Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society

THE QUESTION HOW MUCH COMMUNITY SPIRIT (Gemeinsinn) Does Liberal Society Require? made me go back to a well-known tale of Tolstoy with a similar sounding title, namely, How Much Land Does a Man Require? This is the story, you may remember, of a peasant called Pakhom who becomes obsessed by the passion for acquiring more and more land. Giving in to temptation he subjects himself at one point to an excessive exertion that is supposed to bring him riches but actually leads to physical exhaustion and death. At this stage, of course, Pakhom needs only the small area of land where his body is being put to rest-three Russian ells. Even though these words, coming at the very end of the story, look like the answer Tolstoy gives to the question he asks in the title, he obviously did not mean to say that this is all the land that peasants truly require. His real point is that this is the amount of land we may well end up with if we fall prey to the accumulating passion.