Mutual aid ..

... Bryan Appleyard - Richard Sennett’s Togetherness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The answer is, as Sennett rightly says, to relocate the concept of the competitive free market within the cooperative human world. Much neo-liberal rhetoric seemed to treat the market as some kind of natural system with which we tamper at our peril. This attitude seems to have been supported by some dubious Darwinian rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. In fact, all markets are very intricate human creations, products of cooperation rather than competition.

Prince Kropotkin's Mutual Aid is in part a rebuttal to the "survival of the fittest" notion. But of course it is the tendency to shift power and responsibility to the central government -- thereby marginalizing local authority -- that is a major cause of the problem. It is the principle of subsidiarity that needs to be revived.