Where civic virtue consists in holding together the complex identities of modern selves, it is vulnerable to corruption of two kinds. The first is the tendency to fundamentalism, the response of those who cannot abide the ambiguity associated with divided sovereignty and multiply encumbered selves. To the extent that contemporary politics puts sovereign states and sovereign selves in question, it is likely to provoke reactions from those who would banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to “take back our culture and take
...more
