The common good becomes a responsibility not only of individuals and of the state, but also--in a completely new way--of the intermediate social bodies (which I prefer to call civil
societarian networks) (8) now playing a fundamental role in mediating the processes by which the common good is created.
In the 1790s (to which the parenthesis doubtless refers) such an idealism had hardly had time to work; in 1822 Lamb issued 'A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis', a phenomenon which he attributed to '
societarian reformation', perhaps a belated aspect of 'revolutionary idealism'.