long line of dissenters whose expulsion, far from stifling dissent, if anything strengthened the habit of bitter religious debate. Only a misty image of "traditional society" makes it possible to forget such well‐ known facts and to paint a fantastic picture of colonial New England as a happy little island of ideological peace and quiet undisturbed by dissension and "hermetically" isolated from the outside world.

Bender objects to a historical narrative "shaped by the notion of unrelenting community decline," but his sketch of New England gets thing off to a bad start, and the contrasting picture of the "segmented," "compartmentalized" society that grew up in the nineteenth century barely qualifies the standard view. He wants to argue that "community" and "society" can coexist and that we should think of them not as stages in a historical sequence but as contrasting "forms of interaction." Since "community" no longer has any territorial basis, however, it now has to rest on voluntary association. In the seventeenth century, "community as a place and community as an experience were one." In the nineteenth century, this linkage was shattered. Today the "experience" of community has to be found in the company of "family and friends," which satisfies the need for intimacy in a world governed by the impersonal dynamics of the market. The "coexistence of communal and noncommunal ways" requires "multiple loyalties"; people have to "learn to live in two distinct worlds, each with its own rules and expectations."

The "coexistence" thesis is not new; in one form or another, it has figured in discussions of community from the beginning. It was the hope of sealing off private life as a protected sanctuary from the market that led nineteenth-century moralists to sentimentalize the domestic circle. The same desire to prevent the market from contaminating the "culture of the feelings," as John Stuart Mill called it, underlay the modern cult of art and artistic freedom. But the doctrine of segmented "spheres," whether it is conceived as a program of social reform or simply as a description of modern society, has always been open to insurmountable objections. The principle of "contract" has a tendency to invade the sphere of private life and to corrupt relationships based on "status."

In The Homeless Mind, a study of "modernization and consciousness," Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner argue that it is "possible to concede the irrevocability and irresistibility of modernization ... and to look upon the private sphere as a refuge or 'reservation' for

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