the community and the aim of social life is the fullest available determination of “the beloved community” (Royce, King), which is wholly actual in the present, but left vague by the unwillingness of the community to act on it. Auxier understands the beloved community upon the transcendental logic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of “the general will”: that in every social circumstance there exists an optimal course of action, and that course of action is the general will (what people would each and all choose if they could discern it). The beloved community is the general will, Auxier holds. He allows that corporations and other historical institutions are indeed persons, but often dysfunctional persons whose community values and structures beget alienated and pathological individuals. Auxier holds, contrary to classical liberalism, that politics is a subdivision of ethics and cannot be divorced from human moral life. He holds that the dignity of personality is the highest value in the field of values humans are capable of recognizing, and includes the ani mal and plant worlds as forms of existence that exemplify in some degree, however slight, personality. Auxier insists that humans are morally obliged to remain open to the possibility that personality characterizes the whole order of the cosmos, not just the portion regarded as living or human, and must consider that possibility in forming and enacting their ethical (including political) values. Auxier is a communitarian and sympathizes with the ideas of such classical conservatives as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, insofar as they agree that meaningful change is always slow, what happens to the least in the community happens to the whole community, that economic development must include in its very conception the entire community. He holds with Royce and Gifford Pinchot that conservation of nature is the basis of democratic life and that whatever damages nature also damages democracy. He holds that communities which produce independent individuals will both benefit from that process and suffer from the inevitable betrayals that strong individuals choose, in their tragic isolation. Auxier teaches and advocates a version of nonviolence that derives from both King and Mohandas Gandhi. He argues that almost every problem confronted by human beings, individually and collectively, are solved without the use of violence and that therefore resorting to violence is an aberration in human experience. This is why it requires justifications that always rely upon the logic of