ABSTRACT
The key notion in the politics of social breakdown is civil society. Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead were very much aware of the damage done and the continuously severe threats posed to civil society by liberal modernity's market economy and state. Both, however, saw the state, one whose democratic character is constantly reinforced by active publics and a thriving group life, playing an indispensable role in revitalizing civil society in opposition to market forces. In contrast to the market's and the state's language of individualism, civil society's language of solidarity allows individuals to name and express their needs for belonging, benevolence, and community and thus to begin to undertake the practices necessary to the satisfaction of these needs. Civil society can be an effective guide to the reconstruction of America's social infrastructure only when understood in sociological terms. The political right threatens the already fragile institutional foundations of social obligation.
