See other Dead Constitution Articles
Title: The American Police State
Source:
Lew Rockwell
URL Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson222.html
Published: Aug 12, 2008
Author: William L. Anderson
Post Date: 2008-08-12 19:45:28 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 95
Comments: 3
The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008, 264 pages (paperback), $16.95. In the past six years, I have written a number of articles, papers, and columns about how any pretense of the rule of law in the United States is dead. This was not always the position I took, but after reading the hardback version of The Tyranny of Good Intentions in 2001, I realized that not only were the people who were officially entrusted with keeping the law in this country not interested in fulfilling their duties, but that the very nature of law itself in the USA has fundamentally changed. That change, unfortunately, has been for the worse. I wish I had more comforting words. Paul Craig Roberts, an economist and a former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, and Lawrence M. Stratton, an attorney and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Christian Ethics at Princeton Seminary, have exposed the modern U.S. legal system for the wretched lie that it has become. From the fraud of the "War on Terror" to the destruction of ancient legal doctrines, Roberts and Stratton document the death of law in the United States. Before I go through the litany of cases and situations that Roberts and Stratton present, I first must point out that the main service they do is not the presentation of many injustices that are a regular part of U.S. law today – though what they say is important, if not downright discouraging. (I would warn all readers that they need to prepare to be angry and shocked at the many evils done today in the name of the law. If a reader has problems with high blood pressure, I would urge that person to stop right here.) No, the most important thing that Roberts and Stratton do is to educate the reader about the source of U.S. law, how it began, and why it has become so corrupted. In this review, I will deal first with their vision of the law and the downfall of that vision, before mentioning a few cases. While we might look back to the signing of the Magna Charta in 1215 as the beginnings of what are called the Rights of Englishmen, perhaps the most influential document in the history of our law was (I emphasize "was") William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769. As Roberts and Stratton point out, Blackstone believed that the law should be a "shield for the innocent" and that the purpose of law (and government) was protection of innocent people (and their property) from predators – and from the predatory state. From Blackstone’s vision came the view of "innocent until proven guilty," and the protection of rights for those who were accused. From Blackstone, we are given the famous quote: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer." Indeed, the concept Rights of Englishmen has been absolutely vital to the very idea of liberty in this country. However, there also was a competing vision, one that was drawn up by the "father" of modern government, Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the one who penned the term, "utilitarianism." Bentham scoffed at the idea of individual rights, and believed that the state needed to be a mechanism by which the largest number of people could be able to experience the greatest pleasure with the least amount of pain. In Bentham’s view, the state was to accomplish that purpose by being as unrestrained as possible, led by people whose vision was superior to the vision of ordinary people who did not know better. Law, in Bentham’s view, was not to be a "shield" for innocent people, but rather a set of rules that would push people in a certain direction through incentives, both benign and harsh. Even wrongful convictions of innocent people were not harmful, for they empowered the state and sent a message to everyone else. For example, readers of this page and (one would hope) most Americans recoil at the thought of government using torture to extract confessions. While Blackstone railed against the use of the "rack" and other such torture devices, Bentham saw torture as useful for the state, to be administered by the Wise State as a mechanism to teach the subjects of a country to obey their political masters. Another example came with the use of prisons. Bentham believed that people should be arrested and imprisoned before they committed crimes. The state would be wise enough to determine who was a threat and who was not, and those people deemed to be a threat to "society" were to be locked up and forced to engage in labor. Moreover, prisons were not to be dedicated to incarcerating dangerous and violent people; they were to be used as tool to strengthen the power of the state. Where Blackstone believed that government should be restrained by natural law, and be a "shield" for the innocent, Bentham saw the state’s role to be a sword against people who might threaten the well-being of those in political power. In his view, there was no such thing as "natural law;" indeed, law was nothing but a set of rules put into place by those who had power. It does not take a particularly astute person to see which vision has triumphed in the United States. Roberts and Stratton, after laying out the competing visions of law, demonstrate unequivocally just where U.S. law is headed, and the many injustices that the Benthamite vision has visited upon innocent people. From the Drug War (and the policies of asset forfeiture – read that, seizure by government authorities of property under flimsy pretenses of guilt) to the creation of ex post facto laws to bills of attainder, they document conclusively just how prosecutors, corrupt judges, and the police have destroyed any last vestiges of natural law and constitutional rule. For example, they deal with the ancient doctrine of mens rea, which meant that in order for a person to be charged with a crime, authorities had to show that he or she intended to commit a crime. Blackstone wrote that a "vicious will" was necessary for such charges to be made justly. Bentham thought otherwise. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court and lawmakers have obliterated mens rea, in the process wiping out a very real protection that individuals had against the predatory state. In their chapter, "Crimes Without Intent," Roberts and Stratton outline a number of criminal cases brought in which it was clear that the defendants did not intend to break the law – or even knew they were doing so. One very sad case involves that of Benjamin Lacy of Linden, Virginia, a 73-year-old producer of apple juice who was targeted by the Clinton administration and the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994. Lacy, who had written down a few wrong numbers on waste water forms (he received his information over the telephone) was tried and convicted in federal court for "conspiracy to mislead" the government. Prosecutors theorized that Lacy was trying to cover up polluting a nearby stream. However, they never offered proof that the stream was ever polluted, and they were successful in convincing a judge not to permit Lacy to use evidence that no pollution had taken place as a defense. A sycophantic jury (What other kind of jury exists these days?) believed the prosecutors, and Lacy went to prison, his life ruined. In case someone thinks Roberts and Stratton exaggerate, perhaps a line from the majority 1957 opinion in Lambert v. California, written by Justice William O. Douglas (mistakenly called a "libertarian" by many) will be enlightening: "We do not go with Blackstone in saying that ‘a vicious will’ is necessary to constitute a crime." In fact, while legal historians and others might claim that the Earl Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s expanded the rights of the accused, Roberts and Stratton demonstrate that this court accelerated a trend in which the state – and especially the bureaucracy – gained huge amounts of power against individuals. When agents of the state are given unlimited power by legislators and judges (the Constitution be damned or turned into a mechanism by which to expand the powers of the state), then one should not be surprised when those agents lie or suborn false testimony. Throughout this book, Roberts and Stratton document – and I mean document – how the authorities themselves have become the lawless, and the examples are endless. I must point out – if only because the critics of this review will accuse me of being overly favorable to the authors – that they mention my name in their section on the false prosecution of innocent Duke University students by the infamous Michael B. Nifong. As readers of my articles already know, Nifong indicted three Duke student-athletes for rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault despite knowing that they were innocent, but needing to bring charges in order to gain enough black votes in Durham County, North Carolina, to win an election. (The accuser was black, and the defendants were white. That was enough for the authorities and voters of Durham – and much of the Duke faculty and administration – to conclude that the charges simply had to be true, even if no evidence of a crime existed.) While I appreciate the authors’ pointing out my very small role in exposing Nifong’s predations, I also can say that I would have written this review even had they not mentioned my name. In fact, I will say here that no book – no book – has influenced me more than their 2000 hardback version of Tyranny, and this book is an improvement over the original. If a reader wishes to understand the points from which I come as I deal with the legal abominations of the authorities of this country, this book is the best place to start. I will go farther and say that I really did not understand the law until I read the first version of Tyranny, and that the book gave me the equivalent of a legal education. Had it not been for Roberts and Stratton, I never would have become involved in the Duke case at all, not because I would have believed Nifong, but rather because I would not have understood the real issues behind the case. This book is not a politically-motivated polemic, as both conservatives and liberals are exposed. The modern Drug War is the creation of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and is championed by most conservatives (and especially the Christian Right). The legacy of this "war" has been the explosion of the U.S. prison population from about 300,000 when Reagan took office in 1981, to more than two million today. Yet, liberals also come under scrutiny. Roberts and Stratton document the massacre of innocents at the home of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, which liberals championed aggressively. (I watched the 1995 U.S. Senate hearings on the affair, and Senate Democrats did everything they could to discredit the critics of Janet Reno’s Department of "Justice" which ordered the attacks.) The evisceration of mens rea accelerated during the Clinton administration and is a staple today of modern political liberalism, which seeks to criminalize normal business practices and more. As I warned earlier, a careful reading of this book is guaranteed to raise one’s awareness – and blood pressure. I can feel mine rising as I write these words, so I will stop at this point, for the sake of my own health. I cannot overemphasize just how important this book really is for those who care about liberty and the rule of law. This is not something which looks at modern law and makes a few recommendations, as though a few "reforms" would make a difference. No, Roberts and Stratton have attacked the modern tyrannical state root and branch and have demonstrated conclusively not only that the Bentham vision has "won" the legal battle in this country, but just how utterly destructive that "vision" really has become. Perhaps all we can do right now is to learn, and for those who wish to better understand the foundations of liberty, this is a good place to start. A very good place.
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
Great article. The Powers That Be don't enforce immigration laws but go out of their way to shoot people's dogs when they botch a raid. It's time for a revolution against our current bastardized government in order to give us the government our Founding Fathers intended us to have.
The Anti-Communitarian League: Grassroots Research & Analysis of the Ultimate Third Way Communitarianism is the fake political theory that advocates for a New World Order. Communitarians claim their theory represents a "balance" between selfish individualism and holisitic communism. It's the new Machiavellian middle ground. The Modern Debate between Individualism and Communitarianism by Richard M Clewett, Jr. Professor at Eastern Kentucky University, Department of English. Where did this lovely, vague, fuzzy, feel good, new, bipartisan, middle ground philosophy originate? Communitarianism is the final phase of Hegelian induced communism. It originated with the founders of a communist world empire. Why should we care what it is? It's the foundation for our new Imperial Community Government. It's the purpose for new laws in every State of our Union. It's immensely powerful. It's the legal philosophy establishing the Rule of Law under "reformed communists". Most people have never heard of it; almost everyone (outside of the communitarians themselves) thinks we made it up as part of a conspiracy theory. Average people hear the word "communitarian" and immediately assume it means real community. They discuss it as if it's some vague idea of how people live together. It's never mentioned as the basis for invasive new behaviors that create invasive new programs enforced by community "cops" (especially by American defense attorneys). Every day our elected legislators introduce and pass communitarian initiatives, bills, and acts, yet it's rarely considered as the philosophical grounds for new safety, security, and faith-based programs. They all cross clear constitutional lines between our public servants and the private sector, but nobody seems to know why. Communitarianism blends the sectors, it removes the authentic checks and balances our system depends upon. Communitarian balancing Acts completely remove the balances that make America work. It corrupts and destroys our free system. Communitarian ideology is the foundation for all new unconstitutional programs and policies, no matter what country you live in. Since we live in America our studies focus on the United States. But communitarian law is global law. If you want to know more about where and how it's been implemented, or what it ultimately stands for, then you came to the right place. Our definition of them (and everything else we write at this site) is for visitors who want to know more than the Third Way party line. We are a non-government funded opposition website. They have their version, we have ours. We can prove ours is true, even on a budget. Our ACL manifesto The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking proves their entire philosophical foundation is Dialectical Materialism. It stands unchallenged for a year. U.S. Code defines the Communist Party as a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. This makes communitarianism treason. We oppose reviving "dead" communism under the guise of a "new" Third Way communitarian ideology. Communism didn't disappear any more than empires disappeared. Both communism and imperialism (now fully integrated) are fully operational in the established global government at the Hague. Amitai Etzioni, the communitarian guru who insisted years before 9-11 that America needs a "domestic passport," now says we now need to combine the might of the U.S. Armed Forces with the authority of the United Nations. They're making their final moves. The free world is running out of time.12/17/2004 2:13:07 PM We are not fooled by Fabian propaganda. We've met our burden of proof. It's not a conspiracy. Communitarianism is a scam. We are not alone in our opposition. There are other detractors (besides us). Here's a few examples: No American Left Alone by Charlotte Iserbyt, 4/12/02. (Charlotte Iserbyt worked for the Reagan administration in 1984. She's one of the few people who acknowledges and encourages our ACL work. Her work on the communitarian's influence on American politics is extensive. Iserbyt's contribution to American teachers and educators sets the standard for NWO researchers everywhere.) Glossary of Communitarian Terms by Kjos Ministries. (This wonderful Christian site has many articles about communitarian thinking and programs.) The Communitarian Constitution by Beau Breslin, John Hopkins University Press The ABC's of Communitarianism, A devil's dictionary, by Fareed Zakaria, Posted Friday, July 26, 1996, at 12:30 AM PT Masters of Seduction: Beguiling Americans into Slavery and Self-Destruction by Jeri Lynn Ball. Time Bomb: The Criminal Conspiracy to Create Chaos, to Sovietize America, and to Unleash the Horrors of 21st Century Totalitarianism by American Patriots Past and Present. Okay, so what is it, exactly? Stanford historians tell us it appeared on the scene in the 1970's as part of a higher academic argument among the liberal left. From mainstream news we learn communitarianism is also called The Third Way or civil society. It is a published plan (not a conspiracy theory) for a reinvented world under a strong, central government agency. It's fully documented and quite real. Every place in America fosters it. We've been living under communitarianism for over a decade. Communitarianism expands police- state- military power over individuals. This obscure "idea" has a special police force who perform behavior interventions based on evidence gathered and stored in community mapping programs. Communitarian actions against individuals far exceed the parameters for legitimate American government intrusions. Communitarian actions violate most U.S. law. This philosophy justifies expanding actions against property owners. It's necessary to further the common good. It justifies property abatements against individuals for private, corporate, commerical purposes. This is the philosophy that substantiates the entire radical environmental movement (the group that always advocates for government's "direction of private property"). It's the basis for the Faith-Based Initiative. It explains why the left and the right are so similar in their core values. Communitarians redefined values to mean selfless communitarian "volunteer" obligations to the central collective. They seek to control all natural resources. Human skills are classified as resources. They are the enemy of freedom all over the world. In the early 1990's, the American based Communitarian Network was established at George Washington University in D.C. by a German-Israeli-American Fabian born with the name Werner Faulk. He is now known to the world as the great political guru called Doctor Amitai Etzioni. Since his latest book, he's been ranked in the top 100 influential men in the world. Our evidence shows communitarianism is the synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic. The Hegelian dialectic was the illogical foundation for Marx's Dialectical Materialism. The imperfect communitarian solution is the end result of Hegelian conflicts of the past 2 centuries. The Third Way is another one of those things the American public knows nothing about. According to Russian Prima News, the term civil society originated with Jacobin freemasonry in 1789 France. It's a false synthesis (solution) to the conflicts between fabricated, opposing "ideas." It's a bandaid solution for lethal, self-inflicted wounds. It is the verifiable ideological foundation for all new policies, programs and laws implemented under global sustainable development principles, and all anti-terror-crime and safety initiatives. Throughout the 1990s, many communitarian laws, programs, policies and wars were implemented. Rebuilding Iraq is a carpetbagger's dreamland. At home, new domestic laws generate hundreds of thousands of softer actions against Americans, from Florida to Alaska. The communitarian theory justifies all the new prevention laws used to eliminate independent nations. Communitarianism is the basis for all new fascist laws. It's directly connected to the global philosophy that's been advocating for a a New World Order since 1848. Prior to its announcement in the 1970's, communitarian programs were quietly sustained under both reigning political parties. Bush and Kerry endorse communitarian laws and programs in the United States. (Their ancestors cross nine generations back. Does it make them blood cousins?) They're not unique. Almost all prominent U.S. advisers, leaders, candidates and representatives hail Dr. Etzioni and embrace his communitarian values. The U.S. Mayors embraced it all, "with love." It simply didn't matter who won in the U.S. 2004 elections. Election recounts are headline news. The growing Hegelian conflict between "red and blue" America is gaining momentum. (I got an email forward yesterday from a Kerry supporter at Ground Zero in NYC. She blames Bush for the police state and the fear she lives under. She promised to hold all Bush voters responsible for the next terrorist attack. This could be the Hegelian straw that breaks our back. Are we really falling for the division between red and blue or is it all media hype? ) Communitarian programs and laws also remove any leftover possibility for our raising a future generation of strong, independent, U.S. citizens who are given the will, the individual strength, and the economic means to resist the NWO. We will all eventually follow Dr. Etzioni's advice to rebuild the U.S. into globally controlled U.N. communities. The way the dialectic is progressing, it appears the NWO will succeed. While some Americans recognize and identify portions of the communitarian agenda, we rarely fight local-global battles on the same playing fields as the communitarians. Americans resist based on a limited education in Hegelian philosophy and the conflict theory. Consequently, there exists no cohesive U.S. resistance to the communitarians. All U.N. laws and programmes are based in communitarianism. The War on Terror and all the other Hegelian Wars (drugs, obesity, etc.) are rooted to the communitarian synthesis. The whole dialectical ideology of natural conflicts leading man to a state of controlled and forced Utopia has never been proven to be a sound theory. Yet it is still used to define the necessity for creating a stonger U.N. government. All conflicts further communitarian globalist expansion, because dialectical conflicts are a primary communitarian tool. Communitarianism is the legal basis for all newly revised municipal ordinances, community development departments, new land use and zoning departments, community taxes, and especially community-based crime/terror prevention. Etzioni writes many new ideas for building a safer, global community. (As far as our recent travels have shown us, most Americans still have no idea what the communitarians mean by the term "community.") Communitarianism balances individual rights guaranteed under U.S. Constitutional Law against global Marxist ideology. Communitarians define the new requirements for U.S. citizenship. They re-train selfish Americans in the ideals of service and responsibility to the community. The communitarians are rebuilding a sustainable world. They are behind all the new community visions for the future. Their holistic mission is "to shore up the moral, political and social environment." It's no accident that they show up and serve on every neighborhood council in the world. Here's their preamble. They want to completely disarm Americans. They never suggest disarming Israelis. We've supplied the Israeli military since 1967, and the USSR's economy since the 1930s. Now we can use former KGB spies to train American cops in Zionist peacekeeping. Global peacekeeping requires an international citizen's database. That's why communitarians collect private data on community members. Our skills and abilities are called hidden human assets. Everyone belongs to a community and has to be identified on their development maps. There can be no strangers, slackers, or secrets in a rebuilt, nicer community. New community citizen watch groups are somehow finding creative ways to fill in maps that identify every American homeowner and renter, block by block. Un-elected neighborhood groups act as arms for the community oriented police. Across the world, appointed councils are created as the more socially evolved way to conduct the business of government. Communitarians agree, the U.N. must combine with the strength of the U.S. military and taxpayers. Alone, the U.N. cannot entirely enforce certain "actions" against selected, targeted individuals. Individuals hold no Individual Rights what-so-ever to defend themselves against violent communitarian actions. Liberty dies under a completed global communitarian system of law. From Wyoming to Iraq, international communitarian law is the legal basis for rebuilding the world into one big, happy sustainable community. United Nations' Local Agenda 21 is their blueprint for re-building a communitarian world by 2021. Local collectives are holistically governed by international laws. Lady Shell's International Court at the Hague is centuries old. These laws have been planned for a long time. There's nothing "spontaneous" about communitarian programmes. It's an old imperialist recipie for taking slaves. This is the basis for the New World Order. The U.S. is the last bastion of individual freedom in the world against Hegelian reasoning. We exist outside contrived conflicts that balance individual rights against the common good. The Third Way synthesis is supposed to be "so perfect it gives rise to no anti-thesis." In their geopolitical vision, the ACL's anti-thesis cannot exist. nord.twu.net/acl/communitar.html Communitarianism Prepared by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland editor-in-chief and research director of the Civic Practices Network Communitarianism emerged in the 1980s as a response to the limits of liberal theory and practice. Its dominant themes are that individual rights need to be balanced with social responsibilities, and that autonomous selves do not exist in isolation, but are shaped by the values and culture of communities. Unless we begin to redress the balance toward the pole of community, communitarians believe, our society will continue to become normless, self-centered, and driven by special interests and power seeking. The critique of one-sided emphasis on rights has been key to defining communitarianism. Rights tend to be asserted without a corresponding sense of how they can be achieved, or who will pay for them. "Rights talk" thus corrupts our political discourse, and is used to trump genuine conversation, public deliberation, and practical compromise. It is used to escalate claims, induce guilt and polarize debate. And it is employed without a corresponding sense of responsibilities, other than not actively inflicting harm. Communitarians believe deeply in preserving rights, and extending them in regimes that are nondemocratic or practice discrimination. But they believe that rights need to be seen in a more balanced framework, and that the U.S. would benefit by a temporary moratorium on the manufacture of new rights. Communitarians argue that the one-sided emphasis on rights in liberalism is related to its conception of the individual as a "disembodied self," uprooted from cultural meanings, community attachments, and the life stories that constitute the full identities of real human beings. Dominant liberal theories of justice, as well as much of economic and political theory, presume such a self. And our "habits of the heart" deeply draw upon this, even in many cases where we behave as committed community activists. Communitarians would, again, shift the balance, arguing that the "I" is constituted through the "We" in a dynamic tension. This is not an argument for the traditional community, repressive majoritarianism or the patriarchal family —although not a few critics have interpreted it thus. Communitarians are critical of community institutions that are authoritarian and restrictive, and that cannot bear scrutiny within a larger framework of human rights and equal opportunities. They accept the modern condition that we are located within a web of pluralistic communities with crosscutting tugs and pulls, and genuine value conflicts within them, and within selves. But, as Jean Bethke Elshtain notes in her elaboration on the communitarian individual who happens to be a woman, "the contract model [of liberalism] leaves little space for those contributions of women that have been linked to the human life cycle, to the protection and nurturance of vulnerable human existence. In contractarian terms, women become individuals only when they, too, join the ranks of the sovereign-self ideal. In the rights-absolutist climate of opinion, women are likely to be seen as victims or suckers if they fail to join the 'separated' celebration with anything less than total enthusiasm." The "Responsive Communitarian Platform," drafted by Amitai Etzioni, Mary Ann Glendon and William Galston in November 1991, sketches out the basic framework. It urges that we start with the family and its central role in time-intensive moral education, ensuring that workplaces provide maximum supports for parents through working time innovations, and warning against avoidable divorces in the interests of children first. The second line of defense is reviving moral education in schools at all levels, including the values of tolerance, peaceful conflict resolution, the superiority of democratic government, hard work and saving. It also argues for devolving government services to their appropriate levels, pursuing new kinds of public-private partnerships, and developing national and local service programs. Communitarians see themselves as building a major social movement paralleling that of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. Their ideas have been very influential in academia, and have filtered into the Clinton White House. While a few communitarians have developed refined institutional analyses to match their critiques—one thinks of liberal-communitarian Ezekiel Emanuel's very interesting proposals on health care—communitarian thinking has not yet contributed to moving the debate on specific community and civic institutions substantially forward. This tends to give their arguments a moralizing quality, according to various critics. Selected Readings Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society. New York: Touchstone, 1993. This is the basic statement of communitarianism by a key founder of the movement. It is provocative and readable, and contains the "Responsive Communitarian Platform." It addresses broad issues such as the erosion of a moral voice in our public discourse. It contains chapters on the communitarian family and school, as well as the balance of rights and responsibilities in such controversial issues as hate speech, and drug and HIV testing for public safety and public health. While it ranges across many issues in attempting to define a different discourse, it remains undeveloped at the level of institutional analysis, especially on civic innovations and community building strategies. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press, 1991. This is a key text in the communitarian argument about how an intemperate rhetoric of personal liberty and rights tends to erode the social foundations upon which individual freedom rests, and impedes compromise, mutual understanding, and the discovery of common ground. A political language saturated with rights undermines our capacity for public discussion of the right ordering of our lives together. The book is legal theory accessible to the educated nonspecialist. Amitai Etzioni, ed., New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions and Communities. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. This is the best current collection of theoretical writings within the communitarian tradition. It includes essays by Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amy Gutmann, Charles Taylor and others, as well as a very useful introductory essay by the editor. It demonstrates the richness and depth of communitarian thinking. A companion volume by the same editor, Rights and the Common Good (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), covers more ground with a greater number of shorter essays, but also has more of a patchwork quality. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. This modern classic focuses on one fundamental question: how modern Americans might preserve or create a morally coherent life. But whether this is possible hinges on the relationship between moral character and political community. The authors argue that individualism, not equality, is the central moral value of American life, and ask whether it may be destroying the moral and political community that it depends on for its survival. The entire work is accessible, even pleasurable to read. Particular attention might be paid to Part Two, "Public Life" and the Conclusion. A subsequent volume, The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991), takes up these questions at the level of institutions, and includes chapters on education, work, government and law, religion, and America's role in the world.
#2. To: Ada (#0)
“The best and first guarantor of our neutrality and our independent existence is the defensive will of the people…and the proverbial marksmanship of the Swiss shooter. Each soldier a good marksman! Each shot a hit!” Schweizerische Schutzenseitunt (Swiss Shooting Federation) April, 1941
#3. To: Ada (#0)
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