Charles Reich’s Unfinished Work

Abstract

Charles Reich never stopped worrying for the world. Throughout his life, Reich diagnosed our social and environmental ills with unmatched prescience, insight, and clarity. Yet Reich also never stopped believing that our better selves could still prevail. Even as the zeitgeist turned decidedly against the “new consciousness” that he once proclaimed to be inevitable, Reich never wavered in his conviction that true freedom must—and can—come from individuals working together.

By letter dated September 12, 2008, Reich shared two book proposals with me that, in his words, “address the same underlying problem in very different ways.” With permission from Reich’s family, the Yale Law Journal agreed to publish these two brief writings as part of this Forum collection celebrating Reich’s life and work.

In one proposal, Reich lays out a vision of what he calls The Individual Sector, a space apart from the public and private sectors within which massive “machines”of governmental and corporate power have come to dominate the terms of human existence. Careful readers of Reich’s landmark article, The New Property, will recognize his distinctive brand of left libertarianism in this proposal, but the call for individual freedom feels more urgent now and informed by intervening decades of political fracture, mounting inequality, market creep, and the rise of existential environmental threats.