It presents information as a specifically human property, one that links the subjective and personal, and intersubjective, collective realms.
The corporate realm should pay heed.
These are figures better analyzed by novelists than pundits: as Walter Kirn put it Saturday, they're "self-anointed knights templar of the collective shadow realm, not secular political actors in extremis".
For all the sophistication of the modern global economy and the speed with which it can conduct commerce, the architecture to deal with problems of the public realm and collective responsibility remain sorely underdeveloped.
All in all, it's enough to support the basic contention that civic life -- that realm of collective and often altruistic endeavor that belongs neither to the market nor to the state -- is indeed weaker now, and even to justify a certain nostalgia for the 1950's.
Teilhard also coined the term noosphere -- a generalization of "biosphere" -- as the realm of collective consciousness encompassing the earth and her inhabitants.
Remarkably then, the simple fact that merit and prestige are granted and cannot be imposed in antagonistic equals ensures that tactful modesty when building up and advertising one's own merit becomes compulsory, a "declarative" restraint all the more indicated considering the unavoidable entanglement of individual and collective merit in a realm of egalitarian synergy.
Furthermore and perhaps most importantly, the simple fact that I am French Canadian, having grown up soaking in a collective zeitgeist anchored in the realm of the Canadian land and climate, must have played a huge part in my decision to apply only in Canada.
Amplifying these books' collective impact well beyond the realm of intra-party discussion was the general trend in literary and social scientific theory labeled "structuralism" and with which Althusser's re-reading of Marx was identified.
What you do in the public realm is our collective business.
