INTRODUCTION

Introduction—
Modernity and Its Discontents

Modernity's Paradox

Capitalist economics and liberal democratic politics have given many citizens of Western societies two unique gifts: freedom from economics and liberation from politics. Raised by economic growth from the consciousness of scarcity, they can forget the nitty-gritty of survival and contemplate the building of culture. Released by politics from politics, they can, unlike those who lived before them, lead their lives unaware of the struggles for power taking place around them. The middle classes of Western societies, unconstrained by a real or imagined state of nature, are in a position to make for themselves the kind of social world they desire.

Yet for all its success, modernity is an ambivalent condition. There is, not far beneath the surface, a sense that something is missing: economic growth and political freedom do not seem enough. Max Weber's image of a society without a soul has become something of a popular lament. People are not always articulate about their discontents, but numerous signs—unstable voting patterns, a return to religious orthodoxy, increases in antisocial behavior, opposition to scientific and technological advance, a withdrawal from public issues into private worlds, and the rise of irrationality—indicate, for reasons both sound and unsound, a feeling of discontent with progress.^[1] Capitalist economics and liberal democratic politics have prepared the basis for the good life, but its actual attainment seems just beyond the possible.

The discontents of modernity may have to do with the difficulty facing liberal democratic citizens whenever they make their daily decisions. Sev-

ered from traditions and ties of place, they are free to make choices about how to lead their lives irrespective of the actions of others, yet, because they live in complex societies organized by large states and even larger economies, they are dependent on everyone around them to make their societies work. The essence of the liberal condition is freedom, yet a people who are completely free are a people unencumbered by obligations, whereas economic growth, democratic government, and therefore freedom itself are produced through extensive, and quite encumbered, dependence on others. Unlike Rousseau's natural man, who was born free but was everywhere in chains, modern social individuals are born into chains of interdependence but yearn, most of the time, to be free.

The citizens of capitalist liberal democracies understand the freedom they possess, appreciate its value, defend its prerogatives. But they are confused when it comes to recognizing the social obligations that make their freedom possible in the first place. They are, in a word, unclear about the moral codes by which they ought to live. A moral code is a set of rules that define people's obligations to one another. Neither the liberal market nor the democratic state is comfortable with explicit discussions of the obligations such codes ought to impose. Both view social obligation as a byproduct of individual action. Both prefer present benefits to sacrifices for future generations. Both emphasize rights rather than obligations. Both value procedures over purpose. When capitalism and liberal democracy combine, people are given the potential to determine for themselves what their obligations to others ought to be, but are then given few satisfactory guidelines on how to fulfill them.

Despite their discomfort in discussing moral obligation, modern liberal democrats have a greater need to do so than any people who came before. While the distinction between traditional and modern societies can be overdone, there is little doubt that smaller-scale societies characterized by handed-down authority present the problem of moral obligation in a different light than do those that value individual mobility and economic and political rights. In the former kind of society, moral obligations tend to be both tightly inscribed and limited in scope. On the one hand, rules are expected to be strictly followed; on the other, the number of others to whom the rules are expected to apply are limited—by blood, geography, ethnicity, or political boundaries. Moral obligation is "easy" in a double sense: individuals themselves are not called on to act as moral agents, since authority structures formulate rules of social interaction for them, and the others to whom they are tied by those rules are known to them or share with them certain known characteristics.

Both the scope and the specificity of moral obligations change as societies become more modern. The sheer complexity of modern forms of social organization creates an ever-widening circle of newer obligations beyond those of family and locality. Modern liberal democrats, for one, have obligations to perfect strangers, to those passing others who populate the bureaucracies and urban living arrangements of all Western societies.^[2] They have further obligations, at yet another remove from the traditional milieu, to what has been called the "generalized other,"^[3] a term that might include, for example, those who will live in the future and will therefore be dependent on decisions made by the present generation. To be modern is to face the consequences of decisions made by complete strangers while making decisions that will affect the lives of people one will never know. The scope of moral obligation—especially at a time when issues of possible nuclear war, limitations on economic growth, and ecological destruction are public concerns—seems to be without limits.

Yet if modernity expands the scope of moral obligations, it also thins their specificity. Rather than following narrowly inscribed rules that are expected to be applied strictly and with little tolerance for ambiguity, modern liberal democrats find themselves facing unprecedented moral dilemmas without firm agreement, not merely about what their moral rules are, but even about where they can be found . Religion, to take the most prominent example, is certainly no longer the source of moral authority it once was. Even when one can pronounce the modern age a bit less secular owing to an upsurge in religious affiliation and belief, authoritative moral codes based on God's commands no longer guide much conduct in the modern world. Neither in Italy nor in the United States can the Catholic church assume that its positions on moral issues will be followed by the bulk of its membership; splits between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews have made it clear that agreement within that religion on morality is nonexistent; and Protestant theology has become either highly secular or too strict to be obeyed even by its own preachers.

Nor is philosophy an adequate source of ideas about moral behavior. Moral philosophy, especially in Great Britain and the United States, has developed into an effort to establish the rule of reason, to search for universal standards of justice. (One looks for procedure, rules that regulate not only what we do but also how we do it, ironically making morality morally neutral.) The result, William Sullivan has written, is "a mistrust of the moral meanings embodied in tradition and contingent, historical experience."^[4] Relying on logic, argumentative ability, and abstract formulations of universal criteria of justice, contemporary moral philosophy, for

all its brilliance, tends toward obfuscation or restatements of the obvious. Thus a recent exploration into the thickets of moral obligation (one of the better ones, actually), wishing to make a case that protection of the vulnerable demands a special moral responsibility, relies on logic and on argument against competing moral philosophers—not content to argue instead that we have a special responsibility to the vulnerable simply because it is right.^[5]

Literature, furthermore, can no longer be counted on to serve as a guide to moral understandings. "For our time," Lionel Trilling once wrote, "the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years."^[6] Yet the novel of manners and morals, the tradition from Jane Austen to E. M. Forster that explored so deeply questions of social obligation, has become an anachronism, replaced, as John Gardner noted, by introspective, if not narcissistic, explorations of inner worlds.^[7] In one of his political essays, E. M. Forster said that modern people needed to "combine the new economy and the old morality."^[8] That is precisely what no one today seems to know how to do. The question of personal responsibility that Forster explored in such microscopic detail in his great moral novel Howard's End seems old-fashioned to contemporary readers, who, like that novel's antagonist Henry Wilcox, believe that "as civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it's absurd to pretend that anyone is responsible personally."^[9]

Finally, modern politics, like modern literature, has also lost much of its moral sensibility. The left, which once prided itself on its ethical awareness, no longer speaks a resonant language of moral obligation. Its great objective, the welfare state, gave material benefits to modern people and created an important presumption in favor of equality, but the ethical energy that inspired its early years has for some time been on the wane. Where the welfare state has achieved its greatest success—in Scandinavia—is also where the welfare state has difficulty expressing a compelling moral vision, as I will argue in Chapters 5 and 6. Social democracy there and elsewhere has become defensive, holding on to the gains of the past, unwilling to stake out a terrain for the future. It often represents quite well the interests of its major constituency, the labor movement, but it has difficulty speaking of solidarity within classes, let alone solidarity between them.

The moral exhaustion of the left should be good news to the right, but such does not appear to be the case. The libertarian right, which believes that the market will solve all problems, is, of all political ideologies in the modern world, the most amoral, unwilling even to allow the possibility

that people have any obligations other than to themselves. This moral nihilism is in contrast to the position of the fundamentalist right, for if market theories are all choice and no values, groups like the Moral Majority are all values and no choice. The religious right does have a moral vision, but it is one so confining in its calls for blind obedience to a handed-down moral code that it would negate all the gains of freedom that modern people have acquired. Nor, finally, do those known as "neoconservative" possess an appropriate moral language for modern politics. They ought to, for as former socialists they understand the need for binding ties in society (unlike the libertarian right), while as conservatives they insist on tradition and the importance of morality (unlike the relativistic left). Although there are neoconservatives who have ventured into moral-issue thickets (see Chapter 4), most have preferred to turn their attention from moral questions of how society should work to practical ones of how it actually does.

When uncertainty about how to treat others is compounded by a greater number of others to treat, moral obligation under modern conditions becomes ever more complicated. Because they are free but at the same time unsure what it means to be obligated, modern liberal democrats need one another more but trust one another less. At a time when they have difficulty appreciating the past, they are called on to respect the needs of future generations. When they seem not to know how to preserve small families, they must strengthen large societies. As local communities disintegrate, a world community becomes more necessary than ever. Modern people need to care about the fates of strangers, yet do not even know how to treat their loved ones. Moral rules seem to evaporate the more they are needed. The paradox of modernity is that the more people depend on one another owing to an ever-widening circle of obligations, the fewer are the agreed-upon guidelines for organizing moral rules that can account for those obligations.

Three Theories of Moral Regulation

The decline of traditional notions about moral obligation (rooted in notions of Christian charity or faith in the virtue of an upper class) is often, especially by those of conservative disposition, seen as the cause of modernity's unease. The distance between the need for a moral code and the inability of modern societies to find one becomes a problem so incapable of solution that the forces of modernity which produced it ought to be dis-

trusted, if not condemned. From such a perspective, the things that make modern liberal democracies rich and stable will always lack meaning, while things that give people meaning will have no effect on what makes their societies rich and stable. It is a short step from such a conclusion to a premodern nostalgia for some kind of organic moral community that is alleged to have been destroyed by the forces of modernity (or to a postmodern "deconstructive" consciousness that is distrustful of the binding power of any moral rules, indeed of any rational and intellectual understanding of modernity and its dilemmas).

Traditional morality, however, is not the only morality. Precisely because the moral codes of yesterday constrained the potential of an individual's self-development, they cannot be effective guides for the social ties that make contemporary Western societies work. Economic growth and political democracy are, presumably, here to stay, and so long as they are, moral ideas that protect the few against the many or call on large numbers to stultify their human potential are neither likely to be effective nor justifiable. The problem is not that modernity undermines morality but that modernity displaces moral discourse into new—one is tempted to say modern—forms.

In looking to religion, philosophy, literature, or politics to find the rules of moral obligation, we look in the wrong place. There is an arena in which modern liberal democrats discuss problems of moral obligation, and often with surprising vigor. I will argue in this book that liberal democracies have done away neither with moral codes nor with institutions and practices that embody them. The gap between the need for codes of moral obligation and the reality of societies that are confused about where these codes can be found is filled, however uncomfortably, by the contemporary social sciences.^[10] Even those social sciences that pride themselves on rigorous value neutrality, insisting that they are only describing how people do act, not advocating how they should, contain implicit (and often explicit) statements of what people's obligations to one another should be. (The reliance on numbers, statistical techniques, and algebraic reasoning so common in modern social science journals is not, in my opinion, an alternative to moral philosophy but its continuation, an extension of an effort that began with Hobbes and Hume to systematize moral reasoning, greatly aided, these days, by a host of new technologies.) Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, was by trade a professor of moral philosophy. His followers, though themselves often unwilling to admit it, have the same calling.

For all their tendency toward jargon and abstraction, the ideas of social scientists remain the most common guideposts for moral obligation in a secular, nonliterary age. (Witness the popularity of Milton Friedman's ideas on television or on the best-seller lists, let alone the constant attempts of mass media to find academic experts to comment on one social trend after another.) Moreover, the social sciences contain not only a moral theory of how people should act toward one another, but also a large body of empirical information about how they actually do. As the Kinsey Reports first illustrated, and as every survey since demonstrates again, when all are interested in how others behave but few are secure that they are behaving correctly, social scientists are the closest we have to savants. The contemporary social sciences, despite occasional claims to the contrary, have not done especially well as predictive sciences. One reason they nonetheless continue to flourish is because they are a particularly modern form of secular religion, involving, in their own idiosyncratic language, fundamental questions of what kind of people we who are modern are.

If the social sciences are taken as the theater of moral debate in modern society, the problem facing modern liberal democrats is not a lack of moral guidelines but a plentitude. Instead of having one source for their moral codes, they have at least three: economics, political science, and sociology. (I have not included anthropology in this list, not out of lack of respect—quite the contrary, actually—but because its focus on modern societies tends to be indirect.) Corresponding to each are three sets of institutions or practices charged with the maintenance of moral responsibility: those of the market, the state, and what was once called civil society. When the theory of each social science is linked to the practices it favors, quite distinct approaches to the problem of how to structure obligations to the self and others emerge.

Society works best, says the economic approach, when there exists a mechanism for enabling people to maximize rationally their self-interest. Yet it is an extremely rare economist who stops at the point of simply asserting the ethical benefits of self-interest; most continue on to make a point about obligations to others as well: because the pursuit of my self-interest contributes to some collective good—economic growth or some form of welfare optimality—my obligation to you is to do what is best for me. That way of thinking about obligations, responds the political approach, is naive. People are not, as James Madison once told us, angels, and given the chance to escape their obligations to others, they will. Therefore, some restraint on their desires is necessary; if obligations to the com-

munity as a whole are not regulated by government, they will not exist at all. Both your ideas are too pessimistic, answers the sociological approach. People have a remarkable capacity, given them by the societies they create, to develop their own rules of cooperation and solidarity. The trick is to find a way to trust them so that they will do it. (It ought to be clear that not all economists share the economic approach, not all political scientists the political, and so on; if the disciplinary names are used from time to time in what follows, then, it is for stylistic, not intellectual, reasons.)

In comparing these three approaches to moral obligation, one is tempted to judge them on the basis of whether individual rights or collective needs are given the highest priority. By that standard, the economic approach would be valued by those placing an ethical primacy on freedom above any other value, and structuralist sociology or conservative political theory would be valued by those who emphasize obligations to the group before individual rights. Yet this debate, which goes on endlessly in social theory, tends to obscure an important point: all three approaches, because they seek to address the condition of modern liberal democrats, are theories of regulation as well as theories of freedom. It is certainly true that modern people have obtained, and value highly, individual freedom. But they also have obtained, even if they find them more frustrating and often seem to value them less, complex societies and large-scale institutions that provide them with jobs, wealth, and goods. Modernity would be just as thoroughly destroyed by complete freedom as it would be by complete regimentation.^[11] Because the fear of anarchy is at least as strong as the fear of authority in the development of the social sciences, rationalizing the art of saying no is as important to their development as justifying the desire to say yes.

To be relevant to modern conditions of social complexity, any theory of moral obligation needs to develop an adequate explanation of why people must take into account the effects of their actions on one another. The economic approach, although emphasizing self-interest, does not deny such interdependence. Individual action is generally viewed as purposive, directed toward some goal (such as the creation of wealth) that is beyond the capacity of any one individual to produce independently. Milton Friedman, for example, points out that "specialization of function and division of labor" could not advance if productive units were households and if we relied only on barter. "In a modern society," he notes, "we have gone much farther." Modern economies force us to rely on cooperation, Friedman argues. "Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the

economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals—the technique of the market place."^[12]

Economists with a somewhat more complex theoretical approach, however, recognize that the market is anything but a voluntary mechanism for organizing obligations to others. As two other defenders of the market put it, "Only the romantic anarchist thinks there is a 'natural harmony' among persons that will eliminate all conflict in the absence of rules. . . . Rules define the private spaces within which each of us can carry on our own activities."^[13] One of the enormous advantages of relying on the market to structure obligations to others is that it is an extremely efficient mechanism for insuring obedience to such rules. Gary Becker has expressed it as follows: "Prices and other market instruments allocate the scarce resources within a society and thereby constrain the desires of participants and coordinate their actions. In the economic approach, these market instruments perform most, if not all, of the functions assigned to 'structure' in sociological theory."^[14]

The traditional critique of structural theories in sociology—that they have an overdeveloped conception of man so constrained by society that he has little autonomy and discretion^[15] —would seem, from Becker's remarks, to apply as well to economic theories stressing individual choice. It actually applies more. Economic approaches to moral regulation, indeed most sets of moral assumptions based on the premises of rational choice or methodological individualism, tell me that I am free to find the best way to satisfy my obligations to others. If I fail to do so, however, there are always back-up mechanisms—prices in economics, constitutions in public-choice theory, mass society in the theories of sociologists influenced by economics—to insure that I eventually will. There is one major difference between these back-up mechanisms and the emphasis on social structure and norms found in sociology: it becomes enormously difficult for me to negotiate between my individual needs and the constraints placed on them when the latter are hazy at best, hidden at worst. I am forced, so long as I operate by individualistic moral codes, to organize my obligations to others by having a conversation with an authority I cannot see. The invisible hand is clenched into an invisible fist.

The opposite problem exists with those theories of moral regulation that emphasize collective obligation over individual freedom. In some contemporary political science, as well as in the Durkheimian reification of so-

ciety or various forms of structuralism, obligations to groups tend to weaken the moral character of individuals. When, for example, government collects my taxes and distributes the money to others, it not only assumes responsibilities that would otherwise be mine, but it also decides to whom my obligations ought to extend. I am, therefore, not obligated to real people living real lives around me; instead my obligation is to follow rules, the moral purpose of which is often lost to me. Because my obligations are abstract and impersonal, I am tempted to avoid them if I can, and the collective rule-making authority, knowing full well of my temptation, will rely on its coercive powers to prevent me from doing so. Little of this would matter if modern states were simply administrative substitutes for society. The suspicion that they are not lies at the heart of the difficulty facing the political approach to moral regulation. When I rely on the state to organize my obligations for me I can be sure that my fate will be linked to others, but I lose a good deal of control over deciding how. Because modern states, even liberal democratic ones, are not, as Benjamin Barber has emphasized, very good on talk,^[16] to the degree that I rely on government to structure my obligations to others I can see an authority with which I cannot converse.

Liberal democracies face discontents because they tend to rely on either individualistic moral codes associated with the market or collective moral codes associated with the state, yet neither set of codes can successfully address all the issues that confront society. Should older people support bond projects that will build schools that benefit younger couples? Should younger couples oppose increases in social security benefits that help older people? How do mothers best satisfy their obligations to their children—by staying home and nurturing them or by enhancing their own self-esteem in a career? Do we best serve the interests of those who come after us by saving parkland or by enhancing economic growth? Ought we to give to charity if the decisions of many others to give to charity might be used as an excuse to cut back government programs that have a charitable intent? Should the land of farmers be saved, even if one result would be to preserve inefficient farms? If we do not save inefficient farms, who should pay the costs, including suicides and mental illness, of farmers whose market inefficiencies stand in the way of economic progress? Should individuals maximize the collective good by paying a fair tax share or seek to maximize self-interest by cheating? Should government take responsibility for unemployment, even if the risk might be permanent dependence on the state? Will a firm contribute more to society by closing a branch in an area of

high unemployment, thereby causing considerable suffering, and then opening another branch that creates new jobs somewhere else? Ought culture—ranging from opera and ballet to sports and rock music—to be produced and preserved based on the market principle of sufficient demand, thus risking the neglect of at-first unpopular works, or should we rely instead on government funding, thus risking bureaucratization and possible censorship? Should we, to improve the quality of our air and water, stop relying on "indignant tirades about social responsibility" and instead charge firms for the right to pollute, thereby "harnessing the 'base' motive of material self-interest to promote the common good"?^[17] Is the best solution to the drug crisis to legalize drugs or to try and enforce laws against their use? Some societies rely more on the market to answer these questions, while others rely on the state. Yet both kinds of answers, because they tend to remove from the process of moral decision-making a sense of the individual's personal stake in the fate of others, often have consequences that are surprisingly similar.

To illustrate, consider just one question: how should a society insure that its members feel an obligation to work for their collective defense against external enemies? During the 1960s, Americans relied on government to insure their national defense; a compulsory system of conscription, complete with stiff penalties for avoiding obligation, was used to raise the army that fought in Vietnam. Americans were never asked their opinion about whether the war in Vietnam was necessary for their survival as a nation. Political leaders, whose power lay in their command over the resources of government, simply drafted young men, often against their will, and asked them to die for goals that the leaders themselves were incapable of publicly articulating. No wonder avoidance of obligation, as a presidential commission later established, was the rule, not the exception, and the drafting of people created resentment and inefficiency within the armed services.^[18] Reliance on the coercive powers inherent in government for the defense of the society, premised on a distrust of people's own sense of mutual loyalty and obligation, simply encouraged large numbers of people to forget about obligation entirely.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, public thinking about military obligations swung full circle. "The significant fact of the past decade," Charles Moskos wrote in 1984, "has been the almost complete triumph of economic man over citizen soldier in military manpower policy."^[19] The military began to follow the advice of Milton Friedman, Walter Oi, and other economists who had argued that creating a system of monetary incentives would in-

sure an efficient match between personnel and needs.^[20] Yet it turned out that rewarding self-interest also created problems of obligation to society. Those who were better off, and presumably therefore more obligated to everyone else, avoided obligation entirely, leaving the armed forces to those for whom service was the only available job.^[21] The market was, like the state, viewed as one of only two realistic methods of recruiting people to defend their society. Exactly like reliance on the state, however, use of the market, by creating a separate sphere of military life divorced from civilian life, also weakened the concept of obligation to one's country.^[22] Americans, in short, were expected to believe in the survival of their society, but the two methods used to strengthen that belief (no modern society would ever rely on a purely volunteer army) seemed to have the exact opposite effect.

Neither individualistic nor collectivist accounts of moral obligation, as this example shows, are without substantial problems. As Amy Gutmann has put it, using only slightly different terms, "Most conservative moralists set their moral sights too low, inviting blind obedience to authority; most liberal moralists set them too high, inviting disillusionment with morality."^[23] The limitations of both the market and the state as codes of moral obligation may help explain why political sentiment in modern society is characterized, as Albert Hirschman has argued, by "shifting involvements."^[24] When obsessed with efficiency and cost, modern liberal democrats look for market solutions to their problems; when precisely those concerns with efficiency and cost lead to problems of inequality and injustice, they turn to the state. One course offers a solution to the problems the other creates, yet simultaneously creates problems that the other offers to solve.

Although there are obvious and important differences between the market and the state, they also share similar logics, which is why, as in the case of military recruitment, they often have similar results. Neither speaks well of obligations to other people simply as people, treating them instead as citizens or as opportunities. Neither puts its emphasis on the bonds that tie people together because they want to be tied together without regard for their immediate self-interest or for some external authority having the power to enforce those ties. Finally—and the point I will emphasize most in what follows—neither wishes to recognize one of the very things that make liberal democrats modern: that people are capable of participating in the making of their own moral rules. Modern liberal democracies face so many frustrations because their economic and

political accomplishments create potentials that the operating logic of their moral codes denies.

In the face of approaches to moral regulation that no longer seem as promising as they once were, it makes sense to try to find a way of thinking about obligations to others that puts into better balance individual needs and collective restraints. Such an approach—to the degree that it calls on individuals to rely on self-restraint, ties of solidarity with others, community norms, and voluntary altruism—finds its roots in a historic concern with civil society. What was once a three-sided debate has become, as markets and states have both expanded, two-sided. Sociology itself has contributed to this narrowing of options, because it has found in markets and states seeming solutions to its own moral ambivalence. A third way to think about moral obligation cannot overcome the discontents of modernity, but it can give to people a moral code that, unlike those stressing either individualism or collective obligations, enriches a decision-making process that too often leaves modern people feeling incomplete. To revive notions of moral agency associated with civil society is to begin the development of a language appropriate to addressing the paradox of modernity and to move us away from techniques that seek to displace moral obligations by treating them purely as questions of economic efficiency or public policy.

The Withering Away of Civil Society

Learning how to behave in modern society is not only difficult, but there are also few trusted signposts to guide the way. No one can ever be sure in advance how behavior in one part of society will affect behavior in any other. So great is the potential for unanticipated consequences and perverse outcomes that any effort to regulate society directly seems cumbersome, if not utopian. The uncertainty of the moral choices we must make every day enhances the attraction of the market and the state. (Simultaneously, this uncertainty makes economics and political science seem far more realistic and in greater accord with modern people's understanding of human nature than sociology.)

The market responds to the sense that consequences are best managed when left unanticipated, while the state offers to take choice out of individual hands and give it to the experts. Thus, if housing and other costs are allowed to rise because there are no controls on the market, women must go to work to earn extra income, and the question of how they should

treat their obligations to the next generation is decided, without anyone really seeming to decide it. Similarly, if fiduciary experts tell us we need to raise the social security tax to keep the fund from going bankrupt, our obligation to the previous generation is resolved for us, and we need neither praise nor blame ourselves for whatever results. To the degree that the market and the state offer relief to the complexity of social coordination, they promise the possibility of reconciling the paradox of modernity behind the scenes. Both make the whole business of moral regulation seem easier than, in fact, it is.

Because they are conspicuously less demanding, the state and the market eventually come to be viewed as the only forms of regulation that modern people have at their disposal, especially in the economic organization of their society. As one sociologist puts it, "Under modern conditions . . ., the options are sharply reduced. Specifically, the basic option is whether economic processes are to be governed by market mechanisms or by mechanisms of political allocation. In social-scientific parlance, this is the option between market economies and command economies."^[25] Yet there did exist, at the very start of the modern period, an alternative to both the market and the state. That alternative was called "civil society," a term with so many different meanings and used in so many different contexts that, before it can be used again, some clarification is in order.

In the eighteenth century, thinkers who unleashed modern bourgeois consciousness, such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and David Hume, believed that civil society was the realm that protected the individual against the (monarchical or feudal) state. Society was, in their view, a precious—and precarious—creation. "It is here that a man is made to forget his weakness, his cares of safety, and his subsistence, and to act from those passions which make him discover his force," wrote Adam Ferguson.^[26] Modern people, taking advantage of what Ferguson called "the gift of society to man,"^[27] were no longer at the mercy of nature. All progress, not only in commercial affairs but also in the possibility of curbing the passions and creating mutual sympathy, hinged on the mutual interdependence that men could obtain by leaving a state of nature. When Durkheim wrote of society as a secular god, he was reiterating a notion that found its first expression in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Like any god, society could be demanding. In return for the benefits it offers, it imposes obligations. "The general obligation," Hume wrote, "which binds us to government, is the interest and necessities of society;

and this obligation is very strong."^[28] Therefore, in addition to our "natural" obligations, such as loving children, Hume wrote of justice and morality, obligations undertaken "from a sense of obligation when we consider the necessities of human society."^[29] But how, if we are to be as secular as Hume was on his deathbed,^[30] do we come to appreciate these necessities? The hopes of the theorists of civil society lay in a rational understanding of what made society work—what today we would call social science. In the writings of Montesquieu, for example, who has been called "the first moralist with a sociological perspective,"^[31] we witness the idea that a science of society can help us use modern intelligence to organize our obligations to others. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, who were deeply influenced by Montesquieu, were confident that "constant and universal principles of human nature," as Hume called them, would make possible a modern moral order:

The mutual dependence of men is so great in all societies that scarce any human action is entirely complete in itself, or is performed without some reference to the actions of others, which are requisite to make it answer fully the intention of the agent. . . . In proportion as men extend their dealings and render their intercourse with others more complicated, they always comprehend in their schemes of life a greater variety of voluntary actions which they expect from the proper motives to cooperate with their own.^[32]

For the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, civil society was coterminous with what today we call "the private sector," a realm of personal autonomy in which people could be free to develop their own methods of moral accounting. The ethical superiority of what would come to be called capitalism was due to the moral energy unleashed by the idea that people are responsible for their own actions. Yet it was also clear to these thinkers, as I will argue in Chapter 1, that to the degree that capitalism encouraged pure selfishness, it ran the risk of destroying this very moral potential. The new economic order being created during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries strengthened individual freedom, but it also made obvious the degree to which people in civil society were interdependent. Hegel, for example, like Ferguson and Hume, argued that the selfish energies unleashed by the market create "a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all."^[33] Freedom, from this point of view, did not exist in opposition to society; rather, civil society, by forcing people to recognize the reality of their interdependence,

made freedom possible. Freedom was a social, not a natural, phenomenon, something that existed only through the recognition, rather than the denial, of obligations to others.

Given this understanding of the relationship between civil society and moral potential, the development of capitalism through the nineteenth century—although seen by most theorists, including Marx, as a progressive force—also contained the potential to destroy the very civil society it helped create. In the eighteenth century the greatest threat to civil society was the old order symbolized by the state, against which both liberalism and the market were allies. By the mid–nineteenth century the old order was passing, and the moral autonomy of civil society began to be threatened from a new direction. Because the market, capitalism's greatest achievement, placed a monetary value on all things, it increasingly came to be viewed as undermining the ability of people to find and protect an authenticity that was uniquely their own. If an eighteenth-century theorist of civil society were to have appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century looking for a place where individuals could create their own moral rules, he would have found it neither in the private sector nor in the public.

In the nineteenth century, as a result of these developments, the meaning of civil society began to change. No longer a dualistic conception, it became tripartite, standing between the market and the state, embodying neither the self-interest of the one nor the coercive authority of the other. This idea was already implicit, if in somewhat different form, in Hegel, who viewed civil society as a place of transition from the realm of particularism to that of the universal. Other thinkers found in civil society an alternative to both markets and states. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, anxious to guard against the centralizing power of the state, did not look to "industrial callings" (which, he felt, might reproduce the aristocracy of old) but instead paid attention to ideas of voluntarism and localism. Late-nineteenth-century liberals, wanting to reject laissez-faire but suspicious of governmental collectivism, discovered in pluralism a modified notion of civil society. Certain Marxists, especially Antonio Gramsci, were attracted to the idea of civil society as an alternative to Leninism. And the classical thinkers in the sociological tradition all used civil society as the focal point of their critique of modernity. Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were both strongly influenced by Hegel, and the notion of civil society lay also at the heart of Tönnies's notion of Gemeinschaft, Simmel's fear of the influence of large numbers, Cooley's concept of the primary group, the emphasis on local communities in the Chicago school sociology of Robert A. Park, and

the concept of a lifeworld developed by Jürgen Habermas. If there is one underlying theme that unifies the themes in sociology that never developed the resiliency of concepts such as the market or the state—such as organic solidarity, the collective conscience, the generalized other, sociability, and the gift relationship—it would be the idea of civil society.

Although civil society seems to have all but disappeared from the modern political imagination, it has in recent years begun once again to attract attention.^[34] No doubt the reason for this appeal is an increasing feeling that modernity's two greatest social instruments, the market and the state, have become more problematic. Under extreme conditions of state oppression there can be no question of the power of the ideal of civil society. In Eastern Europe especially, where, in the words of Claude Lefort, "the new society is thought to make the formation of classes or groups with antagonistic interests impossible,"^[35] the pluralistic vision associated with civil society seeks to protect an autonomous social realm against political authority.^[36] Georg Konrad suggests that "civil society is the antithesis of military society" and that "antipolitics"—his name for morality—"is the ethos of civil society."^[37] Adam Michnik writes of Solidarity in Poland:

The essence of the spontaneously growing Independent and Self-governing Labor Union Solidarity lay in the restoration of social ties, self-organization aimed at guaranteeing the defense of labor, civil, and national rights. For the first time in the history of communist rule in Poland "civil society" was being restored, and it was reaching a compromise with the state.^[38]

One need not equate the oppression that exists in Eastern Europe with the imperfections of capitalism in the West to argue that the tripartite theory of civil society can serve as an alternative both to the market under capitalism and to the state under socialism. Contemporary capitalist societies bear little resemblance to the moral world of the Scottish Enlightenment. Composed more of bureaucratic firms than self-motivated individuals, these societies rationalize away personal responsibility rather than extend its realm. Instead of broadening the recognition of mutual interdependence, they deny it, arguing that capitalism is not the product of society but the result of a natural order determined by animalistic instincts. Rather than understanding that economic self-interest is made possible only because obligations are part of a preexisting moral order, they increasingly organize the moral order by the same principles that organize the economy. The more extensively capitalism develops, the more the social world that makes capitalism possible comes to be taken for granted rather

than viewed as a gift toward which the utmost care ought to be given. Societies organized by the market need a theory of civil society as much as societies organized by the state, or else their social ecologies will become as damaged as their natural ecologies.^[39]

But given the confused meanings associated with the term, how ought civil society be understood? There is certainly a temptation, when faced with the limits of the market and the state as moral codes, to reject both in favor of some preexisting moral community that may never have existed or, if it did exist, was so oppressive that its members thought only of escape. That meaning of civil society is emphatically not the one that will be discussed here. Not only is it unrealistic to expect that modern liberal democracies will somehow stop relying on the market and the state, but it is also unfair to ask modern liberal democrats to do without these organizing structures. The market, for all its problems, does promote individual choice, thereby enabling people to act as the creators of their own moral rules. The state, no matter how critical one may be of its authority, not only creates a certain level of security without which modern life would be impossible but, as the Scandinavian societies show, also promotes equality and generally creates a better life for most. Markets and states are here to stay, and it is not my intention to say otherwise.

Moreover, it is anything but axiomatic that the morality of civil society is more "moral" than that of the market or the state. For Hegel, the family was a crucial component of civil society, yet when husbands beat wives and parents abuse children, state intervention ought to take precedence over the sanctity of the family. Theorists of civil society have often put their faith in community, yet when communities practice racial segregation or close their borders, it would be difficult to deny that the market's emphasis on openness is preferable. Even when relations in civil society are based on reciprocity and altruism, they can satisfy obligations to immediate group members to the exclusion of obligations to strangers and hypothetical others. We became modern, in short, for a reason.

There is, however, another meaning to civil society that, instead of embodying some nostalgic hope for a passing order, is more relevant than ever to modern liberal democrats. The themes so important to Ferguson, Hume, and Smith, which later came to be embodied in some of the sociologists influenced by American pragmatism (especially George Herbert Mead), were those of autonomy and responsibility. We learn how to act toward others because civil society brings us into contact with people in such a way that we are forced to recognize our dependence on them. We

ourselves have to take responsibility for our moral obligations, and we do so through this gift called society that we make for ourselves. What makes us modern, in short, is that we are capable of acting as our own moral agents. If modernity means a withering away of such institutions as the tight-knit family and the local community that once taught the moral rules of interdependence, modern people must simply work harder to find such rules for themselves. If we do not, then we sacrifice what is modern about us—often, and ironically, in the name of modernity itself.

Modernity's paradox is a paradox indeed. It cannot be resolved either by welcoming markets and states enthusiastically or by rejecting them completely. The question facing modern liberal democrats is whether they can live in societies organized by states and markets yet also recognize (more than they have) that reliance on states and markets does not absolve them of responsibility for their obligations to others—on the contrary, this responsibility becomes all the more necessary. Such a recognition can come, as it did in the days of Ferguson and Hume, only when those whose business is the understanding of society remind liberal democrats of their obligation to protect the social order that makes their freedom possible.

Moral Obligations: Inward and Outward

My aim in this book is to make three points that I hope will contribute to a revival of a sociological approach to moral regulation. The first is a theoretical one: to recall that neither the market nor the state was ever expected to operate without the moral ties found in civil society (see Chapters 1 and 4). Markets flourish in a moral order defined by noneconomic ties of trust and solidarity; markets are necessary for modernity, but they tend to destory what makes them work. Similarly, the liberal theory of the state was neither purely liberal, for its originators relied on preexisting moral ties to temper the bleakness of the social contract, nor purely statist, because it assumed a strong society. Like the market, the liberal state survives by basing itself on other things than its theory demands.

There has never existed, until the present, a pure theory of either the market or the state. When we look more closely at recent efforts to develop both—such as the effort by the Chicago school of economics to extend the principle of rational choice to all social realms, not just to those we understand as economic; the cognitive treatments of moral obligation found in the work of John Rawls or Lawrence Kohlberg; the justification for state authority associated with conservative political theorists such as Lawrence

Mead; or modern forms of the social democratic welfare state that organize moral relations as well as economic ones—we find that markets and states organized without civil society tend to develop in ways quite contrary to their original intentions.

The second point I wish to make is that as modern societies come to rely ever more thoroughly on either the market or the state to organize their codes of moral obligation, living with the paradoxes of modernity will become increasingly difficult. What makes modern liberal democracy such a frustrating condition is that the less we live in tightly bound communities organized by strong social ties, the greater is our need to recognize our dependence on others, even perfect strangers. To be modern, in short, requires that we extend the "inward" moral rules of civil society "outward" to the realm of nonintimate and distant social relations. Yet states and markets—both of which are "outward" moral codes organizing obligations to distant others—operate in exactly the opposite fashion in their codification of the business of moral obligation, for they have begun to organize "inward" relationships once associated with civil society, such as matters involving the family, the local community, and friendship and other informal networks. (In Jürgen Habermas's language, this process represents the colonization of the lifeworld by system logics.)^[40] Civil society is increasingly squeezed from two directions, raising the question of whether, as a result, people are more confused about how to balance obligations to those they love with obligations to strangers and distant others.

Being modern will always require some way of linking both intimate and distant obligations. Although in theory that balance could just as easily be found by extending outward obligations inward, the proper balance will more realistically be found by extending inward obligations outward. The contribution that a sociological approach can make to discussions of moral obligation is to emphasize that no abstract and formal rules exist specifying what we owe others and others owe us. Instead, moral obligation ought to be viewed as a socially constructed practice, as something we learn through the actual experience of trying to live together with other people. It is for this reason that we ought to worry about the weakness of civil society vis-à-vis the market and the state, for the more we rely on impersonal mechanisms of moral obligation, the more out of practice we become as moral agents capable of finding our own ways to resolve the paradoxes of modernity. We need civil society—families, communities, friendship networks, solidaristic workplace ties, voluntarism, spontaneous groups and movements—not to reject, but to complete the project of modernity.

Has civil society been weakened in the shadow of the market and the state? To answer this question in greater detail, I will look at some trends taking place in societies that rely on either the state or the market for their primary moral codes. No society, of course, relies completely on one or the other. Indeed, for all the opposition between them, markets and states reinforce each other in practice. Government, for example, made possible the rapid expansion of private capitalism in the United States, whereas private capitalism provides the surplus that makes possible the welfare states of Western Europe. A similar convergence of economic and political forces operates in the intimate sector of society: when women enter the labor market, government often steps in to provide child care. Yet although the workings of markets and states cannot be separated from each other, it is also true that some societies tend to rely more on the former, while others increasingly use the latter. The United States stands, along with Great Britain, at one end of this pole of experience, with the Scandinavian welfare states at the other.

In the United States numerous relationships, such as those of family, community, and education, that traditionally have been organized by civil society have lately begun to be organized instead by the logic of the market. This is a recent development, and its full implications are barely understood. Moreover, it is at this point still a tendency, not an accomplished phenomenon, and it is possible that in the future the tendency will reverse itself and civil society will once again be strengthened. Nonetheless, as I argue in Chapter 2, this increasing intrusion of the market into civil society raises fundamental questions about obligations to strangers and hypothetical others. Will present generations, under the increasing influence of the market, be able to consider the needs of future generations? What will happen to altruistic instincts, such as giving to charity and voluntary participation, when self-interest becomes more of a moral code in the intimate sphere of society? Does reliance on the market make it more difficult for individuals to restrain their desires in order to share cultural understandings with others? Increased reliance on the market in the intimate sphere of society, in short, reopens the whole question of what makes a distant social order possible.

The penetration of the market into civil society has its parallel in other societies that, far more than the United States, rely on government to express the rules of moral obligation. In order to examine empirically the consequences of using the state as a moral code, I turn in Chapters 5 and 6 to the Scandinavian countries. Just as the extended reach of the market in the United States is a very recent development, the past fifteen years have

witnessed a change in the character of the Scandinavian welfare state. Instead of relying on transfer payments, in which the wealthy are taxed to redistribute income to the less wealthy, the state has begun to provide services and build institutions—used disproportionately by the middle class—that perform activities once considered within the realm of civil society. Here too the process is incomplete, but this new welfare state also squeezes families, communities, and social networks, albeit from a different direction than that of the market. Will families be able to function well when government assumes some of their most important functions, including the raising of small children? What will happen to individual altruistic instincts if private charity is replaced by collective benefits administered impersonally? Can obligations to future generations be met when political approaches to moral regulation, based on an interest-group understanding of rewards and benefits, give priority to those who are already organized over those not yet born? Will a sense of obligation continue to encourage the expression of solidarity to others when temptations to cheat on taxes or seek private solutions to public problems become overwhelming?

There is little doubt, at least in this observer's opinion, that the welfare state does a better job than the market of organizing obligations to strangers, yet changes in the intimate sphere in Scandinavia do raise questions about the moral character of the welfare state never anticipated by its founders (and surprisingly similar as well to the problems of market-centered societies). We have, neither in Scandinavia nor in the United States, reached a state of pure capitalism or pure statism, but we are far enough along to understand why the business of being moral and modern simultaneously is so demanding.

The third and last point I wish to make, then, is that instead of serving as a nostalgic reminder of a past that probably never was, sociology ought to recover the moral tradition that was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment and was inherited by its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century practitioners (Chapter 7). The problems that arise from relying on markets and states are compounded because both forces view the moral agent as a rule-follower, not a rule-maker. In the sociological tradition—and even then only in that part which rejects an emphasis on social structure in favor of the notion that ordinary people create moral rules through everyday interaction with others—lies an understanding of moral agency that allows us to bring people back in to modernity, to begin to give them the control in the making of moral rules that the market and the state promised but never delivered (Chapter 8). We would in any case need an

understanding of moral obligation based on individuals' ability to contribute to the rules that regulate their behavior; yet as the moral dilemmas faced by liberal democrats intensify in their seriousness—as symbolized by such new moral issues as abortion and AIDS—this understanding becomes more pressing than ever (Chapter 9).

Because social scientists are moral philosophers in disguise, even theoretical discussions of the implicit moral messages they deliver have repercussions in society as a whole. It could turn out to be the case that, as popular as the economic approach is now and the political approach was recently, sociology—a discipline at the moment somewhat lacking in academic prestige—may yet have something to say if the moral limits of the market and the state are increasingly found wanting. My purpose in writing this book is to recall what I take to be the major moral message of the sociological tradition: to maintain their freedom and security, modern liberal democrats need to remind themselves of what a precious gift society is. Society does not carry out our obligations to others for us, but instead creates the possibility that we can carry those obligations out ourselves. If we choose not to do so, we deny what is social about us and are left only with something resembling the state of nature. In that case, it ought not be surprising why modern liberal democrats, for all the wealth their economies have generated and stability their governments have delivered, sometimes wonder what it all means.