other structures of consciousness." They take the same position taken by Bender, in other words; but they do not deny the difficulty of segregating private life from its surroundings. "It would be an overstatement to say that the 'solution' of the private sphere is a failure; ... but it is always very precarious." The history of the modern family, we might add, shows the difficulty of making domestic life a haven in a heartless world. Not only has marriage become a contractual arrangement, revocable at will, but the pervasive influence of the market—the most obvious example of which is the inescapability of commercial television—makes it more and more difficult for parents to shelter their children from the world of glamour, money, and power.

Quite apart from the impossibility of isolating private life from the commercial, bureaucratic, and technological structures that surround it, the "private solution" trivializes the communal ideal it seeks to protect. Bender recognizes the force of this objection. He raises it himself against the "human relations" school of industrial management, which tries to "engraft elements of community onto the main stem of organization." The business corporation will never become a community, Bender argues, any more than the nation as a whole will become a "family." This kind of talk "trivializes community," "markets the illusion of community," and gives rise to an "unspecified feeling of loss and emptiness that in turn makes Americans vulnerable to the manipulation of symbols of community."

At the end of his book, Bender suggests that the idea of a commonwealth, "rather than community, provides the essential foundation for a vigorous and effective political life." A commonwealth, he notes, "is based upon shared public ideals, rather than upon acquaintance or affection." But this afterthought comes too late to save the rest of his argument. The trivialization of the commonwealth is inherent in the very concept of "community," which has always been associated much more closely with intimacy and "togetherness" than with the search for a "vigorous and effective political life." Political life thrives on controversy, remembrance, and a periodic return to first principles, all of which the communitarian ideal condemns. Bender's own book begins with the classic definition of a community: "shared understandings and a sense of obligation"; "intimate, and usually face to face relationships"; an emphasis on "affective or emotional ties" as opposed to self-interest. A serious

-166-