Here lies the source of Elshtain's confusion. Those who organized and joined the civil rights movement justified their resort to civil disobedience by appealing to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Of "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation," in these appeals, they breathed not a word--and for good reason. The respect for one another's rights is what grounds civility and makes it possible for us "to reach disagreement" without slaughtering one another. The search through politics for "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation" is plainly incompatible with this: It directly leads to the "identity politics" that Elshtain abhors. The quest for "self-transformation" and for "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" is, in fact, perfectly consistent with "the current construction of 'difference' as a form of group homogeneity that brooks no disagreement or distinction within and can maintain itself only as a redoubt against threatening 'enemies' from without."
At the heart of the new tribalism so visible within today's academy and beyond is the same warmed-over existentialism that Elshtain's mentor Hannah Arendt purveyed in her books. Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard may be the proximate sources of the postmodern mentality, but the fountainhead for their thinking--and for Arendt's as well--is the Martin Heidegger who sought to practice the politics of "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation" by embracing the National Socialist cause.
In 1933, Heidegger's compatriots, "acting in common as citizens," had gotten together and found "a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." In Arendt's demand that power rest on "reciprocity and mutuality," there is no ground for denying that what Heidegger and his fellow Germans did was "legitimate."
Jean Bethke Elshtain needs to rethink her argument from the bottom up. To discover the foundations for the civility that is, as she quite rightly asserts, crucial to the process of public deliberation within a liberal democratic society, one need only study the American Founding Fathers. Nowhere do they deny that politics can be ennobling. Their very activity presupposed as much. Nor need one doubt that the Revolution required of Americans a measure of solidarity and that the revolutionary experience was for many transformative. Yet nowhere did our Founders advocate revolution or even "direct action" as such.
Instead, they espoused limited government. For instance, in stipulating that taking a religious oath would not be a prerequisite for holding federal office, they signalled their commitment to the view that "self-transformation" and the pursuit of "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" are best conducted outside the political sphere--in churches, in families, and in private associations.
It was, as they saw it, not enough that Americans, "acting in common as citizens," should come together and "find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." There had to be principles, lasting principles, stipulating which "collective hopes and possibilities" can properly be pursued in the political arena and which must be relegated to the private sphere.
The vagueness and incoherence that beset Elshtain's book and the communitarian movement as a whole arise from an unwillingness on the part of some of left-liberalism's most acute and unsparing critics to accept and endorse the fundamental principles underpinning the limits and restraints that they recognize as essential to civility within a liberal democracy such as our own.
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