what does the word civic mean?

I use the word “civic” every day. It is in the title of my college (The Tisch College of Civic Life) and the major that I direct (Civic Studies) and in the names of many topics and fields that I work on, from civic education to civic media.

But what does it mean? In my own mind, “civic” has certain associations and resonances, although I rarely articulate them. During a recent conversation with colleagues, I realized that most don’t hear the same meanings I do. I don’t blame them; there is no agreement about the definition, and the word has been used in many ways. I’ll turn to its history below.

Today, some people hear in the word “civic” a disciplinary intention, an effort to draw a boundary around respectable and approved behaviors (the “civic” ones). Sometimes it is almost synonymous with “civil.” In turn, “civility” sometimes means almost the same as “politeness.” People may use “civic” to identify approved behaviors, or else they may oppose the word as too restrictive and controlling.

Others want to make the word strictly empirical, rather than a value-laden adjective. Then “civic” may refer to a list of activities, from voting to marching in a protest–regardless of the participants’ values and goals. For example, a march would be civic whether the marchers were members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or Mussolini’s Brown Shirts. (But if we take this approach, why are certain activities on the list, and others not?)

I’d like to make space for a more inspiring use of the word that has deep historical roots. My dictionary-style definition would go something like this:

Civ’-ic. adj. 1. Of or pertaining to a group of relatively equal self-governing people. Hence, 2. virtues, values, or skills for self-government, e.g., civic courage, civic knowledge. 3. Assets belonging to or created by self-governing people, e.g., a civic forum. 4. Activities or other phenomena related to self-government, e.g., civic engagement, civic dialogue, civic education.

By a “self-governing people,” I mean to include all the citizens of any republican country, but not only such groups. A town or city within a larger country can have self-governing power. So can a voluntary association or even some kinds of firms; and they may be self-governing even if the states in which they operate are authoritarian. Thus, institutions of various types and scales can be civic.

The history of a word helps explain how it has accrued its diverse definitions and resonances.

The English word “civic” derives from Latin civicus, which primarily refers to relations among fellow members of the same city. In turn, the classical city (the polis or urbs) was self-governing: not usually egalitarian, but quasi-autonomous and governed by a deliberative assembly. So civicus always had echoes of a deliberative forum.

“Civic” enters the Romance languages to translate Latin texts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the very first use in English (1542) refers specifically to the ancient Roman oak-leaf-and-acorn garland awarded to men who had saved fellow citizens in war.

A kind of garland was its only meaning in English until the time of the Commonwealth, when Parliament overthrew the monarch and declared a republic. During this period, the Company of Mercers of the free city of London put on a pageant entitled “Charity Triumphant,” parading a female allegorical figure through the streets of the city. Edmund Gayton (“considered a hack writer” and then imprisoned for debt), published a long descriptive and celebratory poem about this pageant, including the sentence, “I cannot here set forth the reason of the late extinguishing these Civick Lights, and suppressing the Genius of our Metropolis, which for these Planetary Pageants and Pretorian Pomps was as famous and renouned in forraign Nations, as for their faith, wealth, and valour.”

Gayton probably deserves his obscurity, but he does seem to coined the word “Civick” in one of its important senses: “of, belonging to, or relating to a citizen or citizens; of or relating to citizenship or to the rights, duties, etc., of the citizen; befitting a citizen” (OED).

In his time, the English were enthusiastic about self-governance and the ideal of a commonwealth, itself a translation for “republic,” meaning the good that a people makes and owns together. Of course, this was also the period of Puritan self-governance in New England and the invention of important activities that we now naturally call “civic”: town meetings, local elections, and civic education, which Massachusetts had required in 1642.

Just one year later, in 1656, Blount’s dictionary defines “Civick” as “pertaining to the city.” Since then, one of its meanings has always been akin to “urban,” as in “Civic Center” for the name of a city’s convention hall. But I think that “the city” had a different original meaning. Now we think of large, dense municipalities. Originally, an urbs or polis was any autonomous community. For instance, the whole Massachusetts Bay Colony was meant to be a City on the Hill.

By 1747, “civic” was used to modify “virtue.” By the end of that century, the word “civique” (with similar associations) had become influential in France. According to the Constitution of 1791: “The Civic Oath (le serment civique) is: ‘I swear to be faithful to the Nation to the law and to the king and to preserve with all my power the Royal Constitution, decreed by the National Constituent Assembly for the Years 1789, 1790 and 1791.‘”

Across the Channel, Edmund Burke denounced the French revolutionaries who would overthrow traditional values and institutions, including religion. He added:

These enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion, that a state can subsist without any religion better than with one; and that they are able to supply the place of any good which may be in it, by a project of their own—namely, by a sort of education they have imagined, founded in a knowledge of the physical wants of men; progressively carried to an enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public. The scheme of this education has been long known. Of late they distinguish it (as they have got an entire new nomenclature of technical terms) by the name of a Civic Education.

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

According to the OED, this was first use of the word “civic education” in English. It referred to a radically republican, secular, and patriotic project to which the author, Burke, was hostile. To bring civic education to England would be “the most dangerous shock that the state ever received.”

Thus the first English use of the phrase “civic education” was a denunciation. Yet the ideals that animated the French Revolution–self-governance, commitment to the common good–have deep resonances in England and the USA.

By the way, the word “civics” is a noun, in my opinion: short for “civic education.” It is often used adjectively in the phrase “civics education,” but I think that’s a grammatical mistake. In any case, “civics” is strictly American, and its first attested use is in the Boston Daily Advertiser in 1885: “Henry Randall Waite, Ph.D., president of the American Institute of Civics, was the next speaker… The use of the word civics for political science was explained.”

In short, “civic” has many meanings, but some of the oldest and most recurrent ones refer to a republican ideal: concrete communities of people should decide and act together and develop the rules, values, resources, and habits necessary to succeed.

December Confab on Guns & Violence Now Available!

We hosted our December Confab last week with presenters from National Issues Forums, Living Room Conversations, and Essential Partners. Each shared their resources for talking about one of the toughest topics in our communities today: guns and violence. This post contains links to the resources as well as a link to the recording of this event.

Betty Knighton and Darla Minnich from the National Issues Forums Institute shared their Issue Advisory, How Should We Prevent Mass Shootings in Our Communities?   The issue advisory outlines three potential options for addressing this issue and encourages the public to deliberate on these and potentially other options.

Joan Blades of Living Room Conversations shared the Conversation Guide on Guns and Responsibility which seeks to help people come together across political or ideological differences to discuss this challenging topic. The guide offers a format for talking about guns in a way that helps community members hear one another’s experiences and how those impact their views about guns.

Katie Hyten from Essential Partners, the global leader in building trust and understanding across divisive differences, shared the story of how the organization convened participants in 2018 from across the United States for a two-day training in dialogue design and community building, followed by an experiment in digital peer dialogue facilitation. Watch the TIME Magazine video, read the media coverage, ​view resources, ​and find out more about Essential Partners’ approach to this issue on their website.

The Confab was a informative and full of resources and tips. It can be found at this link.

Our sincere thanks to Betty, Darla, Joan and Katie for sharing their resources with us and inspiring us to get our communities talking about this important topic.

Confab bubble imageTo learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and hear recordings of others, visit www.ncdd.org/events/confabs. We love holding these events and we want to continue to elevate the work of our field with Confab Calls and Tech Tuesdays. It is through your generous contributions to NCDD that we can keep doing this work! That’s why we want to encourage you to support NCDD by making a donation or becoming an NCDD member today (you can also renew your membership by clicking here). Thank you!

On the Road with ‘Free, Fair and Alive’

Book tours are known for being grueling odysseys. While it wasn’t a breeze to speak at two dozen events in ten weeks of travel in Europe, UK and the US, it was a joy for me to connect with so many different commoners. I found my visits often amounted to field research filled with unexpected discoveries and chance insights. At events I invariably wound up meeting several fascinating commoners and learning about some amazing research initiative. 

My general conclusion:  The commons world is quite robust -- but it’s not terribly visible to mainstream culture. So the book tour confirmed the aspirations that my coauthor Silke Helfrich and I had for the book, Free, Fair and Alive. We wanted to generate some new concepts, vocabulary, and analyses to bring commoning into sharper focus. That forced us to dig more deeply into the inner dimensions of commoning and into its political implications, especially as it bumps up against property rights and state power.

I'm happy to say that all of our efforts paid off in the end. I kept meeting people who are all too ready to move beyond conventional politics and explore the rich possibilities of the commons. 

To recap for newcomers: Free, Fair and Alive is one of the most comprehensive, in-depth looks at what the commons means in contemporary life. Silke and I spent almost three years trying to make sense of the countless commons we had observed over the preceding 15 years. From her village in Germany and on trains criss-crossing Europe, and from my office in Amherst, Massachusetts -- with occasional in-person work sessions -- we plunged into a serious mutual debriefing about what we had each learned. We wanted to see if we could conceptualize the commons in ways that truly reflect what we had witnessed in Mexico and Greece, India and Germany, the US and UK, and many other places.

Halfway through our research, we realized with a shock that much of the language we were using was seriously wrong and misleading. When using words like “individual,” “rationality” and “resources,” for example – the standard vocabulary of modern economics – we found ourselves locked into a deeply troubling worldview. Do we really wish to regard human beings -- as economists ostensibly do -- as isolated individuals striving to maximize their material self-interests and “externalizing” costs on to “nature.” Is this what "rationality" is?  

Once we realized the ways that we had to escape the gravitational pull of many existing terms and concepts, we set about inventing a new language that could express the realities of cooperating and sharing. In short, a relational framework for the commons. Video producer Nils Agilar captured a glimpse of our process in a wonderful promotional video that he produced. It shows a brainstorming session in which Silke and I came up with a new term to describe what really goes on in a knowledge commons.

For half of my book tour, I traveled with Silke -- to London and a number of other cities in England, and to Amsterdam and Brussels. We encountered Ph.D. students in Amsterdam who hope to build a new international network of graduate students who study the commons. In a separate workshop, I learned how many civic groups in Amsterdam are keen to develop new forms of commons-based finance.

At a Brussels event hosted by Oikos think tank and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, we learned how the commons perspective is gradually working its way into politics. Lotte Stoops, a politician in the Brussels Parliament, is attempting to bring the commons into political and policy discussions there.

In Bristol, England, I met up with some activists with the Transition movement and permaculture world who find great inspiration in the commons. Some Marxist-minded respondents to my talk at The Cube Theater argued that commoners need to pay more attention to class struggle. (Here is a video of my talk and the Q&A in Bristol.)

I had a great evening in London hosted by the Gaia Foundation, which brought together a sizeable contingent of area commoners. Another event, hosted by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, dove into some conversations about art and commoning with the help of the Furtherfield Collective.

Returning to the US, HowlRound Theatre Commons at Emerson College in Boston hosted my presentation and an evening’s dialogue about the role of the commons in the work of artists and cultural workers. By happenstance, I also met up with an Italian student who is an expert on water commons – which gave me a quick tutorial on some latest developments in European and US water commons.

My visit to Boston also brought me into conversation with members of the Leland Street Co-operative Garden in Jamaica Plain ("Tended by All, Harvested by All"), for a potluck dinner in the waning light of a chilly autumn evening. That was an inspiring visit!  People in the neighborhood had personally reclaimed a space that had been used for years as an illegal dumping ground. With some loving care and hard work, the neighborhood turned it into a lovely oasis in the noisy city. 

I participated in other memorable events, including the spirited “Race, Grace, and the Renewal of the Commons” literary festival in Virginia; an activists' luncheon at Ralph Nader’s headquarters hosted by several progressive advocacy groups; conversations with students at Middlebury College and Hampshire College; and an evening with the good folks of Vermont Family Forests in Bristol, Vermont.

I wish to thank the many generous hosts of my talks over the course of my book tour. I also want to salute a number of publications and media outlets that gave some wonderful exposure to Free, Fair and Alive. Shareable magazine named the book as the first of “eleven books we’re reading this fall.” It also did a later Q&A with me about the commons

The group blog Boing Boing published a nice essay by Silke and me, “Learning to See the Commons,” which served as a nice bookend to another Boing Boing piece about Garrett Hardin and the rise of ecofascism

Francesca Rheannon, the velvet-voiced radio show host, interviewed me on “Writer’s Voice," And the new "Commonscast” podcast featured an interview with Silke and me. 

As if all this were not enough, you can learn more about the book itself on its website, where we will soon be posting a new, complete chapter every few weeks. This is possible only because Free, Fair and Alive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. A big thanks to New Society Publishers for having the calm confidence in moving forward with a CC license for a commercial book.

A German version of the book was published by transcript Verlag in April, and is expected to go into a second printing in January 2020. A Spanish translation is underway with the help of Guerrilla Media Collective, which also gave us a big boost in outreach and marketing. We have also entered into long planning conversations for possible editions in several other languages.  

Long planning sessions are needed because, while there are no foreign rights to buy (because of the CC license), a simple translation is not enough. There are too many novel terms in our book that will require native commoners to come up with creative equivalents. Any translation will also require the insertion of country-specific examples and cultural references so that the text will really resonate with readers. In a sense, each edition in another language will be an adaptation as well as a translation: a “transladaptation.”

It was a long time on the road, but it was a fantastic set of conversations! My hope now is that the book will take on a life of its own.

participatory action research in the City of God

Equipe Construindo Juntos (The Building Together Research Center) is based in Rio de Janeiro’s City of God neighborhood, made world-famous by the 2002 film. One of the key team members is my Tufts colleague Anjuli Fahlberg, a sociologist. She works as a close colleague with Ricardo Fernandes, Mirian Andrade, Jacob Portela, and about 20 Research Assistants, all from the neighborhood.

Among their projects is an elaborate survey of residents from 989 City of God households. Characteristically, the study began with open-ended discussion groups that chose the questions. The data was collected by fifteen trained and paid residents. To summarize the findings for neighbors, the research team produced “3,000 colorful pamphlets,” made presentations at local nonprofits, and earned press coverage in the major Rio newspapers.

This is an exemplary case of Participatory Action Research. Tisch College is proud to support it.

See also Participatory Action Research as Civic Studies; and nonviolent civic work under conditions of extreme violence (also on Anjuli Fahlberg’s research).

give to grassroots organizing for civic participation

(Philadelphia) On Giving Tuesday, I am reluctant to name specific organizations to contribute to, other than my own employer (Tisch College) and the grant-seeking organizations on whose fiduciary boards I sit: Street Law, Discovering Justice, Everyday Democracy, and the Civic Series. But I do want to make a general argument that might influence your choices. As I showed in this post, “A total of $23 million–.0.43% of all democracy funding and a little less than one cent per American per year–has been spent on [nonpartisan] grassroots organizing for civic participation.” This kind of work should be a priority, especially for the small donors who form the grassroots base of democracy.

Join us! Giving Tuesday Donations Matched Today and December Confab This Thursday

Friendly reminder about our December Confab Call this coming Thursday, December 5th from noon-1:30 pm Eastern/9 am-10:30 am Pacific. The call will be an opportunity for participants to learn about several resources for talking about guns and violence. We encourage you to join this free call and register today to secure your spot.

Before we go further and in case you missed our post yesterday, today is Giving Tuesday! If you appreciate our Confabs and Tech Tuesdays, conferences and the work we do to build up this vibrant network and the field of dialogue and deliberation – then we would love your support. Today there is a special offer, for folks who donate via our Facebook page, your donations will be matched! If you would prefer to not use social media, you are welcome to donate directly to NCDD right here. We know there are a lot of incredible organizations out there to support today and whether it is $5 or $50; we appreciate any contributions you can provide! Finally, on this note, we encourage folks who are not already NCDD members to check out the member benefits and join the Coalition!

So back to this Confab coming up… it has become an increasing norm in our society to experience mass shootings and this last summer our communities and nations grappled with another wave of violence. As often happens in these moments, people want a space to process what’s happened, and/or talk about what to do to prevent future tragedy. On Thursday, we’ll be featuring three organizations in the NCDD network and the resources they have developed for talking about this topic, learn more below.

National Issues Forums has developed materials several times on the topic. The most recent is their Issue Advisory, How Should We Prevent Mass Shootings in Our Communities?  From the advisory: “Overall, the United States has become safer in recent years. Yet mass shooters target innocent people indiscriminately, often in places where people should feel safe—movie theaters, shopping centers, schools. Many believe these attacks are nothing short of terrorism. How can we stop mass shootings and ensure that people feel safe in their homes and communities?” The issue advisory outlines three potential options for addressing this issue and encourages the public to deliberate on these and potentially other options.

Living Room Conversations‘ Conversation Guide on Guns and Responsibility seeks to help people come together across political or ideological differences to discuss this challenging topic. From the guide: “This conversation focuses on our own personal experience with guns and how these experiences have shaped our opinions. This conversation seeks to help us develop a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges surrounding gun ownership.” The guide offers a format for talking about guns in a way that helps community members hear one another’s experiences and how those impact their views about guns.

Essential Partners, the global leader in building trust and understanding across divisive differences, has led both regional and national projects around the role of guns in American life​ for over five years​. In 2018, EP convened participants from across the United States for a two-day training in dialogue design and community building, followed by an experiment in digital peer dialogue facilitation. A partnership with TIME Magazine, Spaceship Media, and Advance Local, the in-person event took place in Washington, DC, during the March for Our Lives. Watch the TIME Magazine video, read the media coverage, ​view resources, ​and find out more about Essential Partners’ approach to this issue on their website.

On this call, we’ll be joined by presenters from each of these three organizations, who will share with us the resources and how they can be used to discuss the challenging topic of guns. Join us to hear more and have your questions answered about how to convene a conversation in your community.

This free call will take place on Thursday, December 5th from noon-1:30 pm Eastern, 9 am-10:30 am PacificRegister today so you don’t miss out on this event!

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About NCDD’s Confab Calls

Confab bubble imageNCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members (and potential members) of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and to connect with fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Confabs are free and open to all. Register today if you’d like to join us!

how have political science and k-12 civics diverged?

It’s risky to generalize about k-12 civics. In the USA, there are no national standards for civics, state standards tend to be incoherent and not firmly enforced, and textbooks divide the market. Some teachers in some classrooms present highly critical accounts of US politics. Others are committed to American exceptionalism and celebratory narratives. The whole woke-to-MAGA spectrum is represented.

Many k-12 teachers try to avoid adopting positions in the classroom by presenting only hard facts about the constitutional process or by organizing deliberative discussions in which many perspectives are honored. Yet even an ostensibly neutral approach must reflect choices about the most important questions, topics and themes.

It is also risky to generalize about the discipline of political science, which encompasses more heterogeneous subfields than most disciplines. Whole subcultures of political scientists strike me as pro-regime, while others are radical. (See this post for some observations about the balkanized profession.)

But I’d still tentatively hypothesize that the center of gravity in political science stands apart from the center of gravity for k-12 civics, especially if we look at mass-market textbooks and state standards documents for evidence about civics. And I’d suggest that these are the three main gaps:

  1. Political science has haltingly recognized a wider range of perspectives on American political history and institutions, giving more attention to women and people of color as political thinkers and critics. That has meant more attention to critiques of the US system, but also alternative ideals and visions of progress. Again, this generalization ignores woke high school teachers and conservative or traditionalist political science professors, but I’d still venture the generalization.
  2. Political science has widely embraced versions of the New Institutionalism. I have written a primer on that movement, but in essence, it finds that institutions rarely operate as intended because they have their own logics and incentives. This means that it is unlikely that the US government would work as its authors planned. James Madison was an early and brilliant institutionalist who designed constitutional provisions to prevent certain kinds of corruption and failure. But the New Institutionalism has vastly expanded the list of threats, and few political scientists would argue that the US Constitution’s design addresses all these threats in a satisfactory way. Much of the high school curriculum is designed to teach students why the framers designed our system to work as it does. Many political scientists would emphasize that it does not, and could not, work as intended but rather faces serious perils. By the way, here I am not referring to intended “features” of the original Constitution, such as white-male dominance. I am referring to unforeseen “bugs.”
  3. Political science has experienced the behavioral revolution. Human beings evolved to make decisions without full consideration of relevant facts and information, employing heuristics and biases and rationalizing our biases with cherry-picked reasons. It’s common in civics curricula to present a model of the citizen as an independent thinker who decides on the best policy and chooses the candidates who come closest to those views. At least according to political scientists like Achen & Bartels (Democracy for Realists, 2016), this model is a myth. Citizens inevitably join up with large groups and vote to demonstrate loyalty to their groups.

The solution to this gap is not to move k-12 civics all the way to the center of gravity of professional political science. For my taste, the professional discipline is too cynical, not sufficiently normative or interested in problem-solving. Exposing students to cutting-edge political science is unlikely to make them more active and efficacious citizens. A big dose of New Institutionalism plus Behaviorism could kill anyone’s interest in politics unless the insights of those movements can be combined with some creativity and optimism.

At the same time, to ignore the findings of modern political science is increasingly untenable. We need new combinations.

See also: don’t let the behavioral revolution make you fatalistic; the New Institutionalism, deliberative democracy, and the rise of the New Right; on teaching the US Constitution; is our constitutional order doomed?; we should be debating the big social and political paradigms; and constitutional piety.

NCDD Donations Matched Tomorrow on Giving Tuesday!

This week is Giving Tuesday, a day of giving back to the organizations that give to our communities year-round. We at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) ask you to consider supporting our coalition’s work to bring more valuable conversations to communities across the country and the world. We work to increase access to resources for dialogue, deliberation, participatory democracy, and more. Our purpose is to foster connections between individuals and organizations passionate about having more informed and productive conversations; strengthening relationships in order to reduce information and skills from being siloed.

NCDD envisions a future in which all people–regardless of income, position, background or education–are able to engage regularly in lively, thoughtful, and challenging discussions about what really matters to them, in ways that have a positive impact on their lives and their world. We envision a society in which systems and structures support and advance inclusive, constructive, dialogue and deliberation. 

NCDD is a small outfit, with just three part-time staff, and we rely on the support of our network and friends to help us continue to educate people on dialogue and deliberation, and to build this national coalition. Your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500.

On Giving Tuesday (tomorrow, December 3rd), Facebook will match a total of $7 million in donations. Starting at 8am Eastern/5am Pacific, donations made through our Facebook page, will be matched – so please give what you can and help NCDD continue to support this network of innovators!  Important to note: Facebook will be covering processing fees, so 100% of your donation will go towards NCDD (!!). If you don’t use Facebook, you can always make a donation of any amount on our donation page.

For seventeen years, NCDD has worked hard to gather visionaries and practitioners dedicated to raising the quality of discourse across many key issues and questions. Many of you have been a part of that – and we’re immensely grateful for you!

As you reflect back on your years of association, we’re curious: how much has this network meant to you? Has it made a difference for good in some way? In what ways can we continue to drive NCDD together to support each other doing this work?

Please consider a #GivingTuesday donation to help us continue this work into the new year. More than ever before, we could use the help and support – and would be so grateful for your assistance!

We recognize there are a lot of fantastic organizations out there to donate to on Giving Tuesday, but we hope you consider donating to NCDD, which plays such a critical role in building capacity for improved democracy, conversation, and connection (which, we argue, is actually the most important issue we face right now as a country). It is really tough for organizations like NCDD to fundraise and be sustainable because it is a network of organizations, practitioners, and volunteers. Most of the members understandably have to focus on their own organizations and efforts. But networks like NCDD are critical to build a community of practice and grow the field. 

If you don’t know very much about us, we encourage you to check out some of the great benefits of NCDD and become a member. If you are already connected, please consider donating, even just a little bit, especially since it can be matched this morning.

Thank you for your support this Giving Tuesday and every day!