8/14/2003
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Introduction
The current crisis of civic life in the United States has given rise to a new sector
in the academic industry, especially in American political science. A broad inquiry into
the defects and deficiencies of American civic identity was already well underway before
the renewed concern about “patriotism” spurred by the September 11 attacks and recent
military adventures abroad. The new ‘civic imperative’ has for the most part taken on a
Tocquevillian cant in the promotion of a neo-republican model of citizenship, which is
supposed to serve as a corrective for the pathetic civic ethos that has come to characterize
citizenship in the United States.
In the new civic imperative, the theoretical culprit behind America’s civic pathos
has been one or another of several forms of liberal individualism, the effects of which
appear to have become more sharply pronounced over the last 40 years (Putnam, 2000).
In that time, it has also become increasingly obvious that America’s declining interest in
the public good may be much more complicated than today’s civicrats believe. The
falling off of membership in civil associations, rudeness, road rage, growing inequalities,
gated communities, the growth of crime as well as law-and-order attitudes, contempt for
the poor, the evisceration of support for the welfare state, the incessant search for
privatopia and its concomitant, the triumph of meanness,
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and even the decline of ‘social
capital’ itself – among many other things – are, on this alternative view, merely
symptoms of a more fundamental problem, the growth of a kind of selfish, self-centered
individual. Putnam himself points the finger at television, at the decline of participation
Convention