In 1987, novelist Tom Wolfe published Bonfire of the Vanities, the tale of an affluent New York bond trader, who lusts after financial, sexual, and material fulfillment. Able to make or lose millions through split-second computer trading, the protagonist dreams of being a “master of the universe” (the name of a superhero toy figure popular at the time). A misadventure involving his BMW, his mistress, and a black teenager becomes the thread that unravels his world. Wolfe's tale of greed and self-absorption in the midst of social fragmentation, poverty, and racial and class animosity was a stereotypical but useful guide to the times. In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), Robert N. Bellah, a University of California sociologist, and four other scholars interviewed 200 middle-class men and women and found them alienated, isolated, and despondent. They were materially successful but psychologically and spiritually unfulfilled. The anti-intellectualism and cult of hostility to government that pervaded press and politics, Bellah and his associates observed, had left a void. For better or worse, government was a reflection of and an instrument of popular will. To denigrate it as an abstraction was to denigrate the notion of community. He called for a return to religion in its authentic, communal, self-sacrificing sense – not merely as a justification for self-aggrandizement, or for nonbelievers – and a return to the notion of republicanism, government by enlightened individuals who recognized that the individual good is always tied to the common good.