ABSTRACT
In common with many American thinkers and activists, Cady Stanton embraced a bewildering smorgasbord of different civic and personal philosophies—liberal, republican, utopian, scientific, and nativist— throughout her long life. Civil society is a realm that is neither individual in a narrow relentlessly individualist sense, nor communitarian in a strong collectivist sense. The Greek city-state was a community of warriors whose political rights were determined by the fundamental privilege of the soldier to decide his own fate, to choose death nobly. Christianity introduced a strong principle of universalism into the ancient world even as it proclaimed a vision of the “exalted individual,” brought into being by a loving creator the mere creature of any government, any polis, any Empire. Adam Michnik insists that the genuine democrat always struggles with and against his or her own tradition, eschewing thereby the hopelessly heroic and individualist notion of going it alone.
