Kristol Irving. On the democratic idea in America

New York: Harper & Row, 1972. — 149 p.These essays were written and published over the past five years and, except for the correction of a couple of factual errors and the elimination of a few topical references, they are here reprinted without revision. Though composed for different occasions, they do overlap and, in a sense, these overlappings are what each of the essays is really "about." They suggest a common theme and a common concern: the tendency of democratic republics to depart from-to "progress" away from, one might say-their original, animating principles, and as a consequence to precipitate grave crises in the moral and political order.human history, that the actions of self-serving men will coalesce into a common good, and that the emancipation of the individual from social restraints will result in a more perfect community. I do think that, within limits, the notion of the "hidden hand" has its uses in the marketplace, which is the domain of "economic men" rather than of citizens, and where the specter of bankruptcy does impose a kind of self-discipline. I believe the results are disastrous when it is extended to the polity as a whole, which can go bankrupt only once, and whose destiny is finally determined by the capacity of its citizenry to govern its passions and thereby rightly understand its enduring common interests.