Gee’s Reviews > The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom > Status Update

real problem is not the loss of old contexts but rather the failure of our present democratic and industrial scene to create new contexts of association and moral cohesion within which the smaller allegiances of men will assume both functional and psychological significance. It is almost as if the forces that weakened the old have remained to obstruct the new channels of association

Modern philosophies of freedom have tended to emphasize, as we have seen, either the individual's release from power of every kind—generally, through an appeal to natural rights—or the individual's participation in some single structure of authority like the General Will, which replaces all other structures.

modern democratic thought has settled single-mindedly upon the same elements that are crucial to the political community: the abstract individual and the State.

Individual versus State is as false an antithesis today as it ever was. The State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does on what it takes from competing social relationships—family, labor union, profession, local community, and church

ours is a State characterized by ever-rising centralization of function and authority. Both characteristics—social atomization and political centralization—are the unmistakable attributes of the beginnings of mass society. And because of these social and political realities the requirements of liberal democracy

State and individual were the two elements of the unitary theory of democracy. The abstract individual was conceived as the sole bearer of rights and responsibilities. The State, conceived in the image of people who lay incorruptible beneath the superstructure of society, would be the area of fraternity and secular rehabilitation. All that lay between these two elements..were suspect for their fettering influence

The longing for community which now exists as perhaps the most menacing fact of the Western world will not be exorcised by incantations drawn from the writings of Bentham, Mill, and Spencer. No theory of freedom in our age will be either effective or relevant that does not recognize the present centrality of the quest for community

the conditions we see spreading in the Western world today: on the one hand, enlarging masses of socially “free,” insecure, individuals; on the other, the constant increase in the custodial powers of a State that looms ever larger as the only significant refuge for individuals who insist upon escaping from the moral consequences of individualism

Economic freedom cannot be separated from the non-individualistic contexts of association and community of moral purpose. Capitalism has become weakest, as a system of allegiances and incentives, where these social resources have become weak and where no new forms of association and symbolism have arisen to replace the old

To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms