SOURCE: “E Pluribus Unum,” in Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1998, pp. 8–9.

In the following review of A Place for Us, Mort supports Barber's evaluation of recent federal programs which aim to promote a sense of civic responsibility, and asserts that Barber's ideas for increasing corporate responsibility in the global economy, though idealistic, are laudable.

“Civil society,” a term once used by a professor at the University of Berlin in the 1800s (one G. W. F. Hegel), means daily life as it occurs separate from the government or the state. Long dormant, the phrase was resurrected by dissident Eastern European intellectuals raging against their totalitarian states in the 1980s.

Today, the phrase has been co-opted by American intellectuals, politicians and pundits. As political theorist Michael Walzer reminds us, through our “unions, churches, political parties and movements, cooperatives, neighborhoods … we have lived in civil society for many years without knowing it...