For it was such a society, when secularized, that became the model for civil society. Thus the saints' experience of enabling the participation of the unregenerate through the halfway covenant serves as a model for the formal right of political participation in society. But with every turn of Seligman's argument, as with Weber's, religion is held to be a powerful force only in ages past. Indeed, Seligman is pessimistic about the future usefulness of civil society as a normative construct in part because of the persistence of the religious identities of primordial groups. In Eastern Europe, for example, the pole of individuality is insufficiently developed.
People are too embedded in ethnicity or in religion.
The same is true in Israel, where a civil society that could embrace both Arabs and Jews is all but negated by strong tribal loyalties. Primordial groups, like publically consequential religiosity, are incompatible, in Seligman's view, with the autonomous individualism the civil society tradition has required. In America, on the other hand, a strong tradition of respect for individuals as morally autonomous beings frustrates contemporary attempts to provide social solidarity and hence a socially informed sense of identity. Seligman dismisses philosophical communitarianism as a more or less doomed attempt in some degree to preserve, yet simultaneously to overcome, the individualist pole of the tradition. Seligman considers whether, in a time of atomized anomie, new social movements such as feminism or gay rights might provide an incipient civil society for their adherents.