Flying back from South Africa where I spend several months a year, the weekend before the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I was struck by similar lessons in the freedom movements of both societies that need recalling. In both countries, the agent of change threatens to shrink like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

In today's usual accounts, movement leaders take on gigantic, even superhuman proportions. Martin Luther King gave a speech and Congress abolished segregation. Nelson Mandela got out of jail and negotiated the end to apartheid. This top-down narrative has counterparts in today's view that government and politicians are the drivers of change. What is lost is a particular kind of citizen politics -- pluralistic and majoritarian, grounding great moral visions in daily, practical realities. This is the politics which fuels real democratic change.

In the early morning hours of August 28th, I heard King in the room next door practice "I Have a Dream." I was stretched out in a sleeping bag on the hotel floor of my father, who had just gone on staff as King's special assistant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC.

King called the nation to "rise up [and] live out the true meaning of its creed" that all are created equal. The speech paralleled South Africa's Freedom Charter eight years before in 1955, which became the manifesto of the anti-apartheid movement.

Both statements eloquently channeled civic energy. While working as a field secretary for SCLC, I saw this first hand in the movement's community organizing, nonviolent protests, church rallies, citizenship education classes, songs, sermons and many other expressions, Southern blacks, oppressed for generations, became civic role models for the nation.

In South Africa, the Freedom Charter emerged from a parallel, vast public deliberation, the Congress of the People, which took shape in houses, flats, factories, kraals, on farms and in outdoor rallies. The Congress movement re-imagined the society in radically democratic ways. Thousands of volunteers publicized the C.O.P, educated the people, and got their views on what should be included in the Charter. They created a "million signatures campaign."

Both King's Dream and the Freedom Charter advanced inclusive visions. The Charter begins, "We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white." These words insured a nonracial cast to the movement, challenging both the racist apartheid regime and black nationalists who proposed "to drive whites into the sea."

King's speech similarly envisioned that "one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." He also countered divisive politics. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."

Both movements had profound moral aspects, but it is a mistake to see them as simply moral crusades. They embodied a down-to-earth citizen politics aiming to win over the broad middle of society.

Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, principle tutor of King in nonviolence, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom this month, strongly held this view. It came to trenchant expression in his 1965 essay "From Protest to Politics."

Describing post-segregation problems facing the black community like unemployment, inferior housing and education, crime and despair, Rustin argued that to address these required building a movement with even wider support.

He challenged "moderates" who believed that dismantling legal segregation was the final goal. He also countered "militants," those he called the "no-win" tendency. "These are often described as the radicals of the movement but they are really its moralists," he said. "They seek to change white hearts - by traumatizing them. Frequently abetted by white self-flagellants, they may applaud Malcolm X because, while they admit he has no program, they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing."

Neither moderates nor militants would produce much change in Rustin's view. The movement for equality required far ranging reforms if it was to address successfully problems like unemployment, education, poverty in the ghettos and the need to redefine work itself. But detailed programs needed to be owned by the movement.

Citizens' political power was at the heart of Rustin's strategy. Such power could only grow from interracial alliances of blacks with labor unions, churches and synagogues and others. It required a shift in tactics from "direct-action techniques" to "the building of community...power bases." His disagreement with Black Power and other forms of black nationalism was that they alienated needed working class allies.

In recent years, as government moved to the center of the liberal imagination, citizen politics receded. At the 2012 Democratic convention many argued that "government is the one thing we all belong to," as the opening video put it. Rep. Barney Frank proposed that "there are things that a civilized society needs that we can only do when we do them together, and when we do them together that's called government."

Proposals to mark the March anniversary with a new push for government programs overlook polarizations around government's role, which must be addressed effectively if the middle is to be won over for changes.

In South Africa similar dynamics are at work, but the need for active citizenship is much more widely discussed. Thus, a group of leading figures, the Dinokeng Scenario Team, convened by leaders including Graςa Machel, married to Mandela, former Black Consciousness leader Mamphela Ramphele, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndugane, and Rick Manell, analyzed the state of the nation and proposed alternative possibilities in a recent report, South Africa at a Crossroad.

They describe the shift away from citizens. "Before 1994, citizen activism was strong in South Africa. Today, citizens are largely disengaged and increasingly dependent on the government to provide everything." In response, the group argues that "citizens need to take ownership and ask themselves: What are we doing as citizens to become agents of change... to build the future that we envisioned at the dawn of our democracy?"

The report calls for a new "Citizens Charter" process that in effect re-imagines South Africa again as a land that truly belongs to all, black and white.

The idea is worth considering on this side of the ocean.

Harry C. Boyte is a Visiting Professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa and, in the US, Co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Both movements had profound moral aspects, but it is a mistake to see them as simply moral crusades. They embodied a down-to-earth citizen politics aiming to win over the broad middle of society.

Both movements had profound moral aspects, but it is a mistake to see them as simply moral crusades. They embodied a down-to-earth citizen politics aiming to win over the broad middle of society.

Hi everyone! I’ve had a very eventful year since our wonderful Summer idea-moot. It’s been rationalist empirical political science extravaganza for my first-year core curriculum at UCSD’s political science PhD program. Having passed through this gauntlet, but still having my international relations (IR) and political theory comprehensive exams ahead of me next year, I’m interested in following up on a question Peter raised in response to James Ceaser’s “The Role of Political Science and Political Scientists in Civic Education”, which came across my Feedly page at the AEI Citizenship blog.

Responding to Ceaser, Peter writes:“Political science aims to be an empirical investigation into institutions and mass behavior, not an inquiry into what citizens should do. Investigating what citizens should do would require a combination of empirical evidence about how the world works, normative theory about how things ought to be, and strategic guidance about how to improve it (given the resources one has). Ceaser emphasizes the study of regimes, describing that as normative as well as empirical. I would agree, except that I am interested in investigating all scales of human action, of which the regime is only one. (Here I draw on the idea of “polycentrism,” developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom.)”

I’m interested in how political theory, specifically, fits into this discussion of political science and civic education. Indeed, much of Ceasar’s piece seemed to focus on classical political theorists rather than today’s (empirical) political scientists. As I’m currently being steeped in the empirical tradition, though, I would also point out that this kind of political science studies rather more than institutions, mass behavior, and regimes. Instead, the empirical “bet” that the logic of political economy, of homo economicus, fits a given situation better than the logic of appropriateness, of homo sociologicus, is itself a strategic bet intended to fit a given society and scenario to produce useful observations and potential predictions.

And while Ceasar mentions Aristotle, he doesn’t focus on a key issue raised by Aristotle on the question of civic education: the “good man” and the “good citizen” in different types of states. Looming large is the question of whether one can be both a good man and a good citizen in the modern American liberal capitalist state, and how civic education can manage the difficult balance between instilling a sense of civic obligation to conationals and the idea of shared nationhood while maintaining a space for dissent.

I’m currently TA’ing a Summer class (“Ethics and Society,” a gen-ed class for mostly engineering students in one of UCSD’s 7 colleges), and we’ve been reading King, Thoreau, Arendt, Malcolm X, and Walter Benjamin on civil disobedience and political violence this week. Along with recent readings of Jacques Ranciere’s Dissensus and Michael Sandel on the moral limits of the market, I’m wondering how civic education can fit in an increasingly marketized society without being coopted. On the other hand, could it truly be called “civic education” to call for a radical restructuring of the state as it currently exists? Not to be too glib, but wouldn’t that be closer to civic reeducation? (And I say all this as someone with no real background in civic education beyond what we all got last year…)

So to tentatively answer my own question—civic education may differ from political theory in its boundedness within a particular political system with a particular social and historical past and present? If Aristotle is right that different types of regimes—the liberal, the civic republican and communitarian, the social democratic, the nondemocratic—require different kinds of civic virtue, is it incumbent upon the civic educator to work within the confines of the ideals of their own type (to the extent that those ideals can be pinned down, whether in dominant or subaltern traditions)?