The Spirit of Community.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren E.

An early theorist of the market system observed of the man who trades in his plow for the higher income that goes with a factory workbench: "While he remains in a country village his conduct may be attended to, and he may be obliged to attend to it himself. In this situation, and in this situation only, he may have what is called a character to lose. But as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice."

Karl Marx on alienation? No, Adam Smith on the human costs of urbanization. The great evangelist of proto-capitalism was, of course, a passionate and persuasive advocate of free markets, but he did not believe that market arrangements by themselves were sufficient for a society's health. Indeed, Smith was willing to bend the principles of laissez-faire in the cause of promoting a virtuous citizenry. So were the American Founders, especially Jefferson, who considered a disciplined, self-reliant yeomanry a prerequisite to the new republic's flourishing.

In our own time, Charles Murray has eloquently diagnosed the "obscurity and darkness" of America's great cities. Somewhat more ambiguously, the Republican right's call for a return to "family values" bespeaks devotion to old-fashioned virtue. (It also trades, as anyone who watched the 1992 convention knows, on more than a little old-fashioned bigotry). But willingness to proclaim and defend moral values, argues Amitai Etzioni, should not be ceded to conservatives as their exclusive territory, and in The Spirit of Community he unabashedly offers from the (moderate) left a prescription for the moral renewal of America. Or rather a multitude of prescriptions, for the pages of this book overflow with specific policy proposals, some clever and promising, others a rehash of old nostrums that age has not improved. The social vision they are meant to express and enhance is dubbed Communitarianism.

Particular caring communities, maintains Etzioni, are the fount of values from which the greater society receives sustenance, but in recent decades these communities have become badly eroded. The rot starts with the primal community, the family. Divorce, illegitimacy, and two-income households in which parents value money over time deprive children of adequate supervision and example. No easy talk about "quality time" erases the fact that too many children aren't getting the hours they need with a committed mother and father. Nor are shortfalls in the family made good elsewhere. Schools don't function adequately as parent substitutes; they don't even function adequately as schools. The predictable consequence is that kids get into trouble and fail to learn what they need to become...