Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 324 of Richard Epstein’s magnificent 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

There is yet another reason to beware the use of communitarian arguments in a political setting. Just as large political societies are not families writ large, so they are not communities writ large. A community requires more than people who live side by side or individuals who owe allegiance to a single sovereign. It requires that people within the community show some concern for each other. Equal concern and respect cannot be rammed down the throats of people who wish to direct their emotional energies elsewhere. What is required is some willing acceptance and recognition of the communities by their members. Communities can be destroyed from without, but they cannot be created from without; they must be built from within. Thus any effort to use state machinery to create a sense of community is likely to backfire and to displace voluntary groups that could otherwise be formed by free and independent people.