such an abundance of unavoidable calamities that it becomes all the more necessary for people to cling to the idea of progress for emotional support, in spite of the mounting evidence against it. Horrifying images of the future, even when they are invoked not just to titillate a perverse and jaded taste but to shock people into constructive action, foster a curious state of mind that simultaneously believes and refuses to believe in the likelihood of some terminal catastrophe for the human race. A sober assessment of our predicament, one that would lead to action instead of paralyzing despair, has to begin by calling into question the fatalism that informs this whole discourse of progress and disaster. It is the assumption that our future is predetermined by the continuing development of large‐ scale production, colossal technologies, and political centralization that inhibits creative thought and makes it so difficult to avoid the choice between fatuous optimism and debilitating nostalgia.

Some such set of considerations, I think—as Michael Sandel puts it, "a growing fear that, individually and collectively, we are less and less in control of the forces that govern our lives"—helps to account for the recent fascination with submerged traditions of social criticism that have been overshadowed by the dominant tradition deriving from the Enlightenment. In the last twenty-five years, historians and political theorists have rediscovered "civic humanism" and "republican virtue," and the heated debates about these ideas, spilling over from scholarly publications into the journals of opinion, indicate that they have more than academic interest. "Republicanism"—which refers, of course, not to the Republican party but to a much older body of ideas stretching back to the Renaissance and, beyond that, to classical antiquity—has become the slogan of those who criticize liberalism, whether from the right or from the left, as a political philosophy increasingly incapable of commanding unselfish devotion to the common good. Only a revival of civic spirit, these critics maintain, will enable us to attack the problems that threaten to overwhelm us; and the republican emphasis on active citizenship speaks more directly to contemporary needs, they claim, than does the liberal philosophy of acquisitive individualism.

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