The Limited Life

1. According to Ehrenhalt, community is built on lasting relationships which lend themselves to a fairly small degree of choice. It is thus the result of obedience to those in authority (who ultimately create the order of a community) and does not arise from increased individualism or having a wider array of personal choices available to one through the market.
2. Ehrenhalt says this because he believes that markets’ main goals are increased availability of options in order to create competition and encourage productivity and in doing so, they take the emphasis for the decisions that people make away from who it is that people know and have personal relationships with (and are loyal to) and place it instead on where one can get the best deal. He says that lots of people in many ways would actually rather have rules to follow and some kind of guiding authority, instead of being left completely to the impersonal forces of the market with it’s huge array of individual choice.
3. Daley’s corruption-filled machine presents an interesting dilemma because it is somewhat necessary in human relationships to work with people where they are at, but it is also seems wrong to accept sin for what it is without working to build up virtue in society through some kind of reform of the situations in which corruption exists. The fact that improvement in politics hasn’t manifested itself in better results, however, does not seem to be an argument for a return to the machine of Daley’s day even if it seemed to result in a better end product, if nothing else, simply because the ends should not justify the means. Nonetheless, the authority that Ehrenhalt stresses so much seemed to play a role in this machine (even if it was corrupt authority), and a return to greater authority would perhaps help better the current situation…
4. This conflicted state which was widespread in the 1950s manifests itself in Betty Friedan in that she was the winner of Coronet’s ‘mother of the month’ award, indicating that she was leading a successful life, both raising a family and working as an author on the side, but on the other hand, she was also obviously either personally affected by the neuroses of the day, or had been influenced by the general public attitude concerning them, as her featured story was about blossoming romance in the psych ward.