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Interests—Public and Individual

to sustain polyarchy, that is, the legitimation it gives for the assumption that the moral good consists in pursuing my own interests, is adequate to prepare the American people to make the sacrifices necessary to provide the genuine changes necessary for a more equalitarian society. This kind of point can be made also in relation to one of Dahl's other concerns with our contemporary form of society. According to Dahl the irreparable flaw of polyarchy is the remoteness of the government from the citizen. This is not the result of any conspiracy; limits are placed on effective participation in decisions by the sheer number of persons involved. Dahl has no clear solution to this problem except to suggest that we must develop cities and neighborhoods of human proportion. The enhancement of neighborhood corporations, he thinks, might provide one means of giving men a genuine sense of participation in the decisions that affect their lives. This is clearly but a strategy that continues to presuppose the problem. It is interesting that it did not occur to Dahl that perhaps this problem indicates a more fundamental difficulty with his account of the legitimate character of the American form of democracy, for Dahl presupposes that the legitimacy of authority is determined primarily by the extent to which men can efficaciously affect the decisions the government must make. This is still a highly formal criterion, for it presupposes that the legitimacy of authority is determined largely apart from the actual content embodied in the symbolization of that authority. In order for men to assume that government is legitimate they do not necessarily have to participate directly as long as the government clearly is operating in a way to sustain the community's deepest-held values and purposes. Perhaps the crisis of authority today is not that men no longer actually govern themselves, but that the fundamental moral community that should give direction to any government is not present. If that is the case then neither revolution nor Dahl's account of polyarchical authority is sufficient to alleviate the fundamental malaise of our society and government. Moreover to continue to emphasize the significance of the individual's interests for the legitimation of authority may only be a continuation of the fundamental moral failure that has brought on the current crisis. The problem is not the destruction of the individual but the destruction of fundamental forms of trust that provide the basic language, symbols and practices that legitimate authority must presuppose.