Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.

The breakdown in association results in what I call the problem of “the one and the 99” — the direct and unnatural relationship between a human person and a large group. It is a perennial problem, but current conditions have accentuated it dramatically because our technologies are built to connect the one directly to the millions, dissolving everything in between. The platforms that promised to bring us together did so by hollowing out the associations that once stood between the person and the mass. A man scrolling alone is plugged into a crowd of strangers — exposed to their moods, their fears, their judgments — with no friend group or congregation to mediate the encounter. We have never been connected to so many while accompanied by so few. 

Its political manifestation is the self set against the state, with no intermediary institutions or forms of association between them — except a few good group chats, if you’re lucky.

That is not only a lonely and somewhat pathetic way to live. It is also dangerous. The human quest for community does not disappear in these atomized environments; it simply gravitates toward more totalitarian forms of government and belonging.

History has tried to warn us about this danger — and it also shows us the way out.

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In the gray hush of 1970s Czechoslovakia, where even silence seemed state-issued, there was a band called The Plastic People of the Universe. Its music was raw, dissonant, and defiantly Western. The band didn’t shout slogans or call for revolution, but played loudly and boldly. For that, its members were arrested by the Communist government in 1976.

Among those watching was a playwright and dissident named Václav Havel, who would eventually become president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Galvanized by what he saw, Havel wrote a 1978 manifesto in samizdat (self-published) form that passed from hand to trembling hand across the country, under the title The Power of the Powerless.

“Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing,” he wrote, “something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of ‘living within the truth,’ on the real aims of life.”

Havel’s essay centers around a memorable image — a hypothetical greengrocer who places a sign in his shop window that reads “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!” The greengrocer doesn’t really have a strong belief that the workers of the world should unite. He places the sign in the window because it is the easiest thing to do. “The poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots,” Havel wrote. It gets put up because it is the default thing to do, like unpacking the onions and carrots and putting them on the shelf.

Acts like that, Havel suggested, are the lifeblood of what he called post-totalitarianism, in which people aren’t coerced by force into doing things; they voluntarily do what they think is expected of them. They don’t want to cause any trouble, so they quietly and perhaps even unconsciously engage in performative acts that signal belief in the status quo.

Havel’s poster has not disappeared; it has migrated. Today, it is the reflexive repost, the slogan in the bio, the conviction adopted because the people nearest us already hold it. Few of us examine these gestures any more than the greengrocer examined his sign. We perform them because performing them is the path of least resistance — and because everyone around us is performing them, too.

That is social contagion: the unconscious transmission of belief and desire from one person to the next, the reason a slogan or a fear can move through a crowd faster than any argument can. Post-totalitarianism is simply social contagion left unchecked — a society in which the pressure to perform runs strong and widespread because people do not have the kinds of friends, or civic associations, that would immunize them from it. If our society were a human body, it would have high blood pressure which, left untreated, would damage its vital organs. The way to treat this societal disease is not through medication, but through exercise: in our case, the exercise of healthy association that acts as a check on the pressures of power.

Power rarely comes from one source. It often comes from the way people relate — through trust, fear, stories, and rules. “It is in the basic associations of men that the real consequences of political power reveal themselves,” wrote the sociologist Robert Nisbet in the 1950s. Nisbet understood that political health depends on the strength of intermediate bonds that lie between the individual and the state — families, congregations, and local associations that give shape to common life. Once these bonds dissolve, the individual and the state meet face-to-face, naked and unmediated. That is the crisis of modern politics: not too much government, but too little community.

Havel saw a way to reconstitute the civic bonds that helped people live with more integrity, not according to the lies that falsely held his post-totalitarian society together. What if the compliant greengrocer chooses to change his behavior? “Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself,” he wrote. “He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings.” The greengrocer, Havel continued, “has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game.”

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The “one” who thinks that he is alone is never truly alone — that feeling of alienation, of isolation, is precisely what the state wants him to believe. Small acts of defiance are never done in isolation, in part because they appeal to the conscience of others. They wake some up; they help others form new associations. It was the fearlessness of a singular rock band, after all, that gave Havel himself the courage to form an association of his own.

In 1977, he and a group of public intellectuals, writers, philosophers, workers, clergymen, artists, and former political prisoners published a manifesto known as Charter 77. It wasn’t a formal organization, but a kind of moral fellowship: a living association of people who wanted to “live within the truth.” In a society built on compliance, the mere act of signing their names became an act of differentiation.

Our society will remain enervated and paralyzed if we believe that the only choice is between the one and the 99 — between isolation and totalizing conformity. The way forward begins with realizing that a vast middle ground exists. The one cannot be connected to the 99 directly without being in danger of either dissolving into it — or isolating for self-preservation. The self and the crowd are not in a natural relationship.

Imagine going to a large concert with a group of friends in a vast stadium filled with 100,000 frenzied fans and losing your friends in the crowd. You suddenly lose sight of your reference point, of those familiar faces, and you become a stranger in an anonymous crowd. It is your friend group — the intermediary association between yourself and the crowd — that keeps you anchored.

In a strong sense, that is the situation that many people find themselves in today, with the loss of the intermediary associations that Tocqueville saw were so important to the American character. A healthy civic association does not measure its success in membership count or the number of events hosted. Unlike the crowd, your association will notice if you stop coming, and it is there that the value lies. You will be sought out.

History suggests that the most transformative associations are rarely massive at the start. Charter 77 had 240 initial signatories. The Oxford Inklings rarely had more than six or eight members in the room, yet changed literary history. Jesus chose 12. Associations of a modest size are large enough to test ideas against resistance, yet intimate enough for personal accountability.

If you can’t claim to be part of a community of that character today, you should stop waiting for it or looking for it. It is time to build the associations on which progress depends.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book,  The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which has just been published by Macmillan.

I was reminded of Havel’s greengrocer when reading The Right To Sex, a much-lauded new book on women and feminism by Amia Srinivasan — the holder of Oxford University’s prestigious Chichele professorship of social and political theory, a position previously held by luminaries such as Isaiah Berlin.

Despite — or perhaps because of — her standing, she opens the book with a statement typically found in the preface of any contemporary woke writing about women; I’ve come to think of it as a direct equivalent to the greengrocer’s poster:

“At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

Yes, commissar, the statement says, the definition of “woman” in my book about women is “anyone who identifies as a woman”. No, commissar, biology is not a thing.

That politically essential disclaimer out of the way, Srinivasan dives into the messy business of sex and feminism. Is it possible, she asks, to make the “sexual marketplace” more welcoming to people who are not conventionally attractive — without telling people who they should or shouldn’t shag? Can we make porn less harmful to young people without banning it? Can we chart a course between believing women who make sexual assault accusations and avoiding miscarriages of justice — which might disproportionately impact minorities?

The Right To Sex has been breathlessly received by all the usual bellwethers of correct opinion. A gushing profile in Vogue promised that The Right to Sex “will radically change the way you see feminism”. Corbynite clickbait queen Ash Sarkar tweeted a photo of it as “absolutely extraordinary” beach reading. And the Ground Zero of gender-woo fog-weaving, the queer theorist Judith Butler, lauded the book (somewhat ironically, given her own notoriously impenetrable prose style) in the New Statesman as a beacon of “clarity”.

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And indeed, taken one at a time, Srinivasan’s sentences are models of clarity. Taken together, though, her paragraphs and overarching arguments are not. One lengthy section — the coda to the book’s titular essay — dispenses with even the pretence of a sequential argument, instead offering some 40 pages of numbered paragraphs responding to critiques of The Right To Sex. And even where the text is arranged as a sequential argument, Srinivasan piles references together with examples and musings usually without bothering to spell out what they imply.

Instead, what we get is rhetorical questions. Sometimes several are arranged in a row, with none answered directly. “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas?” she asks. “Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?” We are left to speculate on how Srinivasan would actually answer the questions she poses.

Was this, I found myself wondering, the result of woolly thinking on the author’s part? This seemed unlikely, given Srinivasan’s successful career as a philosopher, an occupation that demands verbal precision. Rather, the cumulative impression is of intentional evasiveness. A tiptoeing across the minefield of contemporary debates about desire, personal autonomy, prostitution and exploitation. But is this mindless conformity? I came to think it less a matter of Havel’s greengrocer, than of another twentieth-century thinker who lived through an era of sharp constraints on what may be said: the German philosopher Leo Strauss.

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For it’s one thing to be a shopkeeper, obediently sticking a poster up to signal compliance and a desire to be left alone. What if you’re a public intellectual? Few intelligent people hold unambiguously to the dogmas of the day, but where blasphemy incurs meaningful costs, communicating a less than flawlessly orthodox opinion in public writing is a risky business.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argues that writers in repressive social contexts have historically often conveyed a message at two levels. Where orthodoxy is enforced by persecution, Strauss argued, truth-telling can still be achieved by an author “provided he is capable of writing between the lines”.

A lazy read of The Right To Sex garners all of the orthodoxies we’ve come to know and love in elite woke feminism. Trans women are women; prostitution should be decriminalised; the solution to porn is not legislation but more sex education; hook-up culture is fine except when it isn’t, in which case it’s all men’s fault; anyone who isn’t bisexual should re-evaluate who they fancy in the light of identity politics. Each of these orthodoxies is presented with moral certainty, as simple statements: “Third wave feminists are right […] that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial labour undertaken by most women”.

But having made a simple statement of the official position, our lucid Oxford professor proceeds to convey a sense that everything around that position is hopelessly muddled. Sex work is work, but:

“to understand what sort of work sex work is […] surely we have to say something about the political formation of male desire. And surely there will be related things to say about other forms of women’s work: teaching, nursing, caring, mothering. To say that sex work is ‘just work’ is to forget that all work – men’s work, women’s work – is never just work: it is also sexed.”

If you take at face value the poster Srinivasan put in the window of her greengrocer’s shop, asserting her belief that biology is not a thing, parsing what any of this means beyond the initial assertion of orthodoxy is like nailing jelly to a wall.

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And I came to think that this is, in fact, the hidden structure in this seemingly structureless book: the repeated, maddening contrast between confident pronouncements of theoretical orthodoxy and miserable, inconclusive rummaging in the less than positive real-world outworkings of this orthodoxy. Read in this way, The Right To Sex is an accurate critical summary of woke feminism: clarity in theory, amoral mess in practice.

The text asserts that this mess can’t be solved, for to do so would be to embrace “authoritarian moralism”; but at the same time, the subtext demurs. Srinivasan approvingly mentions government interventions to force parents to accept state-sponsored sex education, or advertisers to create more “inclusive” marketing, policies with more than a striking resemblance to moral values imposed by authority.

The subtext, then, is that authoritarian moralism is good, but we can’t say so. The question is which morals? The things we can’t say in approaching this are hinted at in one of the book’s strangest and most Straussian glitches.

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Strauss suggests that one means a writer may employ to signal a double meaning is to present the orthodox position in flat, affect-less language that bores the reader, and the text’s real argument in vivid, thrilling, memorable terms. And just such a slippage occurs in Srinivasan’s abrupt gear-change from a language of bloodless abstraction to the mythic register of gods and monsters when discussing “patriarchy”.

“What,” Srinivasan asks, “does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?” The personification is startling against a backdrop of generally arid prose. What is this thing, “patriarchy”? How can an abstraction have a “mind” like some creature out of myth?

The careful reader, reflecting on this eruption of the mythic, might be drawn toward a question so profoundly un-askable under mainstream feminism that it could conceivably pose a threat even to shortlistings for appointment to (say) prestigious professorships. Is “patriarchy” not fact but mythology?

And if in fact there were no such thing as “patriarchy”, we might then speculate on what actually shapes the often difficult terrain of men, women and sex. And that in turn points to themes so glaringly absent from Srinivasan’s book it’s hard not to read it as pointed: biology, children, and love.

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You don’t get appointed to prestigious Oxford professorships without being both clever and canny. It’s now commonplace to acknowledge that the age of “free speech” is over, and The Right To Sex responds pragmatically to this state of affairs. It recites every conventional woke opinion the commissars could demand, while between the lines sketching the contours of an entirely different argument, conveyed in the only register such a thing could be conveyed in without trashing a prestigious career: esoterically.

And this shadow message implies many heresies: that the refusal to address love, biology, and children are driving us and our discourse mad. That loveless sex is hell. That pornography is hell, and is devastating young people, who long for loving sexual commitment. That trans women are not women. That “patriarchy” is a paper tiger. That there are irreducible trade-offs to be made between identity groups.

It’s of course impossible to know whether Srinivasan means this argument to emerge from her meandering if mercifully short volume. Given her prominent standing in an institution whose role is to shape elite youth into morally correct regime functionaries, she wouldn’t tell me if that were the case.

Either way, the esoteric reading is the more charitable one, so I’ll go with it. The alternative is that the youngest ever holder of Oxford’s prestigious Chichele Chair is peddling a poorly structured sheaf of arid witterings based on an incoherent worldview; is doing so under the name of “feminism”; and is being lionised for it in Vogue. I prefer to think someone of her evident wit and considerable prose skill understands exactly what she’s choosing not to say.

Yet to see things in that way is to overlook the peculiar contribution of communism to the tyranny exerted in its name. It is also to ignore the abiding relevance of a political system whose charm in Left-wing circles, as we learn from the pronouncements of Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne, has been barely diminished by its enormous legacy of human suffering.

Let us go back a little further than 1989, to 1977, the year when the seeds of what became known as the Velvet Revolution were sown in the former Czechoslovakia. A group of intellectuals, among them the playwright Václav Havel, were in the habit of meeting in private apartments in Prague, where the philosopher Jan Patočka would lecture on Plato, Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger.

Patočka had been forcibly retired from the university after 1968, and his private seminars were conducted in secret. There was a real fear that, should word of them reach the ears of the secret police, arrests would follow. After all, what business did ordinary citizens have in discussing philosophy outside the official universities?

Confined within a secure lecture hall, supervised by scholars trained in Marxist dogma, philosophy had a legitimate place in the system. But, discussed in a private apartment into the early hours of the morning, by people spurred on by the spirit of free enquiry, it was evidently a threat to the state.

The suspicion was justified. In due course there emerged from these private discussions a charter of rights, asking the state to respect the elementary freedoms granted under the Helsinki Accords to the citizens of Czechoslovakia. Charter 77 was signed by those attending Jan Patočka’s seminar, and by a widening circle of brave friends and sympathisers. Patočka himself stepped forward as the Charter’s first spokesman, was arrested and brutally interrogated, with the result that he became ill. Taken to hospital, he continued to be interrogated until he collapsed and died.

In those times, when private education was criminalised, and the universities and colleges were devoted to Marxist-Leninist dogma, the older generation of professors, the best of whom had been expelled from their positions following the Soviet invasion in 1968, had no other way of passing on their knowledge than through such secret seminars. For most of them publication was impossible, and the important books were unavailable or banned.

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By Roger Scruton

The chain of intellectual inspiration had been broken, and they were owners and curators of its last severed link. They lived at the end of an educational tradition, and their attempts to nurture that tradition and to pass it on had to be conducted underground. Do not think that this was an accidental feature of communism: it was the real political meaning of the system. Knowledge means privilege, advantage, curiosity, free enquiry, all of which were threats to the proletarian revolution and to the Party that had taken charge of it.

The Prague of those days was the perfect setting for this drama. A full stop had been put to its spiritual life, but somehow the city stood, half decrepit, above the memory of its greatness. Its dilapidated palaces looked down on the routines of a frightened people, with police on every corner, and deserted churches and civic buildings reminding the citizen that communal life had stopped.

You could be compelled to take part in the joyless May Day parades, but anything like spontaneous social life had vanished long ago. Buildings were boarded up, their crumbling facades raining down on the wooden scaffolds that protected pedestrians from these falling fragments of Heaven. A strange silence prevailed, interrupted only by the squeal of trams, and the city still held onto fragments of its former life like a beautiful statue on a tomb.

Thanks in part to that extraordinary atmosphere, the underground became a moral idea, and around that idea there congregated all the hopes of an educated class deprived of recognition, and forbidden to teach. Through my own contacts with that class, I came to understand why those attending the underground seminars were treated so severely.

What disturbed the authorities was not the fact that these peculiar people were studying Plato. After all, Plato was studied in the official universities too. The problem was that they were studying Plato together, and without asking permission. They had created a club of their own, outside the vigilance of the state, and they had united in friendship to pursue that goal. They had created a fragment of civil society, and in doing so had brought meaning into their lives beyond anything delivered by the grim routines of the communist bureaucracy.

In the Czechoslovakia of those times there was a hunger for civil society. Older people remembered the clubs, troupes, parades, pilgrimages, dances, bands, teams and regiments that were the lost heart of their nation. Younger people looked enviously at those Western societies in which pop groups, dances, festivals and protests offered a life outside the system. And the more serious the desire for those things, the more determined was the Party to forbid them.

The underground meetings and seminars opened a path back to civil society. They promised a society shaped by the free decisions of its members, in which differences of opinion, outlook and purpose would be smoothed away by the sheer joy of cooperation, and in which there would be neither top-down dictatorship nor ideological conformity.

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The war on civil society is the essence of the communist project. Appointed as home minister after the communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, Janos Kádar abolished 5,000 associations in the space of a year, from brass bands to knitting clubs, from scout troupes to shooting parties, from church charities to private schools. He made it a criminal offence to gather money for charitable purposes, and made all schools and youth organisations into the property of the state. Similar policies were undertaken in Czechoslovakia.

All free associations were seen by the communists as places of danger, where hierarchies, distinctions, privileges and deals could challenge the role of the Vanguard Party in its fight for equality and “social justice”. Reflecting on this, I came to see why freedom of association belongs with freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Those two freedoms are the foundation of civil society, and the necessary shield against the abuse of political power.

Take them away and all power ends up in the hands of the state. The result is what we know as “totalitarianism”.

Communism vanished from Europe 30 years ago — but the totalitarian impulse remains. Freedom of association has no sacrosanct status on the Left; in our country we see this in the matter of country sports which are, and will always be, the targets of leftist disapproval.

The Labour Party does not see certain laws forbidding free association as an assault on legitimate freedoms but as a moral duty of the state. After the ban on fox hunting, the Party has likewise set its sights on grouse shooting, not from any concern for the grouse, which are well cared for only because we shoot them, but out of hostility to the kind of people who congregate with guns on grouse moors.

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But the associations that most need protecting, now in Britain as then in Central Europe, are not those devoted to the leisure of country people but those in which people associate for the sake of knowledge.

At the recent Labour Party conference Left-wing activists called for private education to be criminalised, as it was by the communists, and the funds of private schools to be confiscated and used for the “common good”. Meanwhile leftists in universities are mounting effective campaigns to prevent free discussion and to expel those professors whose views they dislike. Politicised subjects like Gender Studies, which forbid ideological disagreement and have doctrine and dogma as their goal, are driving free discussion from the curriculum.

It is not clear, yet, how far this will go. But the arguments given and the tactics adopted are exactly those of the communists in 1948. The state is seen as the guardian of public morality; it must therefore forbid the misuse of our freedoms.

It is surely likely that the underground university that operated in Czechoslovakia in the Eighties will be needed before long in Britain. In preparing for that moment we should be looking back, not to 1989 but to 1977, when the battle which had been fought and lost in the post-war years began again in earnest. And it is our battle today. Once again we must fight for civil society against the state, and for free association against totalitarian control.