The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Philip Selznick. University of California, $40. If the concept of a dense, erudite, 538-page treatise on social theory that is timely isn't a hopeless contradiction in terms, then Philip Selznick's The Moral Commonwealth is timely. I write this when there is still a chance that Bill Clinton will not win the presidential election, though it looks pretty close to a sure thing. By what must be coincidence, The Moral Commonwealth traffics in virtually all the themes of the Clinton campaign, ending with a glorification of the term "covenant" that recalls Clinton's nomination acceptance speech in New York.

So it's impossible to resist subjecting Selznick's discussion of Dewey, Kant, Hume, Locke, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Weber, Freud, et al. to a "Washington read" by mining it for potential clues about the new administration. Of course, this is unfair. Selznick surely couldn't care less about the really pressing issues, like who gets the office in the southwest comer of the West Wing; he's trying to synthesize a political philosophy for the long term, not plot legislative strategy.

Still, he is openly working in a vein of moderate-liberal political thought that extends back about 15 years and includes the writing of figures like Amitai Etzioni and Robert Bellah. This philosophical movement has interacted quite energetically with a moderate-liberal political movement that started at about the same time, of which Clinton has always been a leader. It would seem that all parties concerned would wish that the lengthy labors of the politicians and the philosophers come to fruition simultaneously.

The great obsession of the political moderates has been the Democratic party's loss of its majority status in presidential elections, beginning with the 1968 election. The role of groups like the Democratic Leadership Council has been figuring out how to deruse various Republican-zapping techniques and win back the white middle-class voter. The philosophical moderates are obsessed with a different but complementary issue--the excessive individualism of contemporary American culture. One engine of individualism is capitalism, but another is a certain kind of political liberalism, the kind that emphasizes the protection of an ever-expanding array of legal rights as the...