These observations suggest neither that liberal societies are wholly privatistic, materialistic, and indifferent to inequalities, nor that more communitarian ones are the opposite. Both cultures and ideologies are far more complicated than this. The human impulse to enjoy life’s physical goods and comforts, although gratified in relatively few societies, appears to be nearly universal, as is the primacy of family, religion, and other private domains. By the same token, politics, broadly understood, is a natural activity and disposition that in all societies affects the lives and interests of everyone, even the most privatistic liberal. At least in postindustrial political cultures, the differ- ences between liberal and communitarian citizens with regard to their values, interests, and activities are largely differences in degree – although in the aggregate these dif- ferences produce recognizably distinct civil and political societies. The political cultures and economies of USA, Sweden, and Japan, for example, have much in common but are also strikingly different from one another.