One finds today among many thoughtful men and women a deep and legitimate uneasiness occasioned by the seemingly ever more pervasive decline, in our Western democracies, of what Pierre Manent has called “l’instint de l’existence politique.” The waning of the spirit of the citizen and the growth of “individualism,” the feebleness of civic pride and the strength of personal vanity, the eclipse of statesmanlike prudence, or phronesis, and the predominance of “public relations”: all these symptoms seem increasingly to confirm Tocqueville’s forebodings about modern democracy. Unfortunately, however, this not unreasonable malaise frequently issues in postures of questionable sobriety: on one side, a cynical passivity or morbid despair; on the other side, an insistent hope or demand for a kind of democratic politics of “participation” that would not respect the limits imposed by the nature and the historical development of modern liberalism. Reinforcing this latter sort of political passion is a nostalgic pining for a heroic, communitarian ancestry – a historical or “empirical” link to the civic grandeur of the Roman and Greek republics. The discovery of some such “lost treasure” in our own past would seem to help justify and encourage a moral rebellion against the prosaic or (as it is pejoratively termed) “bourgeois” liberalism that in fact defines American and modern Western republicanism. – pgs. 48-49, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of LockeÂ
