Within Lasch’s three chapters, “Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?,” “Communitarianism or Populism?,” and “Conversation and the Civic Art,” he highlights the decay of civic virtue, while calling attention to the fact that American democracy was at its best when there was “small-scale production through cooperative buying and selling” (81). Small-scale production required qualities of responsibility and self-reliance, claiming that something more than morality that can generate virtue. Lasch refers to the “probing social commentary that took shape in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when it became evident that small property was disappearing and people began to ask themselves whether the virtues associated with proprietorship could be preserved, in…