IT IS NOT GRANTED TO ANY ONE MOUTH TO DELIVER insight into the shared life already sealed, nor does the hour require of him who speaks that he lay down a perfected covering wherein every rent of the society is named, measured, and closed before a hearing may begin. Not from me alone, O people, comes the word; it dwells in the chorus of the many. The interpretation of common life is a song of destiny that bears us all. They who withhold their assent until such a ready-made system stands complete before them, as though the malady of a country must arrive already briefed and entire, thereby turn aside from the very members whose partial sight alone can compose what no single science pretends to finish. Each holds a fragment of the wound and of the remedy. Each insight is a necessary stone in the wall that is not yet raised; yet the newer agora, grown cunning in its narrowing algorithms, makes the citizen’s utterance small, and leaves the lone standing apart, unheard, as if the voice that does not already contain the whole were no voice at all.
In the bygone season of our age there arose, my friend, not one spirit of the commonwealth, but several. Doctrines (ideologies) they were called, yet they were rather so many riven ways of the one longing: each laid hold of a limb of the living whole and named it the All, and so virtue put on again her wrathful harness, and the mind of man took up the scepter. The holy bond was scattered into camps. Noon lost its voice among them, and the boiling sea of opinion was no waving field of grain. They would not return, in blissful self-oblivion, into the All of nature. They stood before her like strangers, and did not comprehend her. The many doctrines feigned to possess the holy art of understand the order of the world and of governance that diagnoses all, and under that pretense gathers the many beneath one completed name of dominion though already existing under one. In the twilight after, the doctrines were given way to lesser fine grain that poured over the earth thorn and vine enriching the force of the few (oligarchie), who walk in the stream of dealings and cling to the goods of the earth. In such an age, I claim no such completeness. I do not set lawful freedom in the republican case forth as the perfect answer to every question the age may put, nor as a system that covers and explains the whole. I chart only its lineage in its historical depth, the long remembering that runs beneath the later forgettings, and I argue that this depth may not remain unspoken; that it should, it must, be proclaimed unto the people, and that the old dream of a knowing and enlightened people not perish in the silence of the partial and the ungathered. For the land is not healed by the one who arrives with the whole commission already written, but by the many who are suffered to bring their several measures, and by the transmission of that depth which teaches them they were never meant to stand alone. Near is the common need, and painful to grasp when every voice is made small before it has spoken its part.
In humility and hope
DOMINIQUE
