COMMUNITAS COMMUNITATUM
The key question in any political system is its legitimacy. -Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books Inc., NY, 1976.
It’s Plato all over again after the acidic effects in Athens of an excessive individualism, after a tonic surge of new life, after an anomic normlessness. It’s a matter of putting everything in the true basket again: the good, the beautiful and the just, in a vision of community born in the terror of anti-community, the soulless reality of democracy.
It’s a new age of a new Rome, a new republic: unitary, centralized, collectivized, resting on legally discrete, socially free individuals but also decentralized and local in essence, with intimacy, communality, pluralistic :sings: with no marching to the sound of one foot, with the law set above all and the nation set in a constellation of forces to establish the reign of virtue in a communitas communitatum1 in which the oneness of life serves as the basis for political messianism, the religion of history.
1 this term is used by Robert Nisbet in his The Social Philosophers.
Ron Price 2 January 1997
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