Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Harrington

A city can share sidewalks, subways, and headlines and still feel like a set of parallel lives. Harrington’s line cuts with that kind of bleak precision: “common” is proximity, “community” is obligation. The sentence is built on a bait-and-switch. It starts with a comforting premise - we live together - then snaps it into an indictment: togetherness isn’t the same as belonging.

The intent is political, but it lands as sociology. Harrington, best known for making poverty impossible for mid-century America to ignore, is pointing at a modern arrangement where people are packed into the same economy and culture while being spared the inconvenience of mutual responsibility. “Lived in common” suggests shared conditions: the same markets, the same institutions, the same national myths. “Not in community” signals the failure to translate those shared conditions into shared care.

The subtext is a critique of liberal comfort: we can tolerate inequality and isolation because we still participate in a common life that looks, from a distance, like cohesion. Mass media, consumer routines, and civic rituals imitate solidarity while keeping real dependency at arm’s length. It’s a warning about a society that has perfected coordination without connection.

Context matters: Harrington was writing in an era when affluence became America’s dominant self-story. His work insisted that the “other America” existed inside the same borders, often invisible to those living right next to it. This sentence is his bleak thesis in miniature: cohabitation is not communion, and a nation can be technically united while morally fragmented.