Beyond state law: everyday rules and the fragile public

In modern urban life, people encounter strangers at every turn. How do they negotiate being thrown together into a society of strangers—to be among people they do not know and with whose cultures they are unfamiliar? Widespread acceptance of informal rules of daily behavior enables the acceptance of others—of strangers—as partners in everyday social and economic transactions. The term ‘public’ denotes a collective of people, linked loosely through acceptance of the primacy of these informal rules, shared concern for the general welfare, and a sense of which others are rightful members of this collective (and which not). Any public set of rules apportions respect in a society. It lays out who defers to whom, creating tensions between those respected and those not, between those included in the public and those excluded. In the United States in the period after World War II, a series of economic and social changes brought those tensions to a head and subverted the unity of the public.