The Missing Child in Liberal Theory

Every day we experience shocks to our civic sensibility. In our view, these shocks are due to the marketization of our social endowment, of family life, of childhood, health, and knowledge, of security and employment. The raw side of the trend towards the marketization and defamilization of the social bond is what we see in street crime, drugs, school drop-outs, single-family poverty, homelessness, and unemployment, which we experience either directly or vicariously through media reportage whose power to observe is equalled only by its inability to explain. Indeed, the media coverage of the daily degradation of the life-world is itself an essential ingredient in the reduction of social concern to social anxiety that further undermines civility.