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Book Review: Public Vision, Private Lives
4 9
Mark S. Cladis, Public Vision, Private Lives: Rousseau, Religion, and 21st-
Century Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 298 pp., $65
hardcover, $29 paperback.
S TEPHEN
E IDE
BOSTON COLLEGE
eidest@bc.edu
I.
In his book Public Vision, Private Lives: Rousseau, Religion,
and 21st-Century Democracy, Mark Cladis brings Rousseau to bear on the
debate about private goods vs. public goods in contemporary political theory.
The two sides in this debate—communitarians and liberals—agree about the
impoverished state of modern life, but disagree about what side of it is more
impoverished, private or public. Communitarians view modern life as desperately
individualistic, lacking any appreciation for such public goods as
citizenship and common culture. Liberals think conformism is the problem,
and that what is needed is more respect for diversity and individual rights.
Cladis believes Rousseau has a unique contribution to make to this debate
because he recognized the usefulness of communitarian means for liberal ends.
In order to ensure respect for diversity and individuality, institutions and formal
declarations of rights are not enough. A “shared democratic culture” (197)
is required, which for Rousseau meant a civic religion. Cladis believes secular
liberals in particular (who are inclined to confine religion to the private sphere)
have a great deal to learn from Rousseau’s teaching on civic religion. Religion,
in Rousseau’s telling, can serve to moderate the conflict between public and
private. Not only does it enrich and cultivate our interior private lives, but, as
“common moral belief,” it achieves the ends of liberalism more effectively than
fear or self-interest (6–7, 193–97). But this does not mean Rousseau thinks an
ultimate resolution to the conflict between public and private is possible, or
even desirable. What the “characteristically unsystematic” (xii, 9) Rousseau
has to teach twenty-first-century democracy above all is that a “fully human”
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