Civic Capitalism and the Leisure of the Theory Class

This essay deals with civic capitalism, which has something to do with the way people combine acquisitiveness and being civic minded, Boston, a city where I discovered lots of people like that, and the theory class, which is composed of people who think and write for a living and whose disdain for capitalism extends to virtually everything except the stocks in their retirement funds. The essay develops along two main argumentative lines: the theme of social integration, of social ad “civic” capital, and the subjects of it all: businesses, to discover the way to be a good community; the theme of “common sense”, of “regular folks” and their everyday life and experience as much more “normal” and integrated, and much less frantic and fragmented, than one could expect. So, these subjects and these everyday practices explain how very diverse people get along together, and indeed insist diverse people are not really as diverse as we are driven to expect of them, independently of their respective wealth or income. They are “more alike than equal”, which points both to the relatively minor role equality in a sheer economic sense plays in integrating a complex society, and to the “behavioural” approach, an approach grounded on everyday social practices rather than on “cultural differences” in an abstract sense.