Youth finding meaning through a larger sense of community.

In his 1998 book, The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett observed the following: Adjustment and change is woven through human history. Natural disasters, wars, economic depressions have upset the status quo and engendered anxieties. Sennett proposed a collective solution to this state of precarity: A larger sense of community, and a fuller sense of character, is required by the increasing number of people who, in modern capitalism, are doomed to fail. This article begins with a discussion of the implications of the new economy for mental health and draws from Sennett's first image in which individuals are on their own to manage lives made precarious by flexible capital. The remainder of the article draws examples from my program of work on adolescents' political theories and interpretations of the social contract that binds them with fellow members of their society. The case is made that civic engagement is beneficial for young people and for democracy, and draws attention to the practices in developmental settings that enable adolescents to experience a larger sense of community. Rational choice models of human behavior reflect a rather negative view of human beings-that people are driven by self-interest and will make decisions that maximize benefits to the self at the expense of benefits to others or to the common good. Both individuals and society benefit when teenagers feel like they are connected to other people and institutions in their community. (PsycINFO Database Record Language: en