helpful to discuss some of the things neither Haworth nor I mean by community, one of the most frequently used terms in our current socio-political vocabulary.

The authors of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society are often classified today as communitarians in the argument going on in social philosophy between communitarians and liberals. At the beginning of The Good Society we indicated rather strong reservations about some usages of the term community and said that we would most often use the word institution instead. Perhaps that is why The Good Society has turned out to be less popular

than Habits! The word community makes people feel good; the word institution makes people's eyes glaze over.

The word community is a good word and I shall continue to use it, although it needs careful definition, something we attempted in Habits of the Heart, but which many people did not understand. My main problem with the word is that it is frequently used to mean small-scale, face-to-face groups like the family, the congregation and the small town, what the Germans call Gemeinschaft. There is a long tradition of extolling this kind of community in America but, when that is all that community means, it is basically sentimental and in the strict sense of the word nostalgic. I agree with Christopher Lasch in his analysis of nostalgia that it is a psychological placebo that allows the nostalgic person to accept regretfully but uncritically whatever is currently being served up in the name of progress. It inhibits serious social criticism rather than serves it.

I want to use the term community in a way that I hope avoids such nostalgic implications. Those philosophical liberals who tend to reject the term community altogether see society as based on a social contract establishing procedures of fairness but otherwise leaving individuals free to serve their own interests, that is to pursue their autonomous opportunities. They argue that, under modern conditions, if we think of community as based on shared values and shared goals, community can exist only in small groups and is not possible or desirable in large-scale societies or institutions.

But it is possible to see this contrast as a continuum or even as a necessary complementarity rather than an either/or choice. I certainly think that procedural norms of fairness are necessary in large-scale social institutions, but I also believe that any group of any size, if it has any breadth of involvement and lasts any length of time, must have some shared values and goals. In this sense I think societies and institutions can never be simply based on contract that maximizes the opportunities of individuals but must also be to some extent communities with shared values and goals.

But there is a problem about the meaning of shared values and goals. Those who think of community nostalgically, as a form of Gemeinschaft, as well as their liberal critics, tend to think consensus about values and goals must be complete or nearly complete, must be unarguable.

In my understanding of community shared values and goals do imply something more than procedural agreement, they do imply some agreements about substance, but they do not require anything like total or unarguable agreement. My idea of a good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of the shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life. Community as I see it is a form of intelligent, reflective life, in which there is indeed consensus, but where the consensus can be challenged and changes, often gradually, sometimes radically, over time.

Now what makes any kind of group a community and not just a contractual association for the maximization of the interests of the individuals involved, is a shared concern with the question what will make this group a good group. Any institution, such as a university, a city or a society, insofar as it is or seeks to be a community needs to ask what is a good university, city, society, etc. So far as it reaches agreement about the good it is supposed to realize (and that will always be contested and open to further debate), it becomes a community with some common values but also common goals. For no existing community is likely to be in any complete sense a good community and the effort to define a good one also entails the goal of trying to create a good one, or, more modestly and realistically, a better one than the one we have.

Let me illustrate my point by talking for a bit, as Haworth does, about the city as a community, a subject made vivid for me by Bill Moyers' two programs on The Good Society in the summer of 1992 where he and his team decided to choose two cities to illustrate the themes of our book: Atlanta and Los Angeles. Now Atlanta and Los Angeles could not at the moment be called communities. In the nostalgic meaning of the term they could never be communities--they are too big, too diverse, too fragmented. But in the sense that they could be good cities with shared values and goals, and now are not, they could indeed be communities.

I wish I could pull down a screen and show you a few clips from those programs. The Atlanta program begins with the euphoric moment when it was announced that Atlanta had been chosen for the 1996 Olympic Games. We then get booster shots of the gleaming skyscrapers, the busy shopping malls, the wealthy suburbs with their trees and lawns that define the capital of the New South, the "city too busy to hate."

But very quickly the camera pans, with the skyscrapers still in sight, to close-ups of housing projects, streets of misery and decay, ambulances screaming to pick up victims of shootings or drug overdose. We learn abruptly that there are two Atlantas, that there is not much community between them, and that for at least half of Atlanta, Atlanta is not a good city at all.

Yet even that is far from the whole story. We are introduced to a woman who has been elected president of the tenants association in the oldest public housing project in the United States, and we find in this black single-parent mother not only remarkable intelligence and energy but hope. Through the initiative of the parents' association a number of excellent programs for the children of the project have been started and have proved themselves effective. And, with the help of some of those close to the city's power structure, the tenants are ready to cooperate with a renewal program which will improve their project in ways that they have a say in, indeed largely because the project is so close to the site of the Olympics that the city would be embarrassed not to do otherwise.

In the closing segment Moyers interviews Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta Project is an effort to bridge the two cities and bring the resources and skills needed to help those in greatest need to experience a fuller life, always with the proviso that it be those in need who define the terms of the partnerships. Jimmy Carter's profound hope that the two Atlantas can become one Atlanta, a good Atlanta, illustrates what I would mean by a city as a community. But the program leaves us in no doubt that the obstacles are enormous and that we can expect only incremental success for the time being.

The Los Angeles program is in a way more overwhelming, with the results of the riots of the previous spring very much in the foreground and their consequences for Koreans, African Americans and Hispanics all too painfully displayed. But here too in each ethnic community, and I use the term here as neutral description as it has come to be used in the press, there are displayed signs of real community, of people trying to help others to put their lives back together and lead a more fulfilling life, and also signs of reaching out to other communities, seeing the city as something that must serve all its inhabitants. Initiatives from the white power structure are less evident in this program and I suspect less evident in reality in Los Angeles than in Atlanta. Yet the problem, the need for community, its overwhelming absence, but the presence of some capacity to think about achieving it, is vivid in both cities.

American cities are excellent metaphors for our world as a whole. Within them we can see pockets of first world affluence, professional competence, institutions that work. But we can also see pockets of third world poverty, despair and institutional collapse. As with our cities

so with our nation. We are no longer a city on a hill as John Winthrop put it, much less a shining city on a hill as Ronald Reagan put it. We illustrate the human condition of the whole globe in 1995. Do we have a national community? Yes and no. I believe we have some shared values and goals, though there is enormous conflict over what they are and what they mean. But a good society we are not. And just as we are not likely to have good cities without a good nation, on the other hand we are not likely to have a good nation except in a good world. The world as a community! Biologically, economically, politically, socially, culturally! We are not very near it, yet that is our project, and the price of failure will be very high, is already very high. Thinking about the biosphere as a community, something many people are doing and all of us had better begin to do, makes respectable again the value of thinking about wholes as organic entities in which everything is connected to everything else. Integration and coherence are on the agenda from the largest scale to the smallest.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me return to the question of opportunity, and the relation between opportunity and community. Those who imagine that we can focus on opportunity virtually alone, allowing individuals to make whatever arrangements they please to fulfill their choices, overlook much about social reality. They forget that institutions (that intimidating word again), which are the specific expressions of community, are necessary even to create the kind of person who can respond to real opportunity. This is most obvious in relation to education. As Haworth puts it:

One of the purposes of education is to liberate the child: to nurture in him dispositions toward free expression and to bring him to a point of personal development where he is able to make his own decisions. The problem is to convert a relatively dependent child into a relatively independent one. The hope is that he will acquire a capacity to grow; and freedom, spontaneity, and creativity are nothing significant if they are not aspects of personal growth. . . No one imagines that children are enabled to grow by being left utterly alone . . . To pursue the objective of education by seeking to dilute the impact of the educational institution on the student would be a strange procedure. (p. 36)

In this case the educational institution is an instance of community, in that it has shared values and goals and the capacity to shape its members in terms of those values and goals. But, Haworth argues, the same logic that holds in education holds also in all the city's institutions:

The institutionalization of urban life means discipline (my emphasis) as well as opportunity. Institutions channel life; they bank its flow. The inhabitant of the city gains opportunity by submitting to the discipline that institutional participation implies. He has a function in his family, factory, church. . . The opportunities for growth that these roles present are realized only when the person accepts the responsibilities (my emphasis) associated with them. . . We may say that though, on the one hand, the individual gains a set of rights through institutional participation, on the other he acquires duties. The institution bestows its resources upon him, enabling him to grow through his specific mode of participation. Hence this participation forms an effectively guaranteed right. But in the same act the institution commits him to perform his role in a way necessitated by the design of the institution. His enjoyment of the right presupposes the performance of the duty. . .

The effect institutions have of channeling the individual's life and of grounding his opportunity to lead a satisfactory life are therefore two sides of the same fact. (p. 37-38)

Of course both Haworth and I presume that it is an open question whether any particular set of institutions is a good instantiation of community--that is always debatable and even good institutions can be made better. The point is that institutions (and therefore community) and opportunity go hand in hand. If we look at some of our cities today, including Atlanta and Los

Angeles, we will have to say that the existing institutions are in sad repair, that therefore community is weak, more a hope than a reality, and, finally, except for the well-favored, opportunity is very problematic. Neither the discipline that good institutions would bring nor the opportunity that discipline makes possible are very evident.

I would like to situate our present difficulties in the context in which "it's the economy, stupid" seems to have a continuing validity. One of the more interesting features of this last quarter of the twentieth century is the return of classical economics as an almost messianic answer to all our difficulties. Well before the fall of European Communism, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their imitators on the continent and in the third world held out a vision of market economics leading to a capitalist utopia, a vision only confirmed by the collapse of so-called real existing socialism. Yet in spite of the unleashing of the free market, both Europe and Japan have entered a period of protracted economic difficulty and the United States is only uncertainly beginning to emerge from one.

Anyone with a sense of history must see the reemergence of self-confident free market economics with a sense of deja vu. How many times in the last two hundred years have we heard that music? How many times have we seen the international economy collapse into itself, often producing wars, and requiring Herculean governmental intervention to get things started again. And after two hundred years we find the classic problems of capitalism as menacing as ever: widespread poverty amidst affluence; growing technological unemployment; more people working more hours than ever in spite of revolutionary "labor-saving" technological advance; and the threat of a crisis of overproduction as the competitive pressure to lower wages dries up the purchasing power of the working population. We must see a certain irony in the words of those who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, spoke of the triumph of capitalism. Socialism is not the answer; a modern society requires a market economy. That much is clear. But the problems of capitalism that called forth the socialist critique in the first place are as urgent as ever.

The experience of the last two hundred years has taught us a few things, though we tend recurrently to forget them: that the market mechanism is marvelous at some things, terrible at others; that the market economy is enormously creative but enormously destructive; that the market economy generates a power that can be compared to atomic energy: without the proper safeguards it destroys everything it touches. Above all, we have learned, or ought to have learned, that the market economy must be surrounded by other institutions that do the things the market economy cannot do, or even the market economy itself will not function. The most obvious of those surrounding institutions is government. While classical economists tended to see government as antithetical to the market and such a view still permeates our common sense in America, the fact is that the market and the administrative state have grown in tandem everywhere that capitalism has gotten a foothold. In fact capitalism needs the state to provide the infrastructure of highways, water supply, electronic communication, without which business could not operate. It needs a legal system that will see that contracts are enforced. It needs police and military institutions that will provide internal and external security.

At the same time society needs the state to protect itself against the instabilities generated by capitalism, such things as unemployment insurance, social security, and, in most advanced societies, universal health care. Society has also required the state to intervene directly in the functioning of the economy as the complexities of economic life have grown too great for corporations or any combination of them to handle alone. International trade, for example, requires vigorous government supervision if it is not to destabilize whole industries and even whole societies. NAFTA and GATT are instances of agreements that only governments could make but that are vital to the economic health of modern societies.

But governments are not the only institutions required to provide a stable environment within which markets can function without creating social chaos. We have heard much of late about "civil society," an intellectually sophisticated term for what most people would call community. Even though the concept of civil society is used in a great many different ways it often refers to that part of society which is not directly involved in either the market or the state. On the one hand civil society includes the large sphere of private life: family, friends, recreational associations, and so forth. On the other it includes many institutions that are public but not governmental. I would include religious institutions here, although they are often thought of as private, because most religious institutions are not only open to all who choose to come but often act vigorously, and legitimately unless they become coercive, in the public sphere. But in view of the sponsors of this talk I want to stress particularly those institutions of civil society that we call nonprofits. They do many things that are socially necessary but that the market economy cannot do because they do not produce a profit. Most of the things nonprofits do could be done by government but we have learned that nonprofits can do them more effectively and at less expense than government. Nor are the boundaries watertight. Nonprofits are funded in part by corporate gifts, in part by government grants, and in part by private giving of both time and money. The University of California as a quasi-autonomous state institution could be seen as a kind of nonprofit. It is governed not by the legislature directly but by its own board of regents and funded only partly by the state of California: a larger part of our budget is supplied by federal grants and private giving than by the state. All universities are in this situation so that the distinction between public and private higher education is relative at best.

Nonprofits are not directly part of the market economy or the state but they are certainly affected by developments in those powerful sectors of society. A time of social stringency does not just affect economic institutions, it affects all institutions. Take for example what we now call downsizing, or if we prefer a more charming euphemism, rightsizing. In a time of social stringency one critically important way of making our economic institutions more competitive is by cutting labor costs. Cutting labor costs can be accomplished by eliminating jobs, reducing salaries, or both. Beginning in the later years of the eighties we saw an increasing mania for downsizing, one that shows no signs of abating. All one needs to do is look at the business section of any metropolitan newspaper to see what new companies have announced cuts in the number of employees. Last month as I was working on this talk I read that the airlines are cutting the commission of travel agents, which will likely cost the jobs of tens of thousands of people. Since the mid-eighties the Fortune 500 companies have cut three and a half million jobs. But it is not only the Fortune 500 that are eliminating jobs. In an atmosphere of social stringency so are nonprofits. I don't know the statistical prevalence of such downsizing among nonprofits but I know sufficient instances of it to make me feel it is widespread. In my university we had three rounds of early retirement offers, the latest one in 1994. Early retirement is a relatively benign way of downsizing, and the university indicates that the downsizing is only temporary. If the positions vacated now are not refilled they will be eventually. So we hope. In the meantime the students face larger classes and fewer professors to go with their sharply increased fees.

One feature of downsizing that the university shares with the private economy is that it affects older employees more than younger ones. A recent American Management Association study showed that 54.6 percent of jobs cut by some 400 companies in the year ending in June 1993 were in supervisory, middle management and professional/technical positions. Many of these are in the over fifty age category. Older employees are targeted because of their higher salaries: eliminating their jobs saves more money. And when we look at people over fifty seeking employment we find a disproportionate number of them in the category of "involuntary" part-time workers, that is they would have preferred full-time jobs, and also a disproportionate number of them in the "discouraged" category of those who have given up looking, and thus are not counted in unemployment statistics. You might discount my concern because I am obviously an advanced member of this age group, even

though I am among the few of my age to resist the golden handshake, but I think the case can be made that a society that cashiers a significant percentage of it best educated and most skilled workers when they reach the older age bracket is undermining the morale of all age groups.

But the deeper penalties inflicted by a time of social stringency go beyond the pains of downsizing, harsh though those are. They force a change in the very atmosphere of the workplace. I think it is instructive to look at what has happened to the professions in the last decade or two. I want to take here as my examples the two classic professions--we once called them learned professions--law and medicine. Speedup is a term originally applied to workers on the factory floor; it now applies to doctors and lawyers. It was only a few years ago that Kaiser told its specialists that the time they were expected to spend with an individual patient was two minutes. At that point several Kaiser doctors that I had consulted over the years decided to take early retirement and I left the Kaiser Health Plan. I went to an HMO, and although I felt I was better treated I learned that the doctors were not. Quite recently HMOs have begun to use what is called capitation: the doctor is paid so much per patient head, regardless of how much time the patient takes. Capitation at around twelve dollars a head per month forces doctors to take a great many patients in order to make ends meet. The doctor can only hope that a large percentage of the patients are young and healthy. But the result is long hours at work, followed by long hours filling out forms.

Law firms, like HMOs, have adopted the lean and mean strategy of corporate America. In one large Los Angeles law firm forty clerical employees, some who had been with the firm for as long as thirty years, were told to leave by the end of the day. When one partner objected to the inhumane way in which the staff persons were fired he was told that business advisors had said that was how it had to be done. But it is not only clerical staff who are cut these days: associates have been laid off in large numbers (and fewer hired) and even partners have been dismissed (and fewer associates made partners). Since the work for many firms has not diminished what does this mean? We will not be surprised to hear that in the last 15 years the number of billable hours expected of lawyers has doubled to a new average of between 2000 and 2500 hours per year. Fifty percent of all lawyers in private practice now work 2400 hours a year or more.

Given these facts it is not surprising to learn that both doctors and lawyers are reporting more and more unhappiness with their work. The pressure of social stringency operates to deprive work of its intrinsic meaning and value and reduce it to a means to external ends, which increasingly become economic survival. Of course much human work has always been little more than a means to the end of economic survival, but it was traditionally one of the advantages of the learned professions that the work was a good in itself. If the pressures of social stringency are impinging more and more on the corporate economy and the professions, how can the nonprofits escape such pressures? The answer clearly is that they cannot.

One obvious focus of concern is the shibboleth of productivity. No one can in principle be opposed to improved productivity. But we have just seen in the cases of law and medicine that a single-minded focus on productivity can undermine the very purpose and quality of the work in question. For nonprofits there is an additional difficultly. How do you measure productivity? I am reminded of Brian O'Connell at the Independent Sector who once told me that business members of boards of nonprofits were often horrified by the chaotic bookkeeping of the organization and concerned that there was a great deal of wasted time and money. But, he said, when they actually went in to look at how the nonprofits operated they found, after the initial shock of apparent disorganization, that a relatively few people were accomplishing a very great deal, though much of it was very hard to measure.

Even though the problems I have been discussing have been with us for quite some time, the terms of the conversation seem to have grown progressively narrower. We have been told with increasing intensity since the elections of last fall that government is the cause of our manifest and multiple difficulties and that if government can be curtailed, limited and in significant part eliminated, the structure of economic opportunity will lead to the solution of all our problems. Regardless of party there is a belief that our goal should be strong economic growth, enabling everyone to have a middle class standard of living. If we attain that, the common good of society will take care of itself.

This line of thinking has two major problems. If we attained this goal worldwide then we would use up resources at the rate that the American middle class currently does and our time on this planet would be short indeed. But two hundred years of the project of making material affluence our primary goal has created so many profound difficulties that it seems we will destroy ourselves economically, ecologically, and militarily long before it is attained. These are not minor problems, yet no American politician and few foreign ones have the courage to tell the truth about them to their peoples. Here I would like to turn to one of those few, the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, who wrote in his recent book Summer Meditations:

All my observations and all my experience have, with remarkable consistency, convinced me that, if today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival, that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit. If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious, or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global green house we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the non-renewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we must--as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility--somehow come to our senses.

I once called this coming to our senses an existential revolution. I meant a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason.

Central to what Havel means by coming to our senses involves the way we treat each other. The existential revolution of which he speaks requires in the first instance the capacity to trust, even when trust is very risky. One cannot treat others morally or create a good society without trust, and trust is something every citizen is called to model. Havel calls for:

[raising] the general level of public manners. By that I mean chiefly the kind of relations that exist among people, between the powerful and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the young and the elderly, adults and children, businesspeople and customers, men and women, teachers and students, officers and soldiers, policemen and citizens, and so on.

More than that, I am also thinking of the quality of people's relationships to nature, to animals, to the atmosphere, to the landscape, to towns, to gardens, to their homes. . .

And there is even more: all this would be hard to imagine without a legal, political, and administrative culture, without the culture of relationships between the state and the citizen. . . Perhaps what I'm saying is clear: however important it may be to get our economy back on its feet it is far from being the only task facing us.

Is that only the case in the Czech Republic or is that not the case everywhere, and especially in the United States?

What exactly Havel means by "coming to our senses" or undergoing an "existential revolution" would require an exegesis of all his writings, which, even though I have read everything translated in English, I am not prepared to undertake. But I want to pursue one of his constant themes just a bit further here. There is in Havel a concern for Being (with a capital B), as he sometimes puts it "something higher," and as he occasionally but very infrequently puts it God. He believes that without an ultimate value and purpose life doesn't make sense. If I may make the connection with my argument, for Havel the question of Being is always the question of the Good. There is a Platonist background that cannot be denied. The question of the Good in this tradition always leads to the question of the good society, to the question of community.

Such concerns, and my mention of Plato, might lead one to think of Havel as a utopian, yet Havel is aware that utopianism has led to the worst of human evils. In Summer Meditations he answers the charge explicitly:

So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don't know whether I'll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

It is clear that Havel is working not for a perfect world but for one a little better, a little less suicidal, than the one in which we live. There is an unabashed idealism in Havel that I find very refreshing, although some Americans find it naive, or even disturbing. The idea of a central European who has lived most of his life under a Communist regime and who spent years in a Communist prison as naive makes me wonder about the naivete of the Americans who have that opinion. My point this evening, however, is that Havel's idealism is not utopian or extravagant. He calls for human responsibility but his expectations are modest. By now he knows how little even the president of a country can do to realize his goals. It is in this respect that I think Havel can be a model for us in the nonprofit or quasi-nonprofit spheres. Government and the economy are preoccupied with quantifiable results. They often do not register how people in a society are treating each other until this shows up in statistics about absenteeism or crime. But those of us who operate primarily in civil society are closer to the social heartbeat. We are in a position to sense how well the social fabric is holding up and where it is beginning to tear, or, in some instances where it is already irreparably torn.

The issues I have discussed are not entirely a matter of individual choice. Though these issues work themselves out in individual lives, they are deeply shaped by the larger institutions of our society. If our society says, in effect, life is a race in which there are winners and losers and you'd better end up a winner, then it is natural for people to think of private opportunity alone.

But if we would have a society that emphasizes our obligations to each other, one in which non-recreational guns are illegal, one in which the scandal of homelessness and the virtual abandonment of large parts of our cities to anarchy are not allowed to occur, then we must create an atmosphere in which community responsibility is as highly regarded as individual opportunity, indeed one in which individual opportunity without community responsibility is seen for what it is: the road to the destruction of any coherent society at all. Certainly our future is in our hands as individuals, but it is only when we take responsibility for building more humane institutions that the choice of adult responsibility becomes socially effective.

We need face-to-face community, but we also need community in our cities, in our nation and in the world.

http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_6.htm

Individualism and the Crisis of Civic Membershipby Robert Bellah, et al

The authors previously collaborated on Habits of the Heart. This article is excerpted from The Good Society, published this month by Knopf. Reprinted by permission. This article appeared in The Christian Century March 20-27, l996, pp. 260-265. Copyrighted by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John C. Purdy.

The consequences of radical individualism are more strikingly evident today than they were even a decade ago when Habits of the Heart was published. In Habits we spoke of commitment, of community and of citizenship as useful contrast terms to an alienating individualism. Properly understood, these terms are still valuable for our current understanding. But today we think the phrase "civic membership" brings out something not quite captured by these other terms. While we criticized distorted forms of individualism, we never sought to neglect the central significance of the individual person or failed to sympathize with the difficulties faced by the individual self in our society. "Civic membership" points to that critical intersection of personal identity with social identity. If we face a crisis of civic identity, it is not just a social crisis; it is a personal crisis as well.

One way of characterizing the crisis of civic membership is to speak of declining "social capital." Robert Putnam, who has brought the term to public attention, defines social capital as follows: "By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital -- tools and training that enhance individual productivity -- social capital refers to features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefits." There are a number of possible indices of social capital, but the two that Putnam has used most extensively are associational membership and public trust.

Putnam has chosen a stunning image as the title of a recent article: Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (Journal of Democracy, January 1995). He reports that between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. This is not a trivial example: nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once in 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional election and roughly the same as claim to attend church regularly.

For Putnam, people bowling by themselves are a symbol of the decline of associational life, the vigor of which has been seen as the heart of our civic culture ever since Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. in the 1830s.

In the 1970s dramatic declines began to hit the associations typically composed of women, such as the PTA and the League of Women Voters. This has often been explained as the result of the massive entry of women into the work force. In the 1980S falling membership struck typically male associations, such as the Lions, Elks, Masons and Shriners, as well. Union membership has dropped by half since its peak in the middle 1950s. We all know of the continuing decline of the number of eligible voters who actually go to the polls, but Putnam reminds us that the number of Americans who answer yes when asked whether they have attended a public meeting on town or school affairs in the last year has fallen by more than a third since 1973.

Almost the only groups that are growing are support groups, such as 12-step groups. These groups make minimal demands on their members and are oriented primarily to the needs of individuals. Indeed, Robert Wuthnow has characterized them as involving individuals who "focus on themselves in the presence of others" -- what we might call being alone together. Putnam argues that paper membership groups, such as the American Association of Retired Persons, which has grown to gargantuan proportions, have little or no civic consequences because their members, although they may have common interests, have no meaningful interaction with one another.

Putnam also worries that the Internet, the electronic town meeting, and other much ballyhooed new technological devices are probably civically vacuous because they do not sustain civic engagement. Talk radio, for instance, mobilizes private opinion, not public opinion, and trades on anxiety, anger and distrust, all of which are deadly to civic culture. The one sphere that seems to be resisting the general trend is religion. Religious membership and church attendance have remained fairly constant after the decline from the religious boom of the 1950s, although membership in church-related groups has declined by about one-sixth since the 1960s.

Accompanying the decline of associational involvement is the decline of public trust. We are not surprised to hear that the proportion of Americans who reply that they trust the government in Washington only some of the time or almost never has risen steadily from 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent in 1992. But are we prepared to hear that the proportion of Americans who say that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 per-cent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did?

The argument for decline in social capital is not one that we made in Habits of the Heart. Habits was essentially a cultural analysis, more about language than about behavior. We worried that the language of individualism might undermine civic commitment, but we pointed to the historically high levels of associational membership in America and the relative strength of such memberships compared with other advanced industrial nations. Whether there has really been such a decline is still controversial, but we are inclined to believe that tendencies that were not entirely clear in the early 1980s when Habits was written are now discernible and disconcerting.

We believe that the culture and language of individualism influence these trends but that there are also structural reasons for them, many of which stem from changes in the global economy that have increased the disparity between the rich and poor and threatened the survival of the middle class. The decline in social capital is evident in different ways in different classes. For example, the decline in civic engagement in the overclass is indicated by their withdrawal into

gated, guarded communities. It is also related to the constant movement of companies in the process of mergers and breakups. Rosabeth Kanter has recently suggested some of the consequences:

"For communities as well as employees this constant shuffling of company identities is confusing and its effects profound. Cities and towns rely on the private sector to augment public services and support community causes. There is a strong 'headquarters bias' in this giving: companies based in a city tend to do more for it, contributing $75,000 a year on average more to the local United Way than companies of similar size with headquarters elsewhere."

Kanter points out that the loss of a corporate headquarters in a middle-sized city can tear holes in the social fabric. Not only are thousands of jobs lost but so is the civic leadership of corporate executives. Local charities lose not only money but board members.

Corporate volatility can lead to a kind of placelessness at the top of the pyramid: "Cut loose from society the rich man can play his chosen role free of guilt and responsibility," observes Michael Lewis. "He becomes that great figure of American mythology -- the roaming frontiersman. hese days the man who has made a fortune is likely to spend more on his means of transportation than on his home: the private jet is the possession that most distinguishes him from the rest of us.... The old aristocratic conceit of place has given way to a glorious placelessness." The mansions of the old rich were certainly expressions of conspicuous consumption, but they also encouraged a sense of responsibility for the particular place (city, state, region) where they were located.

Moving to the opposite end of the income spectrum, Lee Rainwater, in his classic book What Money Buys, shows that poverty -- income insufficient to maintain an acceptable level of living -- operates to deprive the poor not only of material capital but of social capital as well. In traditional hierarchical societies low levels of material well-being can be associated with established statuses that confer the benefits of clientship. In our kind of society, with its fundamentally egalitarian ideology and its emphasis on individual self-reliance, status -- even personal identity -- is conferred primarily by one's relationship to the economy, by one's work and the income derived from one's work. Lacking a socially acceptable income, or any likelihood of attaining one, has long-term consequences for the kind of person one becomes and the kind of life one is likely to live. As Rainwater puts it:

"As people grow up and live their lives, they are engaged in a constant implicit assessment of their likely chances for having the access and resources necessary to maintain a sense of valid identity. People's anticipation of their future chances, particularly as children, adolescents, and younger adults, seems to affect quite markedly the way they relate to others and the way they make use of the resources available to them. When individuals make the assessment that their future possibilities for participating in validating activities are low and particularly when that estimate is constantly confirmed by others in their world (teachers, police, parents), then the process of searching for alternative validating potentials that result, in deviant behavior is set in motion. When people define their position in life as such that they have 'nothing to lose,' they are much less responsive to the efforts at social control exercised informally by those in their neighborhood and formally by official agencies of social regulation."

By reducing social capital, chronic poverty blocks economic and political participation, and consequently weakens the capacity to develop moral character and sustain a viable family life as well.

When we add to the consequences of poverty the consequences of residential segregation, the situation becomes devastating. We should remember that in spite of fair-housing laws residential segregation for black Americans has remained unchanged in our larger cities for the past three decades. What has changed is that the geographical areas with the highest poverty rates have lost retail trade outlets, government services, political influence and, worst of all, employment that provides anything like an adequate living. Those deprived of social capital have come to be confined to "reservations" that are effectively outside the environing society.

As for the anxious middle class, Herbert Gans in Middle American Individualism helps us understand what is happening to social capital in that group. Gans has criticized Habits of the Heart for being too censorious of middle American individualism. After all, says Gans, the residents of the lower-middle- and working-class suburbs who are more devoted to their family and friends than to civic life are only a generation or two away from the grinding poverty of manual labor among their immigrant ancestors or the backbreaking labor of peasant agriculture in the old country.

The social condition of those not-so-distant ancestors was one of vulnerable subordination, of being kicked around by people who told them what to do. Owning one's own home, taking one's vacations wherever one wants, being free to decide whom to see or what to buy once one has left the workplace, are all freedoms that are especially cherished by those whose ancestors never had them. The modest suburb is not the open frontier, but it is, under the circumstances, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Among the many ironies in the life of at least a significant number of these middle Americans, however, is that labor union membership had much to do with their attaining a relative affluence and its attendant independence. Yet for many of them the labor union has become one more alien institution from which they would like to be free. Middle Americans are not only suspicious of government, according to Gans, they don't like organizations of any kind. Compared to the upper middle class, they are not joiners, belonging to only one or two associations at the most, the likeliest being a church. While continuing to identify strongly with the nation, they are increasingly suspicious of politics, which they find confusing and dismaying. Their political participation steadily declines.

As a consequence of tendencies that Gans is probably right in asking us to understand, middle Americans are today losing the social capital that allowed them to attain their valued independence in the first place. Above all, this is true of the decline of the labor movement. This decline is due to legislative changes in the past 20 years that have deprived unions of much of their power and influence, and congressional refusal since 1991 to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour. But, as we see in France and other European countries, where loyalty to labor unions has survived, such attacks can be turned back. Where unions exist in America, union meetings attract 5 percent of the members at most. Lacking the social capital that union membership would provide, anxious-class Americans are vulnerable in new ways to the arbitrary

domination they thought they had escaped. One may not even own one's home and one's recreational vehicle for long if one's job is downsized and the only alternative employment is at the minimum wage.

The decline of social capital in American has particularly distressing consequences if we consider what has happened to political participation. In Voice and Equality, Sydney Verba and his colleagues have given us a comprehensive review of political participation. Although the data concerning trends over time are not unambiguous, they do indicate certain tendencies. During the past 30 years the level of education in the American public has steadily risen, but the political participation that is usually associated with education has not.

Even more significant is the nature of the changes. Political party identification and membership have declined, while campaign contributions and writing to members of Congress have increased. Both of these growing kinds of activities normally take place in the privacy of one's home as one writes a check or a letter. Verba and his associates note that neither generates the personal satisfactions that more social forms of political participation do.

Further, making monetary contributions correlates highly with income and is the most unequal form of participation in our society. The increasing salience of monetary contributions as a form of political participation, as well as the general tendency for political participation to correlate with income, education and occupation, leads to the summary conclusion of the book:

"Meaningful democratic participation requires that the voices of citizens in politics be clear, loud and equal: clear so that public officials know what citizens want and need, loud so that officials have an incentive to pay attention to what they hear, and equal so that the democratic ideal of equal responsiveness to the preferences and interests of all is not violated. Our analysis of voluntary activity in American politics suggests that the public's voice is often loud, sometimes clear, but rarely equal."

Although unequal levels of education, occupation and income favor the originally advantaged in securing the resources for political participation, there is one significant exception. As Verba and his associates note:

"Only religious institutions provide a counterbalance to this cumulative resource process. They play an unusual role in the American participatory system by providing opportunities for the development of civic skills to those who would otherwise be resource-poor. It is commonplace to ascribe the special character of American politics to the weakness of unions and the absence of class-based political parties that can mobilize the disadvantaged -- in particular, the working class -- to political activity. Another way that American society is exceptional is in how often Americans go to church -- with the result that the mobilizing function often performed elsewhere by unions and labor or social democratic parties is more likely to be performed by religious institutions."

Although most Americans agree that things are seriously amiss in our society, that we are not, as the poll questions often put it, "headed in the right direction," they differ over why this is so and what should be done about it. We have sought answers by looking at the structural problems that

we have described under the rubrics of the crisis in civic membership and the decline of social capital. What are some of the other explanations?

Perhaps the most widespread alternative explanation locates the sources of our problems in a crisis of the family. The cry that what our society most needs is "family values" is not one to be lightly dismissed. Almost all the tendencies that we have been describing threaten family life and are often experienced most acutely within the context of the family. Being unemployed and thus unable to get married or not having enough income to support an existing family due to downsizing or part-timing and the tensions caused by these conditions can certainly be understood as family crises. But why is the crisis expressed as a failure of family values?

It is unlikely that we will understand this phenomenon unless we take account once again of the culture of individualism. If we see unemployment or reduced income due to downsizing as purely individual problems rather than structural problems of the economy, then we will seek to understand what is wrong with the unemployed or underemployed individual. If we also discern that such individuals are prone to having children out of wedlock, frequently divorcing, or failing to make child-support payments, we may conclude that the cause is inadequate family values. In Habits of the Heart we strongly affirmed the value of the family and in both Habits and The Good Society we argued for renewed commitment to marriage and family responsibilities. But to imagine that problems arising from failures rooted in the structure of our economy and polity are due primarily to the failings of individuals with inadequate family values seems to us sadly mistaken. It not only increases the level of individual guilt feelings, it distracts attention from larger failures of collective responsibility.

There is a further consequence of the link between cultural individualism and the emphasis on family values. Families have traditionally been supported by the paid labor of men. Failure to support one's family may be taken as an indication of inadequate manhood. It is easy to draw the conclusion that if American men would only act like men, then family life would be improved and social problems solved. Some such way of thinking undoubtedly lies behind the movement known as Promise Keepers as well as the Million Man March of 1995. While we share many of the values of these movements, we are skeptical that increased male responsibility will prove to be an adequate solution to our deep structural economic and political problems or even do more than marginally diminish the severe strains on the American family. The notion that if men would only be men then all would be well in our society seems to us a sad cultural delusion.

Another common alternative explanation of our difficulties is to explain them as the failure of community. This is indeed the case, we believe, but only if our understanding of community is broad and deep enough. In many current usages of the term, however, community means face-to-face groups formed by the voluntary efforts of individuals. Here failure of community as the source of our problems can be interpreted to mean that if more people would only volunteer to help in soup kitchens or Habitat for Humanity or Meals on Wheels, then our social problems would be solved. Habits of the Heart strongly affirms face-to-face communities and the valuable contributions that voluntary groups can make to society. But we do not believe that the deep structural problems that we face as a society can be seriously alleviated by an increase in devotion to community in this narrow sense. We would agree that an increase in the voluntary commitments of individuals can over the long haul increase our social capital and thus add to the

resources we can bring to bear on our problems. But to get at the roots of our problems these resources must be used to overcome institutional difficulties that cannot be directly addressed by voluntary action alone.

There is another problem with emphasizing a small-scale and voluntaristic understanding of community as the solution to our problems. Voluntary activity tends to correlate with income, education and occupation. "Joiners" are more apt to be found in the overclass than in the underclass or anxious middle class-with the significant exception of religious groups. This means that many voluntary activities are not so much designed to help the most deprived -- though we don't want to overlook those that are -- -as to serve the interests of the affluent. This is particularly true of political voluntarism.

Thus, dismantling structures of public provision for the most deprived in hopes that the voluntary sector can take over is mistaken in three important respects. The voluntary sector by no means has the resources to take up the slack, as churches, charities and foundations have been pointing out repeatedly in recent years. The second reason is that our more affluent citizens may feel that they have fulfilled their obligation to society by giving time and money to "make a difference" through voluntary activity without considering that they have hardly made a dent in the real problems faced by most Americans. The third reason is that the voluntary sector is disproportionately run by our better-off citizens, and a good many voluntary activities do more to protect the well-to-do than the needy.

There is another sense of community that also presents difficulties if we think the solution to our problems lies in reviving community, and that is the notion of community as neighborhood or locality. Habits of the Heart encourages strong neighborhoods and supports civic engagement in towns and cities. But residential segregation is a fact of life in contemporary America. Even leaving aside the hypersegregation of urban ghettos, segregation by class arising from differential housing costs is increasingly evident in suburban America. Thus it is quite possible that in "getting involved" with one's neighborhood or even with one's suburban town one will never meet someone of a different race or class. One will not be exposed to the reality of life of people in circumstances different from one's own.

The explanations of our social problems that stress the failure of family values or the failure of community have in common the notion that our problems are individual or are social in only a narrow sense (that is, involving family and local community), rather than economic, political and cultural. A related feature that these common explanations of our troubles share is hostility to the role of government or the state. If we can take care of ourselves with possibly a little help from our friends and family, who needs the state? Indeed, the state is often viewed as an interfering father who won't recognize that his children have grown up and don't need him any more. He can't help solve our problems because in large measure it is he who created them.

In contrast, the market, in this mind-set, seems benign, a neutral theater for competition in which achievement is rewarded and incompetence punished. There is some awareness that markets are not neutral, that there are people and organizations with enormous economic power capable of making decisions that adversely affect many citizens. From this point of view, big business joins

big government as the source of problems rather than their solution. Yet more than in most comparable societies Americans are inclined to think that the market is fairer than the state.

The culture of individualism, then, has made no small contribution to the rise of the ideology we referred to in Habits as neocapitalism. There we drew a picture of the American political situation that has turned out not to be entirely adequate. We suggested that the impasse between welfare liberalism and its countermovement, neocapitalism, was coming to an end and two alternatives, the administered society and economic democracy, were looming on the scene. As it turned out, this incipient pair of alternatives did not materialize, or at least they are enduring a long wait. Instead, neocapitalism has grown ever stronger ideologically and politically. Criticism of "big government" and "tax-and-spend liberalism' has mounted even as particular constituencies, which in the aggregate include most citizens, favor those forms of public provision that benefit them in particular, while opposing benefits they do not receive.

We do not believe we were wrong ten years ago in seeing the severe strains that the neocapitalist formula was creating for the nation. Today those strains are more obvious than ever. But we clearly underestimated the ideological fervor that the neocapitalist position was able to tap. This is ironic, since so much of that fervor derives from the very thing we focused on in our book: individualism. The only thing that makes the neocapitalist vision viable is the degree to which it can be seen as an expression, even a moral expression, of our dominant ideological individualism, with its compulsive stress on independence, its contempt for weakness and its adulation of success.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=224

individualism, political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dates—like socialism and other isms—from the 19th century.

Individualism once exhibited interesting national variations, but its various meanings have since largely merged. Following the upheaval of the French Revolution, individualisme was used pejoratively in France to signify the sources of social dissolution and anarchy and the elevation of individual interests above those of the collective. The term’s negative connotation was employed by French reactionaries, nationalists, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, despite their different views of a feasible and desirable social order. In Germany, the ideas of individual uniqueness (Einzigkeit) and self-realization—in sum, the Romantic notion of individuality—contributed to the cult of individual genius and were later transformed into an organic theory of national community. According to this view, state and society are not artificial constructs erected on the basis of a social contract but instead unique and self-sufficient cultural wholes. In England, individualism encompassed religious nonconformity (i.e., nonconformity with the Church of England) and economic liberalism in its various versions, including both laissez-faire and moderate state-interventionist approaches. In the United States, individualism became part of the core American ideology by the 19th century, incorporating the influences of New England Puritanism, Jeffersonianism, and the philosophy of natural rights. American individualism was universalist and idealist but acquired a harsher edge as it became infused with elements of social Darwinism (i.e., the survival of the fittest). “Rugged individualism”—extolled by Herbert Hoover during his presidential campaign in 1928—was associated with traditional American values such as personal freedom, capitalism, and limited government. As James Bryce, British ambassador to the United States (1907–13), wrote in The American Commonwealth (1888), “Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but [their] peculiar and exclusive possession.”

The French aristocratic political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) described individualism in terms of a kind of moderate selfishness that disposed humans to be concerned only with their own small circle of family and friends. Observing the workings of the American democratic tradition for Democracy in America (1835–40), Tocqueville wrote that by leading “each citizen to isolate himself from his fellows and to draw apart with his<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371284/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=575;key=false;kvqsegs=D;kvsource=other;kvtopicid=286303;kvchannel=HISTORY;misc=1317485961145"></script> family and friends,” individualism sapped the “virtues of public life,” for which civic virtue and association were a suitable remedy. For the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), individualism signified the cult of privacy, which, combined with the growth of self-assertion, had given “impulse to the highest individual development” that flowered in the European Renaissance. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) identified two types of individualism: the utilitarian egoism of the English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who, according to Durkheim, reduced society to “nothing more than a vast apparatus of production and exchange,” and the rationalism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788), and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the

Citizen (1789), which has as “its primary dogma the autonomy of reason and as its primary rite the doctrine of free enquiry.” The Austrian economist F.A. Hayek (1899–1992), who favoured market processes and was distrustful of state intervention, distinguished what he called “false” from “true” individualism. False individualism, which was represented mainly by French and other continental European writers, is characterized by “an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason” and the scope of effective social planning and is “a source of modern socialism”; in contrast, true individualism, whose adherents included John Locke (1632–1704), Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733), David Hume (1711–76), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Adam Smith (1723–90), and Edmund Burke (1729–97), maintained that the “spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend” and accepted that individuals must submit “to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society.”

Other aspects of individualism pertain to a series of different questions about how to conceive the relation between collectivities and individuals. One such question focuses on how facts about the behaviour of groups, about social processes, and about large-scale historical events are to be explained. According to methodological individualism, a view advocated by Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94), any explanation of such a fact ultimately must appeal to, or be stated in terms of, facts about individuals—about their beliefs, desires, and actions. A closely related view, sometimes called ontological individualism, is the thesis that social or historical groups, processes, and events are nothing more than complexes of individuals and individual actions. Methodological individualism precludes explanations that appeal to social factors that cannot in turn be individualistically explained.<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388452/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=575;key=false;kvqsegs=D;kvsource=other;kvtopicid=286303;kvchannel=HISTORY;misc=1317485961148"></script> Examples are Durkheim’s classic account of differential suicide rates in terms of degrees of social integration and the account of the incidence of protest movements in terms of the structure of political opportunities. Ontological individualism contrasts with various ways of seeing institutions and collectivities as “real”—e.g., the view of corporations or states as agents and the view of bureaucratic roles and rules or status groups as independent of individuals, both constraining and enabling individuals’ behaviour. Another question that arises in debates over individualism is how objects of worth or value (i.e., goods) in moral and political life are to be conceived. Some theorists, known as atomists, argue that no such goods are intrinsically common or communal, maintaining instead that there are only individual goods that accrue to individuals. According to this perspective, morality and politics are merely the instruments through which each individual attempts to secure such goods for himself. One example of this view is the conception of political authority as ultimately derived from or justified by a hypothetical “contract” between individuals, as in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Another is the idea, typical in economics and in other social sciences influenced by economics, that most social institutions and relationships can best be understood by assuming that individual behaviour is motivated primarily by self-interest.

Individualism as Tocqueville understood it, with its endorsement of private enjoyments and control of one’s personal environment and its neglect of public involvement and communal attachment, has long been lamented and criticized from both the right and the left and from both religious and secular perspectives. Especially notable critiques have been made by advocates of

communitarianism, who tend to equate individualism with narcissism and selfishness. Likewise, thinkers in the tradition of “republican” political thought—according to which power is best controlled by being divided—are disturbed by their perception that individualism deprives the state of the support and active involvement of citizens, thereby impairing democratic institutions. Individualism also has been thought to distinguish modern Western societies from premodern and non-Western ones, such as traditional India and China, where, it is said, the community or the nation is valued above the individual and an individual’s role in the political and economic life of his community is largely determined by his membership in a specific class or caste.

Steven M. Lukes

collectivism,  any of several types of social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a social class. Collectivism may be contrasted with individualism, in which the rights and interests of the individual are emphasized.

The earliest modern, influential expression of collectivist ideas in the West is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, of 1762 (see social contract), in which it is argued that the individual finds his true being and freedom only in submission to the “general will” of the community. In the early 19th century the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that the individual realizes his true being and freedom only in unqualified submission to the laws and institutions of the nation-state, which to Hegel was the highest embodiment of social morality. Karl Marx later provided the most succinct statement of the collectivist view of the primacy of social interaction in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “It is not men’s consciousness,” he wrote, “which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.”

Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism. The least collectivist of these is social democracy, which seeks to reduce the inequities of unrestrained capitalism by government regulation, redistribution of income, and varying degrees of planning and public ownership. In communist systems collectivism is carried to its furthest extreme, with a minimum of private ownership and a maximum of planned economy.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/125584/collectivism#ref91479

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

By Alexis De Tocqueville

Translated by Henry Reeve

Volume II.

Chapter II: Of Individualism In Democratic Countries

I have shown how it is that in ages of equality every man seeks for his opinions within himself: I am now about to show how it is that, in the same ages, all his feelings are turned towards himself alone. Individualism *a is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart. Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.

a [ [I adopt the expression of the original, however strange it may seem to the English ear, partly because it illustrates the remark on the introduction of general terms into democratic language which was made in a preceding chapter, and partly because I know of no English word exactly equivalent to the expression. The chapter itself defines the meaning attached to it by the author.—Translator's Note.]]

Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a

man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. It is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed.

Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Chapter III: Individualism Stronger At The Close Of A Democratic Revolution Than At Other Periods

The period when the construction of democratic society upon the ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is especially that at which this separation of men from one another, and the egotism resulting from it, most forcibly strike the observation. Democratic communities not only contain a large number of independent citizens, but they are constantly filled with men who, having entered but yesterday upon their independent condition, are intoxicated with their new power. They entertain a presumptuous confidence in their strength, and as they do not suppose that they can henceforward ever have occasion to claim the assistance of their fellow-creatures, they do not scruple to show that they care for nobody but themselves.

An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society. These passions survive the victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the democratic confusion which ensues. Those members of the community who were at the top of the late gradations of rank cannot immediately forget their former greatness; they will long regard themselves as aliens in

the midst of the newly composed society. They look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone. Those, on the contrary, who were formerly at the foot of the social scale, and who have been brought up to the common level by a sudden revolution, cannot enjoy their newly acquired independence without secret uneasiness; and if they meet with some of their former superiors on the same footing as themselves, they stand aloof from them with an expression of triumph and of fear. It is, then, commonly at the outset of democratic society that citizens are most disposed to live apart. Democracy leads men not to draw near to their fellow-creatures; but democratic revolutions lead them to shun each other, and perpetuate in a state of equality the animosities which the state of inequality engendered. The great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.

Chapter IV: That The Americans Combat The Effects Of Individualism By Free Institutions

Despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all is influence is commonly exerted for that purpose. No vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as egotism: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other. He does not ask them to assist him in governing the State; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves. He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community, and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves. Thus the vices which despotism engenders are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things mutually and perniciously complete and assist each other. Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie; despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to consider their fellow-creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public virtue.

Despotism then, which is at all times dangerous, is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages. It is easy to see that in those same ages men stand most in need of freedom. When the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests, and snatched at times from self-observation. As soon as a man begins to treat of public affairs in public, he begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow-men as he had at first imagined, and that, in order to obtain their support, he must often lend them his co-operation.

When the public is supreme, there is no man who does not feel the value of public goodwill, or who does not endeavor to court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those

amongst whom he is to live. Many of the passions which congeal and keep asunder human hearts, are then obliged to retire and hide below the surface. Pride must be dissembled; disdain dares not break out; egotism fears its own self. Under a free government, as most public offices are elective, the men whose elevated minds or aspiring hopes are too closely circumscribed in private life, constantly feel that they cannot do without the population which surrounds them. Men learn at such times to think of their fellow-men from ambitious motives; and they frequently find it, in a manner, their interest to forget themselves.

I may here be met by an objection derived from electioneering intrigues, the meannesses of candidates, and the calumnies of their opponents. These are opportunities for animosity which occur the oftener the more frequent elections become. Such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient; whereas the benefits which attend them remain. The desire of being elected may lead some men for a time to violent hostility; but this same desire leads all men in the long run mutually to support each other; and if it happens that an election accidentally severs two friends, the electoral system brings a multitude of citizens permanently together, who would always have remained unknown to each other. Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.

The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. The legislators of America did not suppose that a general representation of the whole nation would suffice to ward off a disorder at once so natural to the frame of democratic society, and so fatal: they also thought that it would be well to infuse political life into each portion of the territory, in order to multiply to an infinite extent opportunities of acting in concert for all the members of the community, and to make them constantly feel their mutual dependence on each other. The plan was a wise one. The general affairs of a country only engage the attention of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted, and to adapt themselves to one another.

It is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to interest him in the destiny of the State, because he does not clearly understand what influence the destiny of the State can have upon his own lot. But if it be proposed to make a road cross the end of his estate, he will see at a glance that there is a connection between this small public affair and his greatest private affairs; and he will discover, without its being shown to him, the close tie which unites private to general interest. Thus, far more may be done by intrusting to the citizens the administration of minor affairs than by surrendering to them the control of important ones, towards interesting them in the public welfare, and convincing them that they constantly stand in need one of the other in order to provide for it. A brilliant achievement may win for you the favor of a people at one stroke; but to earn the love and respect of the population which surrounds you, a long succession of little services rendered and of obscure good deeds—a constant habit of kindness, and an established reputation for disinterestedness—will be required. Local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them.

In the United States the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day. They know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor; and that in democratic ages you attach a poor man to you more by your manner than by benefits conferred. The magnitude of such benefits, which sets off the difference of conditions, causes a secret irritation to those who reap advantage from them; but the charm of simplicity of manners is almost irresistible: their affability carries men away, and even their want of polish is not always displeasing. This truth does not take root at once in the minds of the rich. They generally resist it as long as the democratic revolution lasts, and they do not acknowledge it immediately after that revolution is accomplished. They are very ready to do good to the people, but they still choose to keep them at arm's length; they think that is sufficient, but they are mistaken. They might spend fortunes thus without warming the hearts of the population around them;—that population does not ask them for the sacrifice of their money, but of their pride.

It would seem as if every imagination in the United States were upon the stretch to invent means of increasing the wealth and satisfying the wants of the public. The best-informed inhabitants of each district constantly use their information to discover new truths which may augment the general prosperity; and if they have made any such discoveries, they eagerly surrender them to the mass of the people.

When the vices and weaknesses, frequently exhibited by those who govern in America, are closely examined, the prosperity of the people occasions—but improperly occasions—surprise. Elected magistrates do not make the American democracy flourish; it flourishes because the magistrates are elective.

It would be unjust to suppose that the patriotism and the zeal which every American displays for the welfare of his fellow-citizens are wholly insincere. Although private interest directs the greater part of human actions in the United States as well as elsewhere, it does not regulate them all. I must say that I have often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have remarked a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to each other. The free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society. They every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is the duty, as well as the interest of men, to make themselves useful to their fellow-creatures; and as he sees no particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side of kindness. Men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice: what was intentional becomes an instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one's fellow citizens, the habit and the taste for serving them is at length acquired.

Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one evil, and political freedom as a second. When they are obliged to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the latter. But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy—namely, political freedom.

Chapter VIII: The Americans Combat Individualism By The Principle Of Interest Rightly Understood

When the world was managed by a few rich and powerful individuals, these persons loved to entertain a lofty idea of the duties of man. They were fond of professing that it is praiseworthy to forget one's self, and that good should be done without hope of reward, as it is by the Deity himself. Such were the standard opinions of that time in morals. I doubt whether men were more virtuous in aristocratic ages than in others; but they were incessantly talking of the beauties of virtue, and its utility was only studied in secret. But since the imagination takes less lofty flights and every man's thoughts are centred in himself, moralists are alarmed by this idea of self-sacrifice, and they no longer venture to present it to the human mind. They therefore content themselves with inquiring whether the personal advantage of each member of the community does not consist in working for the good of all; and when they have hit upon some point on which private interest and public interest meet and amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice. Observations of this kind are gradually multiplied: what was only a single remark becomes a general principle; and it is held as a truth that man serves himself in serving his fellow-creatures, and that his private interest is to do good.

I have already shown, in several parts of this work, by what means the inhabitants of the United States almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow-citizens: my present purpose is to point out the general rule which enables them to do so. In the United States hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue; but they maintain that virtue is useful, and prove it every day. The American moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow-creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices; but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made. They have found out that in their country and their age man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and losing all hope of stopping that force, they turn all their thoughts to the direction of it. They therefore do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous. I shall not here enter into the reasons they allege, which would divert me from my subject: suffice it to say that they have convinced their fellow-countrymen.

Montaigne said long ago: "Were I not to follow the straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track." The doctrine of interest rightly understood is not, then, new, but amongst the Americans of our time it finds universal acceptance: it has become popular there; you may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say. It is as often to be met with on the lips of the poor man as of the rich. In Europe the principle of interest is much grosser than it is in America, but at the same time it is less common, and especially it is less avowed; amongst us, men still constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. The Americans, on the contrary, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the State. In this respect I think they frequently fail to do themselves justice; for in the United States, as well as elsewhere, people are sometimes seen to

give way to those disinterested and spontaneous impulses which are natural to man; but the Americans seldom allow that they yield to emotions of this kind; they are more anxious to do honor to their philosophy than to themselves.

I might here pause, without attempting to pass a judgment on what I have described. The extreme difficulty of the subject would be my excuse, but I shall not avail myself of it; and I had rather that my readers, clearly perceiving my object, should refuse to follow me than that I should leave them in suspense. The principle of interest rightly understood is not a lofty one, but it is clear and sure. It does not aim at mighty objects, but it attains without excessive exertion all those at which it aims. As it lies within the reach of all capacities, everyone can without difficulty apprehend and retain it. By its admirable conformity to human weaknesses, it easily obtains great dominion; nor is that dominion precarious, since the principle checks one personal interest by another, and uses, to direct the passions, the very same instrument which excites them. The principle of interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous, but it disciplines a number of citizens in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and, if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. If the principle of interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world, extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare; but I think that gross depravity would then also be less common. The principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents some men from rising far above the level of mankind; but a great number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught and restrained by it. Observe some few individuals, they are lowered by it; survey mankind, it is raised. I am not afraid to say that the principle of interest, rightly understood, appears to me the best suited of all philosophical theories to the wants of the men of our time, and that I regard it as their chief remaining security against themselves. Towards it, therefore, the minds of the moralists of our age should turn; even should they judge it to be incomplete, it must nevertheless be adopted as necessary.

I do not think upon the whole that there is more egotism amongst us than in America; the only difference is, that there it is enlightened—here it is not. Every American will sacrifice a portion of his private interests to preserve the rest; we would fain preserve the whole, and oftentimes the whole is lost. Everybody I see about me seems bent on teaching his contemporaries, by precept and example, that what is useful is never wrong. Will nobody undertake to make them understand how what is right may be useful? No power upon earth can prevent the increasing equality of conditions from inclining the human mind to seek out what is useful, or from leading every member of the community to be wrapped up in himself. It must therefore be expected that personal interest will become more than ever the principal, if not the sole, spring of men's actions; but it remains to be seen how each man will understand his personal interest. If the members of a community, as they become more equal, become more ignorant and coarse, it is difficult to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them; and no one can foretell into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves, lest they should have to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow-creatures. I do not think that the system of interest, as it is professed in America, is, in all its parts, self-evident; but it contains a great number of truths so evident that men, if they are but educated, cannot fail to see them. Educate, then, at any rate; for the age of implicit self-sacrifice and

instinctive virtues is already flitting far away from us, and the time is fast approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to exist without education.

Chapter XIV: Some Reflections On American Manners

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners. The influence of the social and political state of a country upon manners is therefore deserving of serious examination. Manners are, generally, the product of the very basis of the character of a people, but they are also sometimes the result of an arbitrary convention between certain men; thus they are at once natural and acquired. When certain men perceive that they are the foremost persons in society, without contestation and without effort—when they are constantly engaged on large objects, leaving the more minute details to others—and when they live in the enjoyment of wealth which they did not amass and which they do not fear to lose, it may be supposed that they feel a kind of haughty disdain of the petty interests and practical cares of life, and that their thoughts assume a natural greatness, which their language and their manners denote. In democratic countries manners are generally devoid of dignity, because private life is there extremely petty in its character; and they are frequently low, because the mind has few opportunities of rising above the engrossing cares of domestic interests. True dignity in manners consists in always taking one's proper station, neither too high nor too low; and this is as much within the reach of a peasant as of a prince. In democracies all stations appear doubtful; hence it is that the manners of democracies, though often full of arrogance, are commonly wanting in dignity, and, moreover, they are never either well disciplined or accomplished.

The men who live in democracies are too fluctuating for a certain number of them ever to succeed in laying down a code of good breeding, and in forcing people to follow it. Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion, and there is always a certain incoherence in the manners of such times, because they are moulded upon the feelings and notions of each individual, rather than upon an ideal model proposed for general imitation. This, however, is much more perceptible at the time when an aristocracy has just been overthrown than after it has long been destroyed. New political institutions and new social elements then bring to the same places of resort, and frequently compel to live in common, men whose education and habits are still amazingly dissimilar, and this renders the motley composition of society peculiarly visible. The existence of a former strict code of good breeding is still remembered, but what it contained or where it is to be found is already forgotten. Men have lost the common law of manners, and they have not yet made up their minds to do without it; but everyone endeavors to make to himself some sort of arbitrary and variable rule, from the remnant of former usages; so that manners have neither the regularity and the dignity which they often display amongst aristocratic nations, nor the simplicity and freedom which they sometimes assume in democracies; they are at once constrained and without constraint.

This, however, is not the normal state of things. When the equality of conditions is long established and complete, as all men entertain nearly the same notions and do nearly the same

things, they do not require to agree or to copy from one another in order to speak or act in the same manner: their manners are constantly characterized by a number of lesser diversities, but not by any great differences. They are never perfectly alike, because they do not copy from the same pattern; they are never very unlike, because their social condition is the same. At first sight a traveller would observe that the manners of all the Americans are exactly similar; it is only upon close examination that the peculiarities in which they differ may be detected.

The English make game of the manners of the Americans; but it is singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous delineations belonged themselves to the middle classes in England, to whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable: so that these pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing they blame in the United States; they do not perceive that they are deriding themselves, to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their own country.

Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of behavior: many men would willingly endure its vices, who cannot support its manners. I cannot, however, admit that there is nothing commendable in the manners of a democratic people. Amongst aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations. As a democratic people does not possess any models of high breeding, at least it escapes the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them. In democracies manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic nations, but on the other hand they are never so coarse. Neither the coarse oaths of the populace, nor the elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there: the manners of such a people are often vulgar, but they are neither brutal nor mean. I have already observed that in democracies no such thing as a regular code of good breeding can be laid down; this has some inconveniences and some advantages. In aristocracies the rules of propriety impose the same demeanor on everyone; they make all the members of the same class appear alike, in spite of their private inclinations; they adorn and they conceal the natural man. Amongst a democratic people manners are neither so tutored nor so uniform, but they are frequently more sincere. They form, as it were, a light and loosely woven veil, through which the real feelings and private opinions of each individual are easily discernible. The form and the substance of human actions often, therefore, stand in closer relation; and if the great picture of human life be less embellished, it is more true. Thus it may be said, in one sense, that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all.

The feelings, the passions, the virtues, and the vices of an aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy, but not its manners; they are lost, and vanish forever, as soon as the democratic revolution is completed. It would seem that nothing is more lasting than the manners of an aristocratic class, for they are preserved by that class for some time after it has lost its wealth and its power—nor so fleeting, for no sooner have they disappeared than not a trace of them is to be found; and it is scarcely possible to say what they have been as soon as they have ceased to be. A change in the state of society works this miracle, and a few generations suffice to consummate it. The principal characteristics of aristocracy are handed down by history after an aristocracy is destroyed, but the light and exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories almost immediately after its fall. Men can no longer conceive what these manners were when they have ceased to witness them; they are gone, and their departure was unseen, unfelt; for in

order to feel that refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished manners, habit and education must have prepared the heart, and the taste for them is lost almost as easily as the practice of them. Thus not only a democratic people cannot have aristocratic manners, but they neither comprehend nor desire them; and as they never have thought of them, it is to their minds as if such things had never been. Too much importance should not be attached to this loss, but it may well be regretted.

I am aware that it has not unfrequently happened that the same men have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings: the interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may conceal the meanest hearts. But though the manners of aristocracy did not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish virtue itself. It was no ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men, whose every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural elevation of thought and feeling, by delicacy and regularity of taste, and by urbanity of manners. Those manners threw a pleasing illusory charm over human nature; and though the picture was often a false one, it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction.

Chapter XVI: The Effect Of Democracy On Language

If the reader has rightly understood what I have already said on the subject of literature in general, he will have no difficulty in comprehending that species of influence which a democratic social condition and democratic institutions may exercise over language itself, which is the chief instrument of thought.

American authors may truly be said to live more in England than in their own country; since they constantly study the English writers, and take them every day for their models. But such is not the case with the bulk of the population, which is more immediately subjected to the peculiar causes acting upon the United States. It is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid, if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.

Englishmen of education, and more competent judges than I can be myself of the nicer shades of expression, have frequently assured me that the language of the educated classes in the United States is notably different from that of the educated classes in Great Britain. They complain not only that the Americans have brought into use a number of new words—the difference and the distance between the two countries might suffice to explain that much—but that these new words are more especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts, or the language of trade. They assert, in addition to this, that old English words are often used by the Americans in new acceptations; and lastly, that the inhabitants of the United States frequently intermingle their phraseology in the strangest manner, and sometimes place words together which are always kept apart in the language of the mother-country. These remarks, which were made to me at various times by persons who appeared to be worthy of credit, led me to reflect upon the subject; and my reflections brought me, by theoretical reasoning, to the same point at which my informants had arrived by practical observation.

In aristocracies, language must naturally partake of that state of repose in which everything remains. Few new words are coined, because few new things are made; and even if new things

were made, they would be designated by known words, whose meaning has been determined by tradition. If it happens that the human mind bestirs itself at length, or is roused by light breaking in from without, the novel expressions which are introduced are characterized by a degree of learning, intelligence, and philosophy, which shows that they do not originate in a democracy. After the fall of Constantinople had turned the tide of science and literature towards the west, the French language was almost immediately invaded by a multitude of new words, which had all Greek or Latin roots. An erudite neologism then sprang up in France which was confined to the educated classes, and which produced no sensible effect, or at least a very gradual one, upon the people. All the nations of Europe successively exhibited the same change. Milton alone introduced more than six hundred words into the English language, almost all derived from the Latin, the Greek, or the Hebrew. The constant agitation which prevails in a democratic community tends unceasingly, on the contrary, to change the character of the language, as it does the aspect of affairs. In the midst of this general stir and competition of minds, a great number of new ideas are formed, old ideas are lost, or reappear, or are subdivided into an infinite variety of minor shades. The consequence is, that many words must fall into desuetude, and others must be brought into use.

Democratic nations love change for its own sake; and this is seen in their language as much as in their politics. Even when they do not need to change words, they sometimes feel a wish to transform them. The genius of a democratic people is not only shown by the great number of words they bring into use, but also by the nature of the ideas these new words represent. Amongst such a people the majority lays down the law in language as well as in everything else; its prevailing spirit is as manifest in that as in other respects. But the majority is more engaged in business than in study—in political and commercial interests than in philosophical speculation or literary pursuits. Most of the words coined or adopted for its use will therefore bear the mark of these habits; they will mainly serve to express the wants of business, the passions of party, or the details of the public administration. In these departments the language will constantly spread, whilst on the other hand it will gradually lose ground in metaphysics and theology.

As to the source from which democratic nations are wont to derive their new expressions, and the manner in which they go to work to coin them, both may easily be described. Men living in democratic countries know but little of the language which was spoken at Athens and at Rome, and they do not care to dive into the lore of antiquity to find the expression they happen to want. If they have sometimes recourse to learned etymologies, vanity will induce them to search at the roots of the dead languages; but erudition does not naturally furnish them with its resources. The most ignorant, it sometimes happens, will use them most. The eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek or Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote from learning, the more pompous and erudite is its appellation. Thus the French rope-dancers have transformed themselves into acrobates and funambules.

In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages, democratic nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues; for their mutual intercourse becomes perpetual, and the inhabitants of different countries imitate each other the more readily as they grow more like each other every day.

But it is principally upon their own languages that democratic nations attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn into general circulation.

The most common expedient employed by democratic nations to make an innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted meaning to an expression already in use. This method is very simple, prompt, and convenient; no learning is required to use it aright, and ignorance itself rather facilitates the practice; but that practice is most dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way, they sometimes render the signification which it retains as ambiguous as that which it acquires. An author begins by a slight deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. A second writer twists the sense of the expression in another way; a third takes possession of it for another purpose; and as there is no common appeal to the sentence of a permanent tribunal which may definitely settle the signification of the word, it remains in an ambiguous condition. The consequence is that writers hardly ever appear to dwell upon a single thought, but they always seem to point their aim at a knot of ideas, leaving the reader to judge which of them has been hit. This is a deplorable consequence of democracy. I had rather that the language should be made hideous with words imported from the Chinese, the Tartars, or the Hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our own language should become indeterminate. Harmony and uniformity are only secondary beauties in composition; many of these things are conventional, and, strictly speaking, it is possible to forego them; but without clear phraseology there is no good language.

The principle of equality necessarily introduces several other changes into language. In aristocratic ages, when each nation tends to stand aloof from all others and likes to have distinct characteristics of its own, it often happens that several peoples which have a common origin become nevertheless estranged from each other, so that, without ceasing to understand the same language, they no longer all speak it in the same manner. In these ages each nation is divided into a certain number of classes, which see but little of each other, and do not intermingle. Each of these classes contracts, and invariably retains, habits of mind peculiar to itself, and adopts by choice certain words and certain terms, which afterwards pass from generation to generation, like their estates. The same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a language of the rich—a language of the citizen and a language of the nobility—a learned language and a vulgar one. The deeper the divisions, and the more impassable the barriers of society become, the more must this be the case. I would lay a wager, that amongst the castes of India there are amazing variations of language, and that there is almost as much difference between the language of the pariah and that of the Brahmin as there is in their dress. When, on the contrary, men, being no longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse—when castes are destroyed, and the classes of society are recruited and intermixed with each other, all the words of a language are mingled. Those which are unsuitable to the greater number perish; the remainder form a common store, whence everyone chooses pretty nearly at random. Almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of European nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in the New World, and it is disappearing every day from the old countries.

The influence of this revolution in social conditions is as much felt in style as it is in phraseology. Not only does everyone use the same words, but a habit springs up of using them without discrimination. The rules which style had set up are almost abolished: the line ceases to be drawn between expressions which seem by their very nature vulgar, and other which appear to be refined. Persons springing from different ranks of society carry the terms and expressions they are accustomed to use with them, into whatever circumstances they may pass; thus the origin of words is lost like the origin of individuals, and there is as much confusion in language as there is in society.

I am aware that in the classification of words there are rules which do not belong to one form of society any more than to another, but which are derived from the nature of things. Some expressions and phrases are vulgar, because the ideas they are meant to express are low in themselves; others are of a higher character, because the objects they are intended to designate are naturally elevated. No intermixture of ranks will ever efface these differences. But the principle of equality cannot fail to root out whatever is merely conventional and arbitrary in the forms of thought. Perhaps the necessary classification which I pointed out in the last sentence will always be less respected by a democratic people than by any other, because amongst such a people there are no men who are permanently disposed by education, culture, and leisure to study the natural laws of language, and who cause those laws to be respected by their own observance of them.

I shall not quit this topic without touching on a feature of democratic languages, which is perhaps more characteristic of them than any other. It has already been shown that democratic nations have a taste, and sometimes a passion, for general ideas, and that this arises from their peculiar merits and defects. This liking for general ideas is displayed in democratic languages by the continual use of generic terms or abstract expressions, and by the manner in which they are employed. This is the great merit and the great imperfection of these languages. Democratic nations are passionately addicted to generic terms or abstract expressions, because these modes of speech enlarge thought, and assist the operations of the mind by enabling it to include several objects in a small compass. A French democratic writer will be apt to say capacites in the abstract for men of capacity, and without particularizing the objects to which their capacity is applied: he will talk about actualities to designate in one word the things passing before his eyes at the instant; and he will comprehend under the term eventualities whatever may happen in the universe, dating from the moment at which he speaks. Democratic writers are perpetually coining words of this kind, in which they sublimate into further abstraction the abstract terms of the language. Nay, more, to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity. Thus they would say in French, "La force des choses veut que les capacites gouvernent."

I cannot better illustrate what I mean than by my own example. I have frequently used the word "equality" in an absolute sense—nay, I have personified equality in several places; thus I have said that equality does such and such things, or refrains from doing others. It may be affirmed that the writers of the age of Louis XIV would not have used these expressions: they would never have thought of using the word "equality" without applying it to some particular object; and they would rather have renounced the term altogether than have consented to make a living personage of it.

These abstract terms which abound in democratic languages, and which are used on every occasion without attaching them to any particular fact, enlarge and obscure the thoughts they are intended to convey; they render the mode of speech more succinct, and the idea contained in it less clear. But with regard to language, democratic nations prefer obscurity to labor. I know not indeed whether this loose style has not some secret charm for those who speak and write amongst these nations. As the men who live there are frequently left to the efforts of their individual powers of mind, they are almost always a prey to doubt; and as their situation in life is forever changing, they are never held fast to any of their opinions by the certain tenure of their fortunes. Men living in democratic countries are, then, apt to entertain unsettled ideas, and they require loose expressions to convey them. As they never know whether the idea they express to-day will be appropriate to the new position they may occupy to-morrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms. An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom: you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed.

Amongst all nations, generic and abstract terms form the basis of language. I do not, therefore, affect to expel these terms from democratic languages; I simply remark that men have an especial tendency, in the ages of democracy, to multiply words of this kind—to take them always by themselves in their most abstract acceptation, and to use them on all occasions, even when the nature of the discourse does not require them.

Chapter X: Why The Americans Are More Addicted To Practical Than To Theoretical Science

If a democratic state of society and democratic institutions do not stop the career of the human mind, they incontestably guide it in one direction in preference to another. Their effects, thus circumscribed, are still exceedingly great; and I trust I may be pardoned if I pause for a moment to survey them. We had occasion, in speaking of the philosophical method of the American people, to make several remarks which must here be turned to account.

Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms. These general tendencies are principally discernible in the peculiar subject of this chapter. Those who cultivate the sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow-man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man's authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbors' opinions. Scientific precedents have very little weight with them; they are never long detained by the subtilty of the schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin; they penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one.

The mind may, as it appears to me, divide science into three parts. The first comprises the most theoretical principles, and those more abstract notions whose application is either unknown or very remote. The second is composed of those general truths which still belong to pure theory, but lead, nevertheless, by a straight and short road to practical results. Methods of application and means of execution make up the third. Each of these different portions of science may be separately cultivated, although reason and experience show that none of them can prosper long, if it be absolutely cut off from the two others.

In America the purely practical part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency which is, I think, discernible, though in a less degree, amongst all democratic nations.

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. We do not find there, as amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state of repose because it is well off; and another which does not venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition. Everyone is actively in motion: some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of this universal tumult—this incessant conflict of jarring interests—this continual stride of men after fortune—where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect? How can the mind dwell upon any single point, when everything whirls around it, and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course? But the permanent agitation which subsists in the bosom of a peaceable and established democracy, must be distinguished from the tumultuous and revolutionary movements which almost always attend the birth and growth of democratic society. When a violent revolution occurs amongst a highly civilized people, it cannot fail to give a sudden impulse to their feelings and their opinions. This is more particularly true of democratic revolutions, which stir up all the classes of which a people is composed, and beget, at the same time, inordinate ambition in the breast of every member of the community. The French made most surprising advances in the exact sciences at the very time at which they were finishing the destruction of the remains of their former feudal society; yet this sudden fecundity is not to be attributed to democracy, but to the unexampled revolution which attended its growth. What happened at that period was a special incident, and it would be unwise to regard it as the test of a general principle. Great revolutions are not more common amongst democratic nations than amongst others: I am even inclined to believe that they are less so. But there prevails amongst those populations a small distressing motion—a sort of incessant jostling of men—which annoys and disturbs the mind, without exciting or elevating it. Men who live in democratic communities not only seldom indulge in meditation, but they naturally entertain very little esteem for it. A democratic state of society and democratic institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active life; and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life, are not always suited to a contemplative one. The man of action is frequently obliged to content himself with the best he can get, because he would never accomplish his purpose if he chose to carry every detail to perfection. He has perpetually occasion to rely on ideas which he has not had leisure to search to the bottom; for he is much more frequently aided by the opportunity of

an idea than by its strict accuracy; and, in the long run, he risks less in making use of some false principles, than in spending his time in establishing all his principles on the basis of truth. The world is not led by long or learned demonstrations; a rapid glance at particular incidents, the daily study of the fleeting passions of the multitude, the accidents of the time, and the art of turning them to account, decide all its affairs.

In the ages in which active life is the condition of almost everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect; and, on the other hand, to depreciate below their true standard its slower and deeper labors. This opinion of the public influences the judgment of the men who cultivate the sciences; they are persuaded that they may succeed in those pursuits without meditation, or deterred from such pursuits as demand it.

There are several methods of studying the sciences. Amongst a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of the few. A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another. I do not doubt that in a few minds and far between, an ardent, inexhaustible love of truth springs up, self-supported, and living in ceaseless fruition without ever attaining the satisfaction which it seeks. This ardent love it is—this proud, disinterested love of what is true—which raises men to the abstract sources of truth, to draw their mother-knowledge thence. If Pascal had had nothing in view but some large gain, or even if he had been stimulated by the love of fame alone, I cannot conceive that he would ever have been able to rally all the powers of his mind, as he did, for the better discovery of the most hidden things of the Creator. When I see him, as it were, tear his soul from the midst of all the cares of life to devote it wholly to these researches, and, prematurely snapping the links which bind the frame to life, die of old age before forty, I stand amazed, and I perceive that no ordinary cause is at work to produce efforts so extra-ordinary.

The future will prove whether these passions, at once so rare and so productive, come into being and into growth as easily in the midst of democratic as in aristocratic communities. For myself, I confess that I am slow to believe it. In aristocratic society, the class which gives the tone to opinion, and has the supreme guidance of affairs, being permanently and hereditarily placed above the multitude, naturally conceives a lofty idea of itself and of man. It loves to invent for him noble pleasures, to carve out splendid objects for his ambition. Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions; but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even whilst they indulge in them. The effect is greatly to raise the general pitch of society. In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man. These opinions exert their influence on those who cultivate the sciences, as well as on the rest of the community. They facilitate the natural impulse of the mind to the highest regions of thought, and they naturally prepare it to conceive a sublime—nay, almost a divine—love of truth. Men of science at such periods are consequently carried away by theory; and it even happens that they frequently conceive an inconsiderate contempt for the practical part of learning. "Archimedes," says Plutarch, "was of so lofty a spirit, that he never condescended to write any treatise on the manner of constructing all these engines of offence and defence. And as he held this science of inventing and putting together engines, and all arts generally speaking which tended to any useful end in

practice, to be vile, low, and mercenary, he spent his talents and his studious hours in writing of those things only whose beauty and subtilty had in them no admixture of necessity." Such is the aristocratic aim of science; in democratic nations it cannot be the same.

The greater part of the men who constitute these nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification. As they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it. To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits—that it understands, and that it respects them. In aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called upon to furnish gratification to the mind; in democracies, to the body. You may be sure that the more a nation is democratic, enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer gain, fame, and even power on their authors. For in democracies the working class takes a part in public affairs; and public honors, as well as pecuniary remuneration, may be awarded to those who deserve them. In a community thus organized it may easily be conceived that the human mind may be led insensibly to the neglect of theory; and that it is urged, on the contrary, with unparalleled vehemence to the applications of science, or at least to that portion of theoretical science which is necessary to those who make such applications. In vain will some innate propensity raise the mind towards the loftier spheres of the intellect; interest draws it down to the middle zone. There it may develop all its energy and restless activity, there it may engender all its wonders. These very Americans, who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced into navigation an engine which changes the aspect of the world.

Assuredly I do not content that the democratic nations of our time are destined to witness the extinction of the transcendent luminaries of man's intelligence, nor even that no new lights will ever start into existence. At the age at which the world has now arrived, and amongst so many cultivated nations, perpetually excited by the fever of productive industry, the bonds which connect the different parts of science together cannot fail to strike the observation; and the taste for practical science itself, if it be enlightened, ought to lead men not to neglect theory. In the midst of such numberless attempted applications of so many experiments, repeated every day, it is almost impossible that general laws should not frequently be brought to light; so that great discoveries would be frequent, though great inventors be rare. I believe, moreover, in the high calling of scientific minds. If the democratic principle does not, on the one hand, induce men to cultivate science for its own sake, on the other it enormously increases the number of those who do cultivate it. Nor is it credible that, from amongst so great a multitude no speculative genius should from time to time arise, inflamed by the love of truth alone. Such a one, we may be sure, would dive into the deepest mysteries of nature, whatever be the spirit of his country or his age. He requires no assistance in his course—enough that he be not checked in it.

All that I mean to say is this:—permanent inequality of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and sterile research of abstract truths; whilst the social condition and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek the immediate and useful practical results of

the sciences. This tendency is natural and inevitable: it is curious to be acquainted with it, and it may be necessary to point it out. If those who are called upon to guide the nations of our time clearly discerned from afar off these new tendencies, which will soon be irresistible, they would understand that, possessing education and freedom, men living in democratic ages cannot fail to improve the industrial part of science; and that henceforward all the efforts of the constituted authorities ought to be directed to support the highest branches of learning, and to foster the nobler passion for science itself. In the present age the human mind must be coerced into theoretical studies; it runs of its own accord to practical applications; and, instead of perpetually referring it to the minute examination of secondary effects, it is well to divert it from them sometimes, in order to raise it up to the contemplation of primary causes. Because the civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the barbarians, we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees, and expire of itself. By dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill-pursued. New methods could no longer be invented, and men would continue to apply, without intelligence, and without art, scientific processes no longer understood.

When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there; and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered some traces of the higher branches of science which were lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry: the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there. This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people. The Chinese, in following the track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the latter had been guided. They still used the formula, without asking for its meaning: they retained the instrument, but they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. The Chinese, then, had lost the power of change; for them to improve was impossible. They were compelled, at all times and in all points, to imitate their predecessors, lest they should stray into utter darkness, by deviating for an instant from the path already laid down for them. The source of human knowledge was all but dry; and though the stream still ran on, it could neither swell its waters nor alter its channel. Notwithstanding this, China had subsisted peaceably for centuries. The invaders who had conquered the country assumed the manners of the inhabitants, and order prevailed there. A sort of physical prosperity was everywhere discernible: revolutions were rare, and war was, so to speak, unknown.

It is then a fallacy to flatter ourselves with the reflection that the barbarians are still far from us; for if there be some nations which allow civilization to be torn from their grasp, there are others who trample it themselves under their feet.

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