104 humanizing the world
the teacher to the student, the husband to the wife, the parent to the
child, and, more generally, each according to his station or trade, his
assumed responsibility in the larger life of society as well as in his im-
mediate family and community. Th at public order is best which best
creates the conditions most propitious to the adoption of such an ethic.
We can understand the supposed relation between this ethic of roles
and the public order by analogy to the relation between the nineteenth-
century doctrine of private law and its corresponding conception of
public law. Private law defi ned the system of freedom, the scheme of
ordered liberty, to be upheld against any contamination by the initia-
tives of a state bent on making this system serve the interests of par tic-
u lar groups (e.g., redistribution as the law- subverting capture of the
state by class or factional interest). In such a view, the most important
standard by which to judge a regime of public law was that it not cor-
rupt, through po liti cally directed redistribution, what was supposed to
be the distributively neutral law of coordination among free and equal
individuals: private law. At the same time, it was charged with creating
a po liti cal space within which the system of private rights could fl our-
ish, for example, by providing for the public goods of security and
education.
But what is the content of an ethic of roles? General ideas about the
sanctity of the personal and the rescue of interdependence and recipro-
cal subjectivity from the continuation of war by other means remain
powerless, all by themselves, to supply the answer to this question. Th e
answer begins to become clear only against the background of the ways
in which societies have actually been or ga nized. A defi ning issue is
whether we are to accept the established structure of society as the ho-
rizon within which to pursue the humanization project or to resist that
structure as the chief obstacle to the implementation of this project. To
bring this question into focus, consider two circumstances.
One circumstance has been characteristic of most societies and cul-
tures in world history before the national and world revolutions of the
last two hundred– odd years. It is the association of power, exchange,
and sentiment in the same social relationships. Its characteristic for-
mula is the sentimentalizing of unequal exchange— a relation between
individuals in more powerful and less powerful roles, involving a trade of
practical advantage, overlaid by reciprocal allegiance. Th e patron- client