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The market is not a place or a person or a conspiracy. It is a process — a continuously adapting system of trial and error, experiment and feedback, freedom and responsibility. It rewards both discipline and risk taking, creativity and deferred gratification, foresight and learning from the past. The market process makes possible not only commercial activity but the countless voluntary associations that arise spontaneously when people are allowed the freedom to form their own bonds. Because it depends not on predetermined status but on contract — on choice and consent — the market is liberating. But it is not, as its critics charge, “atomistic,” except in the sense that atoms have a tendency to form molecules, which in turn create larger structures.


Some governments take their primary task to be ensuring that people do the bidding of the gods, and so they establish a coterie of priests or prophets or mullahs to ascertain and enforce divine will. Ancient Egypt and Japan went that one better by finding a man-god to give the orders. Other states seek more worldly outcomes. Rome intricately structured its republic to maintain a balance between patricians and plebeians; Tito’s Yugoslavia sought to preserve one between Serbs and Croats. The Soviet Union claimed to seek a dictatorship of the proletariat, while virtually every contemporary African country is a straightforward dictatorship of the dictator. Imperialist nations strive to put a finger into every available international pot; Switzerland has managed for centuries to remain uninvolved in external entanglements. China built a great wall to keep outsiders out, East Germany one to keep insiders in. And most every other fancy of ambitious, powerful men has found expression in some political form or another. Only recently in human history, however — during the last four centuries at most — has any currency been given to the conception of a political order dedicated to the proposition that individuals are to be left alone, by each other and, especially, by their governors.


The modern system of rule is based upon “territorially defined, fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate domination. As such, it appears to be unique in human history.” How else has political space been configured in the past? Ruggie refers briefly to primitive kin-based systems and to the conception of property rights held by nomadic peoples, but by far the greatest part of his analysis is devoted to the “nonexclusive territorial rule” that characterized medieval Europe, with its complex patterns of multiple allegiances and overlapping jurisdictions. It is by analyzing the earlier transformation of the feudal order into the modern world of states claiming absolute and exclusive sovereignty over their territories that we can gain insight into the new transformation that may now be under way. The modern state has been invented or “socially constructed,” and thus its persistence cannot be taken for granted. In fact, the European Union, where “the process of unbundling of territoriality has gone further than anywhere else,” may point the way toward a postmodern future that will in important respects resemble the medieval past.

 
The notion of “cultural identity” is dangerous. From a social point of view, it represents merely a doubtful, artificial concept, but from a political perspective it threatens humanity’s most precious achievement: freedom. I do not deny that people who speak the same language, were born and live in the same territory, face the same problems, and practice the same religions and customs have common characteristics. But that collective denominator can never fully define each one of them, and it only abolishes or relegates to a disdainful secondary plane the sum of unique attributes and traits that differentiates one member of the group from the others. The concept of identity, when not employed on an exclusively individual scale, is inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure. Rather, true identity springs from the capacity of human beings to resist these influences and counter them with free acts of their own invention. The notion of “collective identity” is an ideological fiction and the foundation of nationalism.

 
What’s telling, really, is that Bogosian should have located his screed against the banality of modern life in the suburbs, because it makes obvious the way in which suburbia becomes the place to which cultural and political anxieties can be displaced. More to the point, it makes clear how much of the suburban critique depends on an utter lack of interest in the suburban experience. It’s not how people in suburbia think they live, or how they understand the way they live, that matters. What matters is that their lives are awful, and that that awfulness poses a threat to the rest of us — with “us” understood to be the representatives of culture, art, and civic concern.


The benefits that the English poor earned by moving from the countryside to the slums of the new cities are heartbreaking in their humility — earthenware plates instead of wooden, underwear, tea, and sugar — but they aren’t any less real for their littleness. Neither are the scarcely less humble acquisitions of the toiling poor of East Asia and Central America. A bicycle, a radio, a package of aspirin, some pork with their rice, shoes rather than sandals: for these things, villagers worldwide are delighted to shatter what has been glamorized as “the world we have lost.”

 
It is a peculiar trait of the bourgeoisie, perhaps the most successful class in history, at least so far, according to Karl Marx, to be hated so intensely by some of its most formidable sons and daughters, including Marx himself. Lack of heroism in the bourgeois ethos, of committing great deeds, has a great deal to do with this peculiarity. The hero courts death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. The hero counts death tolls, the bourgeois counts money. Bin Laden was asked by his interviewer in 1998 whether he ever feared betrayal from within his own entourage. He replied: “These men left worldly affairs, and came here for jihad.” Intellectuals, themselves only rarely heroic, have often displayed a hatred of the bourgeois and an infatuation with heroism - heroic leaders, heroic creeds. Artists in Mussolini’s Italy celebrated speed, youth, energy, instinct, and death-defying derring-do. German social scientists before World War II were fascinated by the juxtaposition of the hero and the bourgeois: Werner Sombart’s Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes) and Bogislav von Selchow’s Der bürgerliche und der heldische Mensch (The Civil and the Heroic Man) are but two examples of the genre. Von Selchow was one, among many others, by no means all German, who argued that bourgeois liberal society had become cold, fragmented, decadent, mediocre, lifeless. The bourgeois, he wrote, is forever hiding himself in a life without peril. The bourgeois, he said, is anxious to eliminate “fighting against Life, as he lacks the strength necessary to master it in its very nakedness and hardness in a manly fashion.” To the likes of von Selchow or Ernst Jünger, World War I showed a different, more heroic side of man. That is why the Battle of Langemarck, a particularly horrific episode in 1914, in which Jünger himself took part, became such a subject for hero worship. Some 145,000 men died in a sequence of utterly futile attacks. But the young heroes, many of them from elite universities like the Japanese kamikaze pilots thirty years later, were supposed to have rushed to their early graves singing the Deutschlandlied. The famous words of Theodor Körner, written a century before, were often evoked in remembrance: “Happiness lies only in sacrificial death.”


My sugar-starved, Spam-fed generation used to look forward to December 25 as an interval of luxury and extravagance, but now we can all eat whatever we want all the year round, Christmas makes us hot, cross, fat and ill.

 
Joyce might have seen distance and isolation as necessary conditions for writing his masterpieces, but the loneliness of the modern etranger, and the absurdity of a weightless, unbounded existence, made others thirst for engagement, a kind of solidarity — if not with a particular nation or people, then with humanity in general, or at least with that part of humanity living in what came to be called the Third World. This is how a fashion for Maoism, the most extreme revolt against individualism, could follow from a fashion for alienation.

 
Some who instantly (and rightly) understand that Palestinians may burn to avenge their compatriots killed by American weapons assume that Americans have only interests (at least the elites do) and, at best, gullibilities (the best the masses are capable of). Those who are quick to read the mind of the executioner — crediting him with the longest possible list of legitimate grievances — forfeit understanding of the victim. The style of anti-Americanism I am writing about is different from the terrorist’s logic that because, say, the US maintains bases in Saudi Arabia, because your symbols in Mecca and Medina have been (in your mind) traduced, God calls you to slaughter innocents and crush their own temples to dust. The terrorist logic of Osama bin Laden is transpolitical — that is to say, nihilistic. Issues are fodder for his apocalyptic imagination. He wants power and calls it God. Were Palestinians to win all their demands, he would move on, in his next video, to his next issue. The soft anti-American, by contrast, sincerely wants US policies to change, but lays even the mass murderer (if not the mass murder) at the door of the US itself.


Such an extraordinary paradox can arise because, in her opinion, what people are is not in the least connected with, let alone determined by, what they do. Hence Ivan the Terrible’s failure to understand, in her early story, why the Israelis do not love him for what he is instead of pedantically concentrating on what he had done. The idea that people are the victims of their own conduct is, of course, part of the zeitgeist, and The Hand that Signed the Paper is only its reductio ad absurdum.