The blurbs on the back cover of The End of Equality ttry to paint Kaus' message as a radical departure from American political practice. Author Lawrence Mead goes so far as to name Kaus "the inventor of Civic Liberalism. "But despite the book-jacket bluster, Kaus' solution is as old as America itself. Alexis de Tocqueville considered strong civic ties to be the cornerstone of democracy, and the activists of the French Revolution even reorganized the calendar in order to squeeze class rivalry out of late-eighteenth-century society. Kaus' philosophy is nothing new.

But the real innovation of The End of Equality is that it follows time-honored civic liberalism to its logical ends. Kaus maintains that the first problem civic liberals must eliminate is the persistence of underclass. If the United States can somehow raise its poorest citizens' standard of living, other Americans won't be able to justify their flight from the public sphere. The perceived threat that the poorly-educated, crime-ridden underclass poses to the children of the wealthy and the middle class will disappear, and Americans will find their way back into public parks, public schools, public transportation and the like.

How do you rehabilitate the underclass? According to The End of Equality, you give up on welfare and instead guarantee subsistence-level jobs. Sidestepping economic issues entirely, the author mentions only the benefits of increased social equality. Everyone who wants to live will have to work. Without middle-class derision of "welfare mothers" and "welfare cheats," the ubiquity of work will bind Americans together.

The End of Equality suggests that other institutional changes will shore up the new public sphere. A healthcare system that puts the rich and poor together in the same doctors' offices and hospital rooms demonstrates an unequivocal refusal to value the lives of the rich more than those of the poor. Likewise a military draft. Although it provides and easy out for college-aged males who hesitate to face the risks and rigors of military service, the current All-Volunteer Force is the epitome of institutionalized social inequality; the poor boys get paid to get killed, and everyone else stays home. Earnest institutional changes Kaus implies, can and must rebuild society.

There's no guarantee the Kaus' forced Civic Liberalism will be any more successful than the class-blind Pruit-lgoe apartment complex. Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe built this vast concrete block, devoid of the tenements' decaying wood and the bourgeois curves, angles and bay windows. But people resented the ugly, socially-engineered building, and the housing authority that paid for the place ended up dynamiting it.

We might cynically suggest that a desire for social superiority--not just material well-being--motivates people, and Civic Liberalism is therefore doomed to failure. Maybe you just can't convince people that money doesn't matter.

Kaus' plan is no blueprint for the rebuilding of American society. The evidence he accepts is reasonable but not rigorous. too anecdotal, too thin. And like utopians of the past, he pessimistically critiques the old politics while messianically exalting the new.

But his proposals about how society ought to work are no less credible than anyone else's ideas. Clinton's still uneasy mix of money and civic liberalism remains untested, and certainly neither the old-style Democrats nor the Republicans offer better solutions. With no end to American's current malaise in sight, revitalizing common culture can't hurt.