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This article investigates privatized economic rationality of war-making. The privatization of war is based on an economy in which the use of force and economic life have one again merged, meaning that those involved in war have no rational interest in its conclusion. The strategy of terrorism aims much less at the immediate physical consequences of the use of force than at the psychological consequences of violence. Thus, terrorist violence has two addresses. First of all, those who feel connected in a broad sense to those attacked, be it by reason of belonging to the same class or social stratum or by reason of national or ethnic identity or palace of residence. They are signaled that henceforth they will no longer live in safety, since from now on violence can reach them always and everywhere. The other addresses of terrorist violence are not so much the members of small terror groups or the constituency that supports them as the would-be interested third. They are signaled that there is no reason to give up in the face of a seemingly superior foe, but rather that resistance is possible and can be successful. Effectively staged terrorist attacks then become symbols of the weakness and vulnerability of a militarily and economically superior power.

Civil society is a neologism that enjoyed a strong career in the journalistic language of political feature articles. Civic virtue on the other hand holds little hope of ever crossing the editorial office's threshold. Civil society sounds modern, civic virtue sounds old fashioned or to be even more exact, ancient. Yet the copula and with which connected both terms, is not intended to imply any opposition or tension, but on the contrary to draw attention to their complementary nature. These are terms in which an explanation of each is inferred in the other. Civil society and civic virtue refer to each other in a double, concurrent sense. They are mutually prerequisite as well as consequent, which means that if civil society is to have continued existence, it is dependent on civic virtue whilst at the same time, where it is already in existence, generating civic virtue. The same applies to civic virtue that, when seen as a behavioural disposition not only of individuals, but of wider groups, requires a functioning civil society. A requirement which it both renews and receives at the same time. Civil society and civic virtue together are, according to my first proposition, reciprocal, generating and regenerating phenomena.