Rights Talk and its Remedies

John Hagen, Jr., has a nice piece in the Jan. 2 issue of America, providing an overview of the leading themes in the work of Professor Mary Ann Glendon.  Unfortunately, it is not available -- except to subscribers -- on-line.  It's definitely worth reading, though. 

UPDATE: A helpful reader had provided a link to the piece.  Here is the conclusion:

A leading theme in Glendon's writing is the importance of intermediate institutions in society-neighborhoods, churches, voluntary associations and the family. Echoing the 19th-century French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, she constantly stresses the role of these groups as "schools of citizenship" and "seedbeds of civic virtue." They teach cooperation, empathy, sacrifice, responsible use of freedom and concern for the common good. She frequently speaks of such groups in environmental terms, and warns that "the fragile ecology" that they embody is weakening. Mass culture, bureaucracy and global corporations all tend to stifle them. This speeds the atrophy of democratic skills and habits already set in progress by activist courts.

Glendon's emphasis on local "communities of memory and mutual aid" is classically Catholic. It reflects the key principles of solidarity and subsidiarity and stands in contrast to the rights-focused individualism of both the cultural left and the cultural right.

A striking summation of Glendon's outlook is to be found in the quotation she selected as the heading for her Web site . . . . It is taken from the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan: "There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will endure is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait."