Richard Cornuelle and the American dream that was… and could be
At a time when eyes all around the world are on the White House, Richard Cornuelle’s Reclaiming the American Dream, published in 1965, offers an opportunity for readers to reclaim their gaze and cast it back out to the work of invisible hands across the American landscape. Written as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation was massively expanding the role of Washington in welfare provision, Cornuelle’s book offered an alternative: a coherent vision of how voluntary associations and individual initiative can address social challenges without defaulting to government intervention or the need for a national C.E.O.
Reclaiming the American Dream has given generations of Americans a deeper appreciation for civil society and a philosophical framework to understand its role. More than a century after Alexis de Tocqueville observed Americans’ impulse to govern themselves through a teeming array of voluntary associations, Cornuelle looked back to Tocqueville’s insights and sought to discover what had happened to the vast associational activity that once characterized America. He catalogued what he found and gave it a name — “the independent sector.” The associative spirit of independent action in America was not gone, Cornuelle told us, but it was in danger of being eclipsed and enervated by expansive government. Could we remember the feel of rolling up our sleeves and engaging in the business of living together and caring for one another? Cornuelle believed so.
Cornuelle’s American Dream is fractal. He envisioned a world of people energetically and cooperatively engaged in thousands of mostly modest activities of mutual aid and civic improvement. And from these activities would emerge a landscape of thriving communities filled with resilient people. Reclaiming the American Dream explained the vital role of dispersed social responsibility and voluntary action in addressing social problems and in nurturing what Tocqueville had described as “habits of the heart.” Here and in later writings—including De-Managing America and Healing America—Cornuelle sought to remind us that complex social problems can usually be solved more quickly by local beneficence and on-the-spot problem solving than by distant bureaucrats or legislators.
Cornuelle’s vision is especially valuable today, as too many Americans have lost the vocabulary and practical skills of independent action. Americans seem increasingly apt, when they see a problem, to call for government action rather than to take initiative. Cornuelle’s American Dream was not nostalgic, nor did he have a simplistic view of what the independent sector could accomplish. Far from advocating a return to 19th-century forms of voluntary association, he called for people to develop new capabilities to help one another and to address emerging challenges in our communities. This forward-looking aspect of his thought speaks to our current moment, where technological innovation and new approaches to coordinating human action offer unprecedented opportunities for developing voluntary solutions to social dilemmas and crises of all kinds.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Cornuelle’s work helps us understand why the erosion of confidence in independent action is so dangerous for a free society. When people lose faith in their ability to address social challenges through voluntary action, they naturally turn to government solutions. This dynamic creates a debilitating cycle where increased government intervention further erodes people’s confidence in their own capabilities. By showing how private initiative and philanthropy, like private enterprise and investment, serve and amplify public purposes, Cornuelle provides us a more complete account of how a free society functions.
Revisiting this framework today can help provide corrective balance to the increasing submersion of all social functions under polarizing political imperatives. Reclaiming the American Dream can speak to business leaders who find themselves increasingly defensive about the role of markets and private enterprise, to philanthropic leaders trying to sustain charitable missions that are not reduced to government contracting, and to policy and political leaders who are awakening to their impotence given the sclerosis of the administrative state. For each audience, Cornuelle offers a rationale for their proper role in fostering a free society. As we grapple today with questions about the proper balance between government, commercial, and independent sector responses to social problems, Cornuelle’s framework helps us think more clearly about the distinctive modes of human action and how we can best come together around shared purposes.
In my copy of Reclaiming the American Dream, inscribed by Cornuelle as we were starting a new collaboration that would provide more than a decade of intellectual inquiry and adventure (the record of which can be found at Conversations on Philanthropy), Dick welcomed me to “the unfinished revolution.” This was how he thought about his ongoing effort to rekindle the ideas and institutions that could strengthen the independent sector. But the larger end he always had in sight was the unleashing of responsible human action and the emancipation of the human spirit. Cornuelle’s dictum — to see a problem is to act on it — is as important today as it was in 1965, maybe more so. With various forms of nationalism again on the rise, Cornuelle’s call for de-nationalizing community can challenge us to take hold of our freedom right where we are and to use our imaginations, our initiative, and our creativity to make American communities great again.
Lenore T. Ealy, Ph.D., is international vice president at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. Previously she served as Senior Fellow for Communities with the Charles Koch Institute. From 2000-2011 she worked closely with Dick Cornuelle to build a network of scholars and practitioners seeking to re-examine and strengthen the ideas, institutions, and social practices that sustain a free and flourishing society (www.ThePhilanthropicEnterprise.org).
