Editor's choice

Culture and politics
FALLOUT FROM CENTRIFUGAL FORCES

THE DECLINE
OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
Process, Participation,
and Power in State Legislatures
Alan Rosenthal, 1998
Congressional Quarterly Press

THE ONE AND THE MANY
America's Struggle
for the Common Good
Martin E. Marty, 1997
Harvard University Press

In an election year, these two seemingly disparate books make surprising complementary reading.

Religion scholar Martin E. Marty concerns himself with cultural identity, political scientist Alan Rosenthal with representative democracy. Yet their underlying purpose is the same: to assess the dangers inherent in the fragmentation of our public enterprise.

Marty agrees with historian Gerda Lerner that stories about a shared past are vital because they help shape a nation's or a community's identity. Yet we live in an age when there are many contending stories. "Are these narratives," he asks, "all part of what some have called a grand story, a metanarrative? Or do citizens in their various groups possess only separate stories that isolate people from one another?"

Believing the latter possibility exists, Marty takes aim at so-called identity politics. The American experiment, he warns, "is a delicate venture, a gossamer fabric" that is threatened. He contends that the nation's moral, spiritual and intellectual capital are in need of restoring, "but 're-storying the body politic' says even more."

More may also be less at the extremes of popular sovereignty. Alarmists already envision a future not so distant when each voter can determine policy in the isolated glow of his or her computer screen. Alan Rosenthal's analysis of changes in the state assemblies turns on the distinction between such super-democracy and the nature of representation. He worries that initiative powers and term limits are already reducing cohesion and authority in legislative bodies.

Neither book purports to be a how- to manual, but both authors should be saluted for red-flagging the potential fallout from centrifugal forces in our culture and our polity.

THE ONE AND THE MANY IN ILLINOIS: Excerpts from the Martin Marty Governor's Humanities Lecture

The Illinoisan is first and foremost a heterogeneous character, and symbols fit him with little grace....[;] his heterogeneity is in itself the final key to his nature. Historically his State has been one where paradox blossoms constantly, where both Lincoln and the suppressors of Love- joy were nurtured; where the Utopias of the Janssonists and the Icarians rose in counterpoint to the lusty individualism of old Chicago.... Criss-crossed by railroads from all corners of the country, a steelmaker, Illinois in its entirety functions as a working model of the Nation as a whole.

Who wrote those thoughtful words in The WPA Guide to Illinois? ... The 1939 guide has been reprinted with a new introduction, and there has been a freshly conceived successor volume. But that little excerpt from the original can be treated canonically and classically to serve as an epigraph for our effort to address questions about Illinoisdom, Illinoishood, and the like.

Exactly what occasioned and occasions the claim that in Illinois paradoxes blossom constantly, or at least sufficiently that to mention it can help characterize the state? The central one offered by the WPA writer and many before and after would go something like this: There are reasons to expect some generalizations to apply in any state, but particularism abounds. One expects some homogeneity in a state. But, countering this, we get remarkable heterogeneity in "Illinois." ... In no state would a demographer expect complete uniformity. But states may display some sort of organic, bounded, characteristics, especially because political and cultural identities often merge and fuse to some extent. Illinois, contrary to opinion and expectation, then, manifests a distinctive kind of heterogeneity. All others flow from that.

Illustration by Mike Cramer

In an age when "identity politics" is overdone, it seems valid to point to multiple spheres or intersections where loyalties can be expressed, but without fanaticism; where people find enriched but not exclusive and hence overlapping communities that can contribute to their identity without turning them into tribalists.

Religion scholar Martin E. Marty is retiring from the University of Chicago. He delivered the fourth governor's lecture last June, sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council.

Illinois Issues March 1998 / 31