Category Archives: civic theory

assessing the charge of respectability politics

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“Respectability politics” is a valuable term of criticism. Apparently, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined it in 1993. It refers to a strategy of trying to look “better” in the eyes of the dominant group in order to be accepted and make progress. Since respectability politics puts unjust and impossible burdens on the marginalized, we should diagnose and try to avoid it.

At the same time, successful social movements do try to look better. An appearance of moral or spiritual discipline and excellence–“Worthiness” –is an asset that social movements can build and use for political purposes, along with “Unity,” “Numbers,” and “Commitment” (WUNC, for short). They claim higher ground because that’s a powerful strategy.

Also, democratic social movements demand that their own members–previously excluded from civic life–be treated as full citizens. True citizens display values and commitments that are not very common in any population: for example, they are actively engaged with public issues and concerned for the common good. Therefore, in asserting a right to be full citizens, social movements often try to embody values that are better than what they see around them; they try to “Be the change.”

My friend Harry Boyte has saved the Program Notes from the 1963 March on Washington, which says, among other things: “In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words, and even hot insults. But when a whole people speaks to its government, the dialogue and the action must be on a level reflecting the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government.”

I don’t think that message should be labeled “respectability politics.” The point of the Program Notes was not to look better to White people. The point was to live up to high expectations chosen and embraced by the Black leaders of the March. The movement redefined respectability–indeed, excellence–on its own terms.

For example, it’s traditional for a crowd at a march or rally to hear a famous and excellent singer. That is one way to display both worthiness and unity. At the 1963 March, Mahalia Jackson filled this traditional role when she sang, “I’ve Been ‘Buked, and I’ve Been Scorned.” The difference was that she sang an old gospel song about her own people. This was a performance designed to move and inspire Whites (and others) as well as African Americans, yet she didn’t sing a “White” song to obtain their support.

Likewise, Dr. King’s speech was aimed at a majority-White and overwhelmingly Christian nation, but his specific style of prophetic oratory was uniquely African American. One of the achievements of an effective social movement is an expansion or redefinition of respectability–but not an abandonment of respectability as an ideal.

It’s hard to redefine and consistently demonstrate respectability within a mass movement that is voluntary and democratic. People will join with all kinds of agendas and styles, and they have a right to that diversity. Some will make choices that look bad to others. Enemies of the movement will emphasize the outliers: for example, FoxNews showed footage of last Friday’s anarchists to illustrate Saturday’s vast and peaceful women’s marches. Still, I think the women’s marches represented “worthiness” to an extraordinary degree, and that is a basis for optimism about the next few years.

Opinions about any specific case will differ, but we can look at a sign, slogan, or statement; at a whole episode, like Saturday’s marches; or at a movement composed of many such episodes, and assign it to a category:

  1. Problematic respectability politics, when the movement adopts norms that exclude some people in order to gain support.
  2. Neutral respectability, when the movement just happens to be respectable in many people’s eyes, without adjusting its rhetoric or strategies or excluding anyone.
  3. Pursuit of excellence: whether by displaying self-sacrifice or by singing as well as Mahalia Jackson (or in many other ways), a movement presents itself as more than respectable. Most people cannot meet this ideal, but it becomes a resource for the whole movement. Maybe only Gandhi is starving himself, but we are all satyagrahis if we support him.
  4. Shifting the border of respectability in productive ways. For example, wearing a pink pussy hat on Saturday was a way of rebuking the utterly disreputable new president with a sly and kid-friendly answer. In my view, the hats were fully respectable, but in a way that shifted respectability slightly.
  5. Unhelpfully un-respectable politics, such as the anarchists’ window-breaking on Friday or (arguably) Madonna’s speech at the March.

My main point is that the choices are not just 1 or 5. Some movements fill the other categories, and all are options.

Saturday’s democratic vistas

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The ideal of democracy gets weak support today.

Republican presidents from T.R. to George W. Bush presented the United States as a champion of democracy. But a current conservative talking point holds that the US is meant to be a republic, not a democracy, and only the opposition party favors democratic forms of government.

It’s my anecdotal impression that not many Democratic voters are all that enthusiastic about democracy, either; they see a population that likes Donald Trump enough to give him a near-majority, and they are not sure they want that majority to rule.

Overseas, the suppression of the Arab Spring, the frailties of the EU, the rise of popular ethno-nationalists in many countries, and the strong performance of  China’s authoritarian regime have left small-d democrats with a hangover. Julia Ioffe is just one of many well-informed commentators who recalled recent failed democratic uprisings when she observed this weekend’s marches. “Talking to the protesters in Washington today, it was hard not to hear the echoes of the weakness of the Moscow protests five years ago: a vague, unstructured cause; too much diversity of purpose; no real political path forward; and the real potential for the meaning of the day to melt into self-congratulatory complacency.”

Meanwhile, impressive scholarly evidence continues to build that people make political choices on the basis of social identities, not by forming independent opinions of issues; that our conflicting moral views have unconscious bases that are “nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders“; and that voters are badly uninformed. Walter Lippmann (1925) and Joseph Schumpeter (1942) already held this general view, but the accumulating evidence must be taken seriously.

Many thoughtful people have accepted the diagnosis in full. They are aware of democracy’s real maladies. Unfortunately, their commitment to finding cures is much weaker.

After all, any political system is only as good as we make it. There are generic arguments in favor of core principles of democracy, such as “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl 1989), but there are also generic problems with it, such as majority-tyranny, propaganda, free-riding, motivated reasoning, the “iron law of oligarchy,” and polarization. An actual system based on voting equality will work well only to the degree that we build institutions and norms that can counter its weaknesses. For instance, a city newspaper can address low information and polarization in a metro area–as long as it finds a market and uses its revenues to inform the public. A grassroots political party can overcome free-riding problems by getting citizens involved–but only if it engages citizens.

If we want to build the new institutions and norms that can make democracy work in the 21st century, we need a lot of people to see its potential. We must be hard-headed designers and reformers of institutions, our eyes open to human limitations; but we must also hear old Walt Whitman’s music:

The purpose of democracy … is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself. …

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy. I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help’d, though often harm’d, by them. …

I submit, therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.

Whitman saw glimpses of that future in his own time, and I think hundreds of thousands of people–including me–scanned new democratic vistas on Saturday. That was the first essential step toward actually repairing our democracy together.

on the relationship between ethics and politics

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The basic ethical question is “What should I do?” Three prevalent ways of addressing that question are: 1) to universalize, asking what you’d want anyone to do who was similarly situated, 2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most good for the most people, given your resources and options, or 3) to exhibit and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness. Philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers, but in a vast range of ordinary circumstances, they concur.

The basic political question is “What should we do?” The verb is plural because politics exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-states. To be sure, the ethical question never vanishes, because you can ask whether you should belong to a given group and what you personally should do in relation to it. But the plural question raises a new set of issues that are not directly addressed in individual ethics.

For one thing, we decide what we should do together—not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decision. But that is the wrong choice if the group is misguided, and you retain the options of resistance or exit.

This means that issues of complicity arise in politics that are not salient in individual ethics. A group to which I belong acts in my name. Am I therefore complicit in the harm that it does? On the other hand, how do I know that what I would have decided alone is really better than what the group has decided by discussing?

The group has potential value. It can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal behavior in order to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually unequal. So the question “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” and to act together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain, but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.

Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can be applied in politics, but with important modulations.

First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical norms, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-ideal behavior in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from the logic of hypotheticals.

Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group that maximizes net benefits for the world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price to pay.

Christopher Winship acknowledges that justice demands raising the quality of the schooling available to the least advantaged American students. However, he argues, “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all.* This is an example of how preserving the group (in this case, a Nordic democracy) can do more good than maximizing the benefits of the group’s actions at any given moment.

Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—virtues understood, in an Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions. In other words, virtues are habits that can be deliberately shaped. Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. Developing and maintaining virtues requires different strategies when a group instead of an individual is the thing that is virtuous or vicious.

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That scheme must be complicated in two fundamental ways.

On one hand, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. Anyone who asks of her nation “What should we do?” probably developed her opinions under the influence of that already-existing nation. These are examples of the ontological dependence of individuals on groups.

On the other hand, groups are rather like individuals in their interactions with one another. Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom co-edited a book that explored the close parallels between collective-action problems in small communities and among states. In both contexts, there is typically no single enforcer who can determine the behavior of the parties. There is plenty of room for disaster, yet sometimes the parties work out solutions, from rules for pasturing goats on common land to international arms treaties.

Furthermore, governments do not merely work “within their jurisdictions by imposing authoritative rules on their subjects” (p. 11) Even dictatorships cannot do that, because they cannot police and control their populations without a great deal of voluntary cooperation. A government is not a single actor that stands apart from society and directs it, but rather as a whole set of human actors (politicians, civil servants, front-line workers) who constantly interact with each other and with people outside the government. Not much is accomplished unless they are able to motivate voluntary compliance with agreements.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their Bloomington School see governance as “polycentric.” At the local level, we are constantly interacting in game-like situations with other people who may either cooperate or not. There are islands of command-and-control in which some individuals tell others what to do, but their capacity to control usually depends on norms of willing compliance. Nation-states exist in a global anarchy, without any power above them, but they have managed to work out some arrangements for cooperation. And between nation-states and local communities are complex webs of arrangements involving intermediary organizations such as municipalities and regional governments, parties, interest groups, and media organizations. Cooperation, competition, and mutual destruction are all possible in all of these contexts.

I think that the categories of the ethical and the political constantly recur at all scales, and which one is most salient depends mainly on the perspective that seems most appropriate in the situation, that of an “I” or a “we.”

That said, scale matters, because it influences how we should think about agency and responsibility. We shoulder the most responsibility at the smallest scales, especially when we act alone. Agency is also most tangible at that scale: we can see what we accomplish by ourselves. However, we cannot accomplish much. At very large scales, agency is hard to detect because millions or billions of others are also at work, and it is unreasonable to expect the whole population to shift at anyone’s will. In the middle range (which I think is under-theorized), we can take part in effective action. That is politics. Politics is an ethical matter, in the broadest sense–there is a difference between right and wrong–but the ethical principles appropriate for individual action no longer suffice. A new set of considerations becomes important when we move from I to we.

*Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8.

See also: against methodological individualism; is social science too anthropocentric? and two basic categories of problems.

on the relationship between ethics and politics

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The basic ethical question is “What should I do?” Three prevalent ways of addressing that question are: 1) to universalize, asking what you’d want anyone to do who was similarly situated, 2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most good for the most people, given your resources and options, or 3) to exhibit and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness. Philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers, but in a vast range of ordinary circumstances, they concur.

The basic political question is “What should we do?” The verb is plural because politics exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-states. To be sure, the ethical question never vanishes, because you can ask whether you should belong to a given group and what you personally should do in relation to it. But the plural question raises a new set of issues that are not directly addressed in individual ethics.

For one thing, we decide what we should do together—not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decision. But that is the wrong choice if the group is misguided, and you retain the options of resistance or exit.

This means that issues of complicity arise in politics that are not salient in individual ethics. A group to which I belong acts in my name. Am I therefore complicit in the harm that it does? On the other hand, how do I know that what I would have decided alone is really better than what the group has decided by discussing?

The group has potential value. It can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal behavior in order to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually unequal. So the question “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” and to act together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain, but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.

Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can be applied in politics, but with important modulations.

First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical norms, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-ideal behavior in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from the logic of hypotheticals.

Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group that maximizes net benefits for the world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price to pay.

Christopher Winship acknowledges that justice demands raising the quality of the schooling available to the least advantaged American students. However, he argues, “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all.* This is an example of how preserving the group (in this case, a Nordic democracy) can do more good than maximizing the benefits of the group’s actions at any given moment.

Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—virtues understood, in an Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions. In other words, virtues are habits that can be deliberately shaped. Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. Developing and maintaining virtues requires different strategies when a group instead of an individual is the thing that is virtuous or vicious.

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That scheme must be complicated in two fundamental ways.

On one hand, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. Anyone who asks of her nation “What should we do?” probably developed her opinions under the influence of that already-existing nation. These are examples of the ontological dependence of individuals on groups.

On the other hand, groups are rather like individuals in their interactions with one another. Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom co-edited a book that explored the close parallels between collective-action problems in small communities and among states. In both contexts, there is typically no single enforcer who can determine the behavior of the parties. There is plenty of room for disaster, yet sometimes the parties work out solutions, from rules for pasturing goats on common land to international arms treaties.

Furthermore, governments do not merely work “within their jurisdictions by imposing authoritative rules on their subjects” (p. 11) Even dictatorships cannot do that, because they cannot police and control their populations without a great deal of voluntary cooperation. A government is not a single actor that stands apart from society and directs it, but rather as a whole set of human actors (politicians, civil servants, front-line workers) who constantly interact with each other and with people outside the government. Not much is accomplished unless they are able to motivate voluntary compliance with agreements.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their Bloomington School see governance as “polycentric.” At the local level, we are constantly interacting in game-like situations with other people who may either cooperate or not. There are islands of command-and-control in which some individuals tell others what to do, but their capacity to control usually depends on norms of willing compliance. Nation-states exist in a global anarchy, without any power above them, but they have managed to work out some arrangements for cooperation. And between nation-states and local communities are complex webs of arrangements involving intermediary organizations such as municipalities and regional governments, parties, interest groups, and media organizations. Cooperation, competition, and mutual destruction are all possible in all of these contexts.

I think that the categories of the ethical and the political constantly recur at all scales, and which one is most salient depends mainly on the perspective that seems most appropriate in the situation, that of an “I” or a “we.”

That said, scale matters, because it influences how we should think about agency and responsibility. We shoulder the most responsibility at the smallest scales, especially when we act alone. Agency is also most tangible at that scale: we can see what we accomplish by ourselves. However, we cannot accomplish much. At very large scales, agency is hard to detect because millions or billions of others are also at work, and it is unreasonable to expect the whole population to shift at anyone’s will. In the middle range (which I think is under-theorized), we can take part in effective action. That is politics. Politics is an ethical matter, in the broadest sense–there is a difference between right and wrong–but the ethical principles appropriate for individual action no longer suffice. A new set of considerations becomes important when we move from I to we.

*Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8.

See also: against methodological individualism; is social science too anthropocentric? and two basic categories of problems.

Apply for the Ninth Annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies

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The ninth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will take place from June 12 to June 22, 2017 at Tufts University. It will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar that brings together faculty, advanced graduate students, and practitioners from many countries and diverse fields of study.

Organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Tisch College and Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland, the Summer Institute will engage participants in challenging discussions of such topics as:

  • What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
  • What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
  • What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
  • What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

This is the syllabus for the eighth annual seminar (in 2016). The 2017 syllabus will be modified but will largely follow this outline.

You can read more about the motivation for the Institute in the “Framing Statement” by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania:

Practicalities

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

To apply: please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 17, 2017. You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply.

The seminar will be followed (from June 22, evening, until June 24) by a public conference–”Frontiers of Democracy 2017″–in downtown Boston. Participants in the institute are expected to stay for the public conference. See information on the conference here. That page also explains how you can propose a concurrent session for the 2017 conference, whether or not you wish to apply for the Summer Institute.

the prophetic mode in the Civil Rights Movement and in everyday politics

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On Martin Luther King Day, Kenyatta R. Gilbert published an explanatory article in The Conversation about King’s “prophetic vision.” Gilbert traced King’s rhetorical mode to three “particularly inventive” Black preachers active during the Great Migration: “Baptist pastor Adam C. Powell Sr., the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) pastor Florence S. Randolph and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop Reverdy C. Ransom.” All three were political reformers and community leaders who echoed the Hebrew prophets (as well as the Gospels) in their sermons.

If you’ve made a careful study of King’s own writing and speaking, you will recognize constant evocations of the Biblical prophets. Just for instance, in the “I Have a Dream Speech,” King quotes Amos 5:24 (“But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”) and Isaiah 40:4 (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”).

In fact, it can be a bit of cliché to call King and other Civil Rights Leaders “prophetic.” That combination of words yields 649,000 hits on Google right now. So it’s worth looking a bit closer at the texts of the nineteen biblical books traditionally called Nevi’im, prophecies, to see what we mean when we associate them with the great Civil Rights leaders.

These are heterogeneous texts, containing biographical information, autobiographical passages, dramatic narratives (like Jonah in the whale), reports of the Lord’s words, dialogues between the prophet and the Lord, dreams, acts of these wise men and women, sermons, predictions, and much poetry.

Although this whole body of text enriched King’s speech and thought, I think that we have something more specific in mind when we use the word “prophetic” for his words.

A prophesy, in the narrower sense, often begins with a moral condemnation of the present, often directed explicitly at the most powerful people: the kings, priests, and rich men:

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. (Amos 5:11-12)

The prophesy may forecast the punishment and fall of these wicked men. “Woe unto you,” says the Lord, through Amos, six verses later. A classic prophesy then predicts a better time, a time of justice. This prediction is not empirical, based on continuing the current trends into the future. Rather, it is moral and hortatory. If the people begin to act righteously, then God will help them make the world better. “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15).

A Hebrew prophet derives his authority from God’s interactions with him–or her, since Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Hannah, Avigail, Huldah, and Esther are traditionally named prophets along with the bearded men. In contrast, a modern political prophet should be cautious about claiming direct divine inspiration. Instead, a modern prophet invites the audience to consider a moral description of the present. If they agree, and they behave as recommended, then the prophesy may become true as a result of their coordinated action.

So understood, prophesies can be rather humdrum. You are using the prophetic mode if you stand up at a PTA meeting and say, “The playground is a mess. If we all get together and clean it up this Saturday, the kids will be safer and happier next week.” The divine intervention and high flown language of the King James Version are missing, but you are still submitting a moral condemnation of the present, an exhortation to action, and a vision of the better world that will result.

The problem is that some prophesies are good, and some are bad. The bad ones either describe a morally worse world or demand unproductive actions. A certain President-Elect, for example, promises to make America great again in ways that I consider both unlikely and undesirable. We need methods for distinguishing good prophesies from bad ones. And two dominant modes of thought are unhelpful.

The scientific (and social-scientific) mode is unhelpful because it tries to separate empirical descriptions from moral judgments. Moral judgment is presented as mere opinion, and anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. This mode is also unhelpful because it predicts the future based on data from the past. We can make the future different from the past, but only if we refuse to assume that observed patterns must hold.

The professional mode used in bureaucracies (whether governmental or corporate) is also unhelpful because it is limited to means/ends reasoning. It says: If you want this to happen, you may (or should) do that. But what should you want to happen?

The scientific mode fits neatly together with the professional/bureaucratic mode when institutions use social science to find efficient means to their fixed ends.

The prophetic mode challenges these ways of thinking. A prophetic voice claims that some things really are bad (not merely in the prophet’s opinion), that a better future is possible, and that we can and must create that future by changing how we act. Prophesies are not hypotheses that are either true or false. They are exhortations that we can make true by how we react to them. They should be rooted in the experience of the speaker, the experiences of the audience, and a deeper tradition that preserves many others’ experiences, such as the Biblical background on which King drew so regularly.

King and his fellow African American Christian Civil Rights leaders exemplified prophetic thought. Their texts–together with the ways they were received and used–are models of a form of reasoning that is essential to citizenship in all times and places. Theirs is a gift that we must preserve and pass on.

See also: “an exercise for Martin Luther King Day,” “a different Shakespeare from the one I love” (with a excursus on the King James Version in Black political rhetoric),”the Nehemiah story,” and “homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School” (on “natality” as human freedom from the past).

Facts/Values/Strategies: a mini-conference at Tufts’ University’s Tisch College of Civic Life

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Current global crises of democracy raise fundamental questions about how citizens can be responsible and effective actors, whether they are combating racism in the United States, protecting human rights in the Middle East, or addressing climate change. If “citizens” are people who strive to leave their communities greater and more beautiful (as in the Athenian citizen’s oath), then their thinking must combine facts, values, and strategies, because all three must influence any wise decision. Mainstream scholarship distinguishes facts, values, and strategies, assigning them to different branches of the academy. Many critics have noted the philosophical shortcomings of the fact/value distinction, but citizens need accounts of how facts, values, and strategies can be recombined, both in theory and in practice. John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Mahatma Gandhi, Jürgen Habermas, Amartya Sen—and many other theorists of citizenship—have offered such accounts.

Actual civic movements also combine facts, values, and strategies in distinctive ways. For instance, the American Civil Rights Movement used the language of prophesy, and Second Wave Feminism strategically advocated new ways of knowing.

These papers propose theoretical, methodological, historical, and empirical responses and case-studies related to the question: how should citizens put facts, values, and strategies together?

Papers

  • “Public Entrepreneurship, Civic Competence, and Voluntary Association: Self-Governance Through the Ostroms’ Political Economy Lenses” — Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University
  • “Giving Birth in the Public Square: Dialogue as a Maieutic Practice” — Lauren Swayne Barthold, University of Connecticut
  • “William James’s Psychology of Philosophizing: Selective Attention, Intellectual Diversity, and the Sentiments in Our Rationalities” — Paul Croce, Stetson University
  • “The Praxis of Amartya Sen and the Promotion of Democratic Capability” — Anthony DeCesare, St. Louis University
  • “Social Media, Dismantling Racism and Mystical Knowing: What White Catholics are Learning from #BlackLivesMatter” — Mary E. Hess, University of Toronto
  • “Institutions, Capabilities, Citizens” — James Johnson, University of Rochester, and Susan Orr, SUNY College at Brockport
  • “Forgiveness After Charleston: The Ethics of an Unlikely Act” — Larry M. Jorgensen, Skidmore College
  • “Facts, Values, and Democracy Worth Wanting: Public Deliberation in the Era of Trump” — David Eric Meens, University of Colorado Boulder
  • “When Democracy Had Roots and Airwaves: Putting Facts, Values, and Strategies Together in Rural America” — Timothy J. Shaffer, Kansas State University
  • “A Civic Account of Justice” — Karol Edward So?tan, University of Maryland

Paper titles are preliminary

Conference chair: Peter Levine, Tisch College, Tufts University.
Good Society editor: Trygve Throntveit, University of Minnesota

review article: Public-Spirited Citizenship: Leadership and Good Government in the United States by Ralph Ketcham

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[From Political Science Quarterly, vol. 131, no. 4, winter 2016-17, pp. 896-7. Text as submitted. The definitive version is available at www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/polq. ]

Ralph Ketcham is a distinguished American political historian and biographer, a renowned educator, and an avid student of political thought from classical to current times. In Public-Spirited Citizenship, the most recent of more than a dozen books, he offers a sweeping narrative about both political science and American politics from the founding era to the present, with a valuable excursion into 20th century East Asia.

His story begins with the civic republican tradition that defined the public good as the purpose of politics, civic virtue as the foundation both of a good society and a worthy life, statecraft as leadership and institutional design to encourage civic virtue and promote the public good, and education as the development of good character along with the skills and knowledge needed for civic life. Ketcham emphasizes that the founders of the American republic were steeped in this tradition.

Civic republicanism never vanished, according to Ketcham’s account, but it suffered a series of blows in the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea of a public good began to seem unscientific and naïve as theories of human nature emerged that emphasized self-interest and irrationality. Education was increasingly defined as the imparting of information and scientific insights about the way things really worked, not moral development or reflection on the public good. Public institutions, too, shifted from deliberative forums to sites of negotiation among organized interests.

The American Political Science Association played a role in that story. Starting in the early 1900s, leading American political scientists decried education that took the form of “sermonizing and patriotic expostulation” (p. 105). The only alternative they recognized was a rigorous, detached, disenchanted study of politics as it was. In keeping with that goal, they advocated specialization and expertise. Political science meant training for professors and technocrats in basically the current system.

Good citizens, Ketcham argues, will not be “’experts’ in the details of government; rather, they must have a disinterested perspective and must ask the proper public question, ‘What is good for the polity as a whole?’ and not [a] corrupt private one” (pp. 33-34). That stance is best cultivated, Ketcham argues, by a broad liberal education that is “profound,” “integrated,” and “radical.” But all those ideals seem naïve to positivist social scientists, who doubt there is anything good for the polity (apart from the aggregation of private interests) and who favor education that is specialized empirical training for the status quo.

The broad outlines of this narrative are not unique to Ketcham, but he has a sharp eye for overlooked aphorisms, incidents, and characters. This book is a treasury of quotations from proponents of civic republicanism and positivism alike. It is also a pageant of character sketches—from Benjamin Franklin in dialogue with Mohawk King Hendricks about good government in 1754, to Fukuzawa Yukichi reflecting on how republican norms might merge with Confucian ideals in Meiji Japan, to Ketcham’s own colleagues at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who are giving renewed attention to the ideal of “citizenship” that is in their institution’s name.

I concur with the whole story, but I would add that an 18th century account of the public good and civic virtue can’t directly apply today, not only because we must draw from more diverse sources, but also because we have learned hard truths from history, the natural and social sciences, the terrible experiences of the past century—in a word, from modernity. The decline of civic education and civic culture reflects not only a loss of moral commitment but also a profound intellectual challenge that confronts public-spirited citizens today.

save the date for Frontiers of Democracy: June 22-24, 2017 in Boston

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Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University with partners.

In 2017, the frontiers of democracy are threatened around the world. Leaders and movements that have popular support–yet are charged with being undemocratic, xenophobic, and illiberal–are influential or dominant in the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, South Africa, France, Britain, and the United States, among other countries. Meanwhile, many peoples continue to face deep and sustained repression. Social movements and networks are confronting this global turn to authoritarianism. Please join us for a discussion of what we must do to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy.

You can enter your information here (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/zp2qlpz) to let us know that you are interested in attending and to ensure that you receive additional information about the agenda and registering for Frontiers. (This is not a registration link.)

As always, the format of Frontiers is highly interactive; most of the concurrent sessions are “learning exchanges” rather than presentations or panels. We welcome proposals for learning exchanges for 2017. Please use this form to submit ideas (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/jfdurwv).

Frontiers is a public conference that follows immediately after the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a 2-week seminar for scholars, practitioners, and advanced graduate students. The Summer Institute requires an application, and admissions decisions are usually made in May. Prospective applicants should sign up on the Summer Institute’s webpage (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/hgm64rb) to receive more information.

Levinson and Fay, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics

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Meira Levinson’s and Jacob Fay’s edited volume Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries is enormously valuable. It not only addresses problems that confront educators every day but also suggests how moral reasoning can be revitalized in academia.

The book is organized around seven business-school-like cases. Each case poses a common dilemma. For instance, should a team of middle school teachers choose to promote a student who is far behind grade level? She will struggle and probably fail if she goes on to high school, but if they retain her, she will doubtless drop out. Each case ends at the point of decision. It is followed by half a dozen short reflective essays contributed by a mix of scholars and practitioners (although I noticed no systematic differences between the academics’ and educators’ chapters, which is interesting in itself).

Dilemmas of Educational Ethics represents a mode of thought that can fill a gap left in the tessellation of our current disciplines.

Social and behavioral sciences help to illuminate what is going on and predict what will happen as a result of various strategies. Management disciplines provide advice about how to operate as administrative leaders. And philosophy/political theory offers frameworks for asking “what is justice?” or “what should be done?”

But none of these disciplines directly addresses the question “What should we do?”–if “we” means a concrete group of responsible actors who have limited options and imperfect information. They face not only a practical question but also an intellectually challenging one. Practitioners would benefit if scholars thought from this perspective, and scholarly disciplines would be stronger if they addressed what is often a much harder question than “should should be done?” Social science misses the mark by bracketing the value aspect of the question “what should we do?”, and most philosophy/political theory loses the active agent (“we”) by focusing on justice as a virtue of social systems rather than an outcome of concrete action.

As advertised, the cases in this book are “richly described” and “realistic” (p. 3). The writing isn’t pretentious or mannered, but it is literary in the sense that various characters’ goals, emotional states, and interactions are described. The narratives build genuine suspense and force the reader to decide what she or he would do. This is a difficult form of writing that is unusual in most disciplines. In particular, it differs from the thought-experiments popular in moral philosophy: trolley problems and the like.

Philosophers prefer stylized situations that force a choice among theories that are revealed to be incompatible. For instance, whether to change the track of a runaway trolley forces a different response for a utilitarian or a Kantian. This is a dilemma in the sense of a choice between two bad options. A third choice is either defined as impossible or rejected as question-begging. You’re not allowed to ask, “Isn’t there something else the onlooker can throw in front of the trolley?” But many responses to the scenarios in this book do suggest a third or fourth option. Jeffrey Smith calls this move “breaking out of the binary” (p. 83). 

As Jal Mehta writes (p. 19), the cases in Levinson and Fay make you want to “diminish rather than ignite conflicts among first principles” and satisfy as many constituencies as you can, not necessarily for uniform reasons (p. 19). Mehta notes that that’s how skillful administrators think. It is, he adds, “diametrically opposed” to how “political philosophers” teach us to think. I’d say it is political thinking, in the best sense. Yet it is just as intellectually demanding as mainstream philosophy, if not more so.

Philosophers’ principles sometimes enter the discussion usefully. Christopher Winship addresses a case about school assignment rules by invoking John Rawls’ “Difference Principle” (any differences are legitimate only to the extent they are necessary to improve the situation of the least advantaged.) In turn, the Difference Principle emerged from Rawls’ highly abstract thought experiment of an Original Position, in which we shed knowledge of our own circumstances. But Winship doubts that “specific policy directives follow” from the Difference Principle for this case (p. 175). The best choice depends on predictions of the effects of various policies. Like other contributors, Winship thinks the best approach is to consider a “broad set of policy options” in case there’s a way to avoid the dilemma (p. 178).

Some of the authors balk at the focus on individual or small-group choices. Melissa Aguire, for instance, notes that the teachers in the first case study face a tragic choice that would be avoided entirely if the system were just. Her point is true and relevant; it should be made. At the same time, describing how things should be instead of what we must do can evade responsibility. Yes, systems should be just, but they aren’t, and what are we going to do about that? Many authors explore the constraints that teachers and others face in an unjust larger context, but they repeatedly insist that the specific actor is not powerless (e.g., 127). In the classic debate about structure and agency, they emphasize agency–not because it solves everything, but because it is the main concern of an actual agent.

Responding to a case about a teacher in a zero-tolerance school who thinks a vulnerable teenager has committed theft (which will result in a prison sentence), Tommie Shelby objects to the narrow focus on her “professional responsibilities.” “What matters first of all are the injustices that pervade society.” Still, Shelby doesn’t resort to calling for those injustices to be solved by someone else. Rather, he would “focus on her more general duties as a relatively privileged member of a profoundly unjust society.” That is to treat the teacher as an individual citizen, not just an individual professional. Shelby adds, “she can’t reform society on her own. She needs allies, and perhaps even a social movement, to be able to fundamentally change things.” (79, 81).

Needing a social movement is a problems of collective action. Jennifer Hochschild makes explicit references to the literature on collective action problems as she responds to a case about pervasive grade inflation in a private school. When everyone inflates grades, each teacher and school is forced to as well. But Hochschild’s brief review of the tragedy of the commons neglects more recent work by Elinor Ostrom and many others about how people actually solve collective action problems. They are not inexorable tragedies but suspenseful drams. Many of the suggestions in this volume are plausible solutions.

The scale gradually grows as the volume progresses–from choices made by one or a few teachers up to policies considered by school districts and states. As the scale grows, the active agent becomes more obscure. After presenting a case about comparing charter schools to other schools, Levinson asks, “would you support legislation that restricts charter school expansion?” (p. 185). Here the actor (“you”) is a voter, one of more than a million. The impact of each vote is infinitesimal, and the ballot question will be already framed by others. But Andres A. Alonso objects to a narrative that treats the Boston Public Schools (BPS) as the agent that chooses a school assignment plan. “Districts are hotbeds of internal and external politics. Virtually every decision is fought over by multiple stakeholders” (p. 165). His political analysis puts people’s agency back into the picture. 

Some of the authors suggest strategies at an important midsize scale that is usually overlooked in philosophy. Ethics focuses on individual choices, whereas the most influential political theories consider the ideal structure of a whole society; but here the focus is on purposeful groups. For instance, Toby N. Romer notes (p. 37) that as long as each teacher decides whether to send each student to a violence-prone “alternative” school, the right answer may be not to. But if all the teachers in the same middle school send all the relevant kids to that school, it will immediately improve, thanks to the broader range of enrollees. This is an example of collective action by a group, a “we,” that is small enough to make decisions and act together.

Authors cite Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom), Bent Flyvbjerg’s revival of phronesis, and pragmatism as methodological precedents. I share those enthusiasms, but I’m not sure that we yet have a satisfactory philosophical apparatus to clarify how people should think about what they should do. We must go beyond vague references to judgment or practical wisdom. We must face questions of agency and structure, relations between individual and group intentions and responsibilities, and challenges of collective action at various scales. I think this is an important frontier for philosophy and social theory.

See also Bent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis; community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; a different approach to human problems