Camillo Sitte stamp from Austria
Man is originally beastly, but although the taint of savagery in him is never effaced, he has found out ways of bringing order to his life. Everyone can make his own list of the different kinds of orderliness that have been of use to him, instances in which the heterogeneous parts have been brought together in a relatively harmonious whole. The temple of Nike in Athens is a triumph of order, and so, in a different way, is a modern supermarket. The family embodies one sort of order, the nation-state another.
In a great work of order—a Bach fugue or a bottle of first-rate Burgundy—the discordant qualities of life are overcome, if only temporarily. The difficulty lies in finding out which methods of creating order are most suited to the different occasions of life. The techniques which make Walmart or A&P possible are quite different from those which beget a work like the Maison Carrée at Nîmes or Chopin’s Krakowiak. The political and legislative processes by which the state insures public order are of little use in raising a family; the Wealth of Nations, if it shows how order emerges spontaneously in the economic realm, does not shed very much light on the throwing of a good dinner party.
What is wanted is a better sense of the limitsof particular methods of overcoming unruliness in life. Woodrow Wilson sought to draw up a constitution for his
