The chapter starts from the assumption that the ideals held up by both Hierarchical and Atomistic approaches to governance produce pathologies of bondage and isolation, and that each perspective attempts to remedy the pathology of its counterpart. In this age of existential crisis, huge tensions between collectivist and individualistic positions are pushed to a breaking point. The approach of the authors is based on the decision to focus on the possibility of replacing the neoconservative, neoliberal, and communitarian reform movements with their respective hybrid approaches to governance in the Arc of Reification. By this, it is meant the unresolved tensions between the desire of individuals to be autonomous and the fear linked to individualism. This opens up to a sort of modern liberalism, with the possibility of conducting to an existential crisis. According to Turner, “the more individual rights expand, the more the individual becomes subject to centralized control and regulation”. As a consequence, the dialectic between liberalisms and their neo-extensions generate contradictions in lived experience. This paradox of the i/Individual is created when human beings simultaneously attempt to exist as both embedded within groups and socially independent beings—the two sides of the ontological divide between collectivism and individualism. The authors suggest that the void cannot be represented by any substantive meaning—innate or man-made. However, the ontological assumptions in each of the other three ideal-types enable representation: someone can be authorized to represent the One (Hierarchical); someone can be authorized through majority rules to represent the preferences of the Many (Atomistic); or anyone has the potential to represent the common good (Holographic). The solution proposed in chapter 11 is to reinstate social boundaries in order to reclaim the polity from both the chaos of the market and the hierarchical control of the state. Reforms may delimit the market and reclaim spaces for political and community life. The argument is that the value of equality among diversity would once again check the value of liberty, thereby creating unity. Reforms are presented as means to fight the collapse of state, market, and civil society under the domain of market values, by reasserting a firm separation among them and placing civil society in a privileged position over the other two. Civil society could then revitalize the public sphere by restructuring interactions according to communicative ethics and action in substantive relationship.
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