The One and the Many: America's Struggle for the Common Good.

America's public life is full of grunts and screeches and pervaded by a righteously accented rhetoric of me and mine, and Americans in droves, complicit but disgusted, are turning away from it. Martin Marty and Amitai Etzioni - respectively, a towering student of American religion and a distinguished sociologist, and founder of the communitarian movement - would like to draw them back, offering, in their different ways, what amounts to a prolegomenon to politics, the rediscovery of speech about the common good.

They agree that the United States is too large and too diverse for close and coherent community: Both are seeking a middle ground between what Marty calls "totalism," the effort to impose a single "story" or national culture, and a "tribalism" that would fragment us into warring islands of race, ethnicity, and gender; and both appeal to the possibility of "symbiosis" in a "community of communities" informed by a version of the doctrine of subsidiarity. But not surprisingly, they strike those balances differently. Etzioni is more worried about excessive individualism and disorder and more willing - as part of a conscious dialectic - to overemphasize the common; Marty is more skeptical about "grand stories" and more concerned to accommodate plural perspectives and voices. But they agree that, given our variegated cultures, habits, and histories, the bases of American unity lie in and around political institutions, a civic bond that, beyond the Constitution and the laws, requires its own sort of "cohesive sentiment."

In fact, Marty and Etzioni are participants in a very old American debate. The framers of the Constitution were content with relatively "diffuse" feelings of national unity, confiding that the United States could accommodate extreme diversity - including the culture of slavery - within the design of the laws. They did assume that American citizens would be white and dominantly Protestant, with largely common ideas about family and private morals, but they made no effort to preserve these likenesses. It was their opponents, the Antifederalists, who stressed that republican government depends on civic spirit and that, since self-government is at bottom the government of the self, it calls for, in place of coercion, a heroic effort to "arm persuasion on every side."

Ambivalent Marty leans toward the Federalist, while Etzioni comes close to the Antifederalist side, but both hope to revitalize or develop America's "moral voice," trusting that moral discourse ("telling our stories") will discover or create the ground of community. To be sure, both are more than a little vague about how this national "megalogue" is to take place, although Etzioni has a dangerously soft spot for electronic communication. Still, they are right to observe that the fact of conversation makes nonsense of the claim that we are locked into "incommensurable universes of discourse." And in any case, Marty and Etzioni are most concerned to establish that moral concerns and ideas of the common good are proper matters for public discussion, not simply "perspectives" or "value judgments" excluded - as a school of liberal philosophy has it - from legitimate political debate.

Marty does sometimes flirt with that view, following a generous, inclusive impulse and contending that the Constitution is neutral with respect to culture and not meant to "promote a creed or consensus or anything else substantive." Subsequently, while arguing - correctly - that the Constitution presumes the subordination of religion in secular affairs, Marty allows religion more space than the founders envisioned. Jefferson, who followed Locke in teaching that government can regulate religion's "overt acts," almost certainly would not have felt, as Marty does, that the First Amendment protects animal sacrifice in Santeria. And fundamentally, Marty's thesis is simply wrong. The Constitution does have a creed: It aims to promote a "more perfect union," chiefly by opening the door to commerce and technology in the interest of human mastery and individual freedom, while weakening communities through temptations of the market and the allure of ambition.

Etzioni often slights political institutions, but he recognizes that the demoralizing - and homogenizing - effects of the market are reinforced by the Constitution's individualism, something he attributes to an overemphatic eighteenth-century attempt to promote autonomy against narrow and confining communities. As guides to practice, his ideas for correcting that excess often misfire, partly because he overrates the possibilities for transformation. (His suggestions for the reform of legal practice add up to utopianism squared; for example, he proposes that lawyers be prohibited from entering "not guilty" pleas for clients they know to be guilty, or from challenging testimony they know to be true.) In principle, however, it is hard to quarrel with Etzioni's hope for a democratic moral voice strong enough to be heard amid the clamors of the marketplace.

Unfortunately, along with more potent obstacles, any grand democratic dialogue is opposed by the intellectually fashionable support for a politics without "foundations." As both Marty and Etzioni indicate, moral discussion imposes fairly definite constraints and forms, most notably, rules of civility and respect. Political conversations aren't simply pleasant story swapping; they can easily turn violent because they are about things that matter. Our "stories," in fact, are serious efforts - sometimes desperate ones - to account for our common history and for the place of that history in human reality. The logic of moral discussion points squarely to first things.

Etzioni is ready to address those issues: He is comfortable talking about what amounts to natural right, and he affirms that, beyond its procedures, democracy is a norm and a goal. But even Marty's argument leans more in that direction than he wants to advertise. Marty's religious liberalism makes him quarrel with the view - associated with Chesterton, and more recently, with Sidney Mead - that America is a "nation with the soul of a church"; in Marty's analysis, the Declaration of Independence, too much like a creed, yields precedence to the Constitution. Yet the Declaration's doctrine is "civil religion" of a very special sort. Lincoln, of course, found it indispensable in making the moral case against slavery, and, in a quieter way, the Declaration's teaching is just as important to Marty's position. Marty's preference for inclusion rather than hegemony, for respecting and listening to America's many voices, like his confidence in their potential for harmony, goes well beyond utilitarian calculations. It rests, like the republic, on the proposition that all human beings are created equal.

Wilson Carey McWilliams is professor of political science at Rutgers University.