1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. R. D. Heffner, 2 vols. ( New York: Vintage, 1954 ).
2. As is well known, Habermas uses this phrase to identify contradictions in the modern advanced capitalist societies; see his Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). I take it herein in a more general sense as defined by Charles Taylor to mean, “Societies destroy themselves when they violate the conditions of legitimacy which they themselves tend to posit and inculcate”; see Charles Taylor, in “Legitimation Crisis,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 ), vol. 2, p. 248.
3. Thomas Merton, “The Wild Places,” The Center Magazine (July 1968), pp. 4044.
4. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (13 December 1968): 1243–1248.
5. Charles Taylor, "Philosophy and Its History," in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 17-30