Albert Dzur, author of Democratic Professionalism and Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury, is writing a series in the Boston Review entitled “Trench Democracy: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places.”

When we think of democratic reform, our minds usually turn to explicitly political upheavals: the Civil Rights Movement, the Arab Spring. In such cases, masses of people put aside their ordinary lives of family and work to press for a new government–or at least for new laws.

That definition of reform hides a different kind of democratic politics that is more sustained, less state-centric, and less obvious to reporters and average citizens. It is what Dzur calls “the public work of self-directing community groups that band together to secure affordable housing, welcome new immigrant groups, and repair common areas like parks and playgrounds.”

I am aware of this kind of public work and have put it at the center of my book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. I argue that about one million Americans are engaged in “self-directing community groups” in particular places and issue areas. But they do not yet see themselves as part of a civic movement that is larger than their particular projects and causes. So we must organize them to advocate in their common interest–for funds to support civic processes, rights to public participation, education policies that support high-quality civic education, and news coverage of citizens’ work.

In developing this strategy and counting my one million civic activists, I did not pay sufficient attention to the layer of politics and reform that Dzur investigates. I describe leaders and members of civic groups, but his main topic is the everyday pro-democratic work of professionals within mainstream organizations:

[T]hey take their public responsibilities seriously and listen carefully to those outside their walls and those at all levels of their internal hierarchy in order to foster physical proximity between formerly separated individuals, encourage co-ownership of problems previously seen as beyond laypeople’s ability or realm of responsibility, and seek out opportunities for collaborative work between laypeople and professionals.We fail to see these activities as politically significant because they do not fit our conventional picture of democratic change. As if to repay the compliment, the democratic professionals I have interviewed in fields such as criminal justice, public administration, and K-12 education rarely use the concepts employed by social scientists and political theorists. Lacking an overarching ideology, they make it up as they go along, developing roles, attitudes, habits, and practices that open calcified structures up to greater participation. Their democratic action is thus endogenous to their occupational routine, often involving those who would not consider themselves activists or even engaged citizens.

Though they belong to practitioner networks and engage in ongoing streams of print, online, and face-to-face dialogue, the democratic professionals I have met do not form a typical social movement. Rather than mobilizing fellow travelers and putting pressure on government office holders to make new laws or rules, or convening temporary participatory processes such as citizens’ juries, deliberative polls, and citizens’ assemblies, democratic professionals are making real-world changes in their domains piece by piece, practice by practice. In the trenches all around us they are renovating and reconstructing schools, clinics, prisons, and other seemingly inert bodies.

The rest of Dzur’s series will explore examples of this work, using his own interviews with committed democratic professionals. These professionals must be part of a movement for civic reform. The first step is to learn who they are and what they are striving for. Dzur’s work is indispensable for that purpose.

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I very much enjoyed presenting my new book today at MIT’s Center for Civic Media. The questions and discussion were terrific. Also, Willow Brugh produced an animated version of my talk in real time:

I still maintain that it’s worth reading the book, but this pretty much sums it up.

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Bill Shore and Darrell Hammond are fabulously successful social entrepreneurs. Each founded a nonprofit that raised tons of money, inspired many thousands of volunteers, drew great press, and provided lots of services. (Share Our Strength fed homeless people; KaBOOM! built playgrounds.) Now, along with Amy Celep, these two founders have written a provocative piece entitled “When Good is Not Good Enough.” This passage –contributed by Shore–gives a flavor of the whole article:

So I began with an idea that was clear, simple, and wrong: we would end hunger by raising money and granting it out to food banks and other emergency food assistance programs. It should have been obvious then, as it is now, that hunger is a symptom of the deeper, more complex problem of poverty.

Both Share Our Strength and KaBOOM! have shifted to addressing what they see as the root causes of big social problems, using tactics inspired by the movements against smoking, drunk driving, and malaria.

In a reply also published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Cynthia Gibson, Katya Smyth, Gail Nayowith, & Jonathan Zaff anticipate most of the points I would want to make. They applaud the honesty and ambition of the original article but raise doubts about whether nonprofit organizations can really “solve” social problems without the rest of the public. The two articles together offer a great guide to the debate between social entrepreneurship and civic engagement.

I would add a couple of points that are generally consistent with Gibson, Smyth, Nayowith and Zaff.

First, the metaphor of “root causes” is problematic and misleading. It suggests that if you could fix the root, you could solve a whole problem in one stroke, much as pulling out the root of a weed will kill it. Much more typically, problems form complex systems with no  primary cause. For example, racism, crime, violence, education, and poverty all influence each other. Poverty worsens crime, but crime independently deepens the poverty of afflicted communities. Such complexity should not cause despair. You can intervene helpfully at many points in the cycle, not only at the “deepest” point, which may be the least accessible. For instance, better policing does not directly address poverty, but it can cut crime, and that helps poor people.

The metaphor of a root misleadingly suggests that you should only work on the part of the problem that seems somehow biggest and most difficult. That is doubly wrong: (1) you might be able to do more good with limited resources if you intervened somewhere else, and (2) even if you solved the problem that you see as primary, the rest of the system would remain.

Second, the idea that organizations can solve social problems ignores the persistence of politics. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (starting on pp. 65), I mention the popular “moon-ghetto” metaphor from the 1960s:

This was the idea that engineers and other specialists had put human beings on the moon (and brought them safely home), so it should be possible to tackle the problems of the so-called “ghetto” in much the same way. It was all a matter of scientifically diagnosing the causes of poverty and efficiently deploying solutions.

Actually, the moon and the “ghetto” are very different. The moon is almost perfectly detached from all other human issues and contexts, because it is 240,000 miles away from our planet (although NASA’s launch facilities in Florida and Houston might have some local impact). The goal of the Apollo Program—whether you endorsed it or not—was clear and easily defined. The challenges were physical; thus Newtonian physics allowed engineers to predict the impact of their tools precisely in advance. The costs were also calculable—in fact, the Apollo Program was completed under budget. The astronauts and other participants were highly motivated volunteers, who had signed up for a fully developed concept that they understood in advance. The president and other national leaders had committed enough funds to make the Apollo Program a success, because its value to them exceeded the costs.

In contrast, a low-income urban neighborhood is enmeshed with other communities. Its challenges are multi-dimensional. Its strengths and weaknesses are open to debate. Defining success is a matter of values; even how to measure the basic facts is controversial. (For example, how should “race” be defined in a survey? What are the borders of a neighborhood?) Everyone involved—from the smallest child on the block to the most powerful official downtown—has distinct interests and motivations. Outsiders may not care enough to provide adequate funds, and residents may prefer to leave than to make their area better. When social scientists and policymakers implement rewards or punishments to affect people’s behavior, the targets tend to realize what is happening and develop strategies to resist, subvert, or profit from the policies—a response that machines can never offer. No wonder we could put a man on the moon but our poor urban neighborhoods persist. …

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(New Haven) Next week, I will lead a discussion of the Nobel-Prize-winning research of the late Elinor Ostrom. I will be with a group of engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists who are concerned about water, one of the basic scarce and contested natural resources.

Ostrom studied water-management, but she was a political scientist concerned with “civic engagement,” especially the practices that ordinary people develop to manage common resources. Why should an engineer or a scientist concerned with water care about civic engagement, as Ostrom analyzed it?

One reason is that ordinary people’s deliberate and creative action is a more important condition of successful resource-management than analysts had thought before Lin Ostrom wrote. The dominant 20th century view held that resources were either public or private. If they were private, the owners would have incentives to protect them (although market failures might occur under specific conditions). Public resources, however, would be destroyed by the Tragedy of the Commons in the form of free-riding, overuse, underinvestment, etc. Thus public resources had to be privatized or else governed by a central state. Water was quasi-public because you can’t own the oceans or clouds (“fugitive resources”), although you can own a gallon of water or a spring. Applying the theory that public goods were doomed, 20th century regimes either privatized or nationalized forests, grazing lands, and water. The results were frequently catastrophic, contributing to mass human and animal death. (See Governing the Commons, p. 23. All subsequent quotes are also from that book.)

Ostrom discovered that, contrary to the simplistic theories of collective action, people were capable of managing public goods, including waterways and fisheries. They did not always succeed, but they did not always fail, either. Variation in the ways that they worked mattered to the outcomes. To succeed, they needed institutional arrangements, skills, norms, motivations, and habits. All of these factors then became important predictors of preserving or destroying natural resources. An engineer or a chemist cannot ignore these factors if she actually wants to contribute to good water management. Discovering a process or inventing a technical system does no good unless someone uses it. That someone cannot be an omnicompetent and incorruptible state, because there is no such thing. Somehow, people have to adopt any technical innovation, and often they can contribute to designing it as well.

An example is a crisis of overfishing off Alanya, Turkey (pp. 19-20). The fishers solved the problem through an ingenious system of randomly assigning all the licensed boats to specific starting points and rotating these locations on a fixed schedule. Privatization could not have solved the problem because this was already a system of private boats and workers, and the fish are a “fugitive resource.” Nor could it have been solved by the state, except at high cost. The fishers knew exactly where to put each location, and the state would have had to recreate that knowledge—assuming that it acted fairly and without corruption. The best solution was a self-created one.

If the first reason to read Ostrom is that she studied citizenship and found that it mattered, the second is that she was a citizen. She was a scientist who won countless NSF grants as well as the Nobel and a MacArthur “genius” award. But she was a scientist who wanted to improve the world, and that made her a model citizen. For instance, after introducing the prisoner’s dilemma, she writes, “As long as people are described as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I would rather address the question how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedy (p. 7).”

This is a complex pair of sentences, worth unpacking. Ostrom’s ultimate goal is to avoid “remorseless tragedy.” The stakes are high, and they are defined in moral terms, even though Ostrom is a scientist. To avoid tragedy, she will not propose direct solutions. Instead, she wants to “enhance the capabilities of those involved.” These people will not merely act within a system, discussing issues and making choices. The limiting case of a person who makes a choice within a fixed system is the prisoner in a prisoner’s dilemma. “Individuals who have no self-organizing and self-governing authority are stuck in a singe-tier world. The structure of their problems is given to them” (p. 54). In contrast, Ostrom wants people to change the rules. And she is part of that process, because she discloses her own goal in the first-person singular: “I would rather address. …” In real life, Ostrom actually worked with peasants and fishers because she had to learn from them and because she wanted them to benefit from her findings.

In short, Ostrom not only discovered that complex social/environmental systems involve deliberate human collective action. She also treated social science as part of those systems, and herself as one of the human beings who was trying to manage the commons.

Other insights from Governing the Commons:

“Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low-cost by external authorities, I argue that ‘getting the institutions right’ is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process” (p. 14).

“… as long as analysts assume that individuals cannot change … situations themselves, they do not ask what internal or external variables can enhance or impede the efforts of communities of individuals to deal creatively and constructively with perverse problems such as the tragedy of the commons” (p. 21)

“Empirically validated theories of human organization will be essential ingredients of a policy science that can inform decisions about the likely consequences of a multitude of ways of organizing human activities. Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. … One can, however, get trapped in one’s own intellectual web” (p. 24)

“The basic strategy is to identify those aspects of the physical, cultural, and institutional setting that are likely to affect [the results.] Once one has all the needed information, one can then abstract from the richness of the empirical situation to devise a playable game that will capture the essence of the problems the individuals are facing” (p. 55).

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“As America has wallowed through an unprecedented decline in civic engagement, Peter Levine has been a lighthouse warning of the dangers of civic alienation. Now, he makes the encouraging case that although we will live for a while with the consequences of past mistakes, the worst of the storm is over. Professor Levine concludes with ten common sense strategies that can energize the people and their governmental institutions while preparing a new generation of Americans with the values and competencies to sustain our reinvigorated democracy.”—Bob Graham, United States Senator (1986-2004)

“Peter Levine is a remarkable asset—a scholar whose research is rigorous and unflinching but whose passion for democracy brims with optimism and engagement. In We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, Levine catalogues all the ways our institutional systems discourage engagement among citizens. But he finds and lifts up a million people doing civic work for a better world, and asks us to join and harness that energy for real change. It’s clear-eyed and a clarion call—and a must read whether you’re a full time advocate or ‘just’ a citizen hoping to make a difference.” —Miles Rapoport, President, Demos

“We know what it means to get better leaders. But how are we supposed to produce better citizens? That’s the question Peter Levine brings into focus. If the examples he describes can spur the one million most active citizens into a movement for civic renewal, we will all benefit from communities that are more deliberative, more collaborative, and more engaged.”—Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

“In an America now rife with inequality, institutionalized corruption, a jobless recovery and more prisoners than any other country, many sense that we stand at a nadir of democracy. With inspiring erudition, Levine points to an unlikely solution: the people themselves. Drawing from experiences in schools from Washington, D.C. to neighborhoods in San Antonio, he develops a pragmatic approach to civic revitalization that builds upon developments in organizing, deliberation, civic education, and public service, but goes far beyond any of these to reach for an ambitious vision of participatory democracy. He asks us to join the emerging civic movement he describes, and we all should.”—Archon Fung, Ford Foundation Professor of Citizenship and Democracy, Harvard Kennedy School

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(Chicago) According to the official definition of the American Political Science Association, “Political science is the study of governments, public policies and political processes, systems, and political behavior.” In other words, it is a generally impersonal and positivistic investigation into how certain kinds of processes (labeled “politics”) actually work. It is not a discussion of what you and I should do to make the world better.

This modern definition may seem obvious but it reflects a shift. In 1901, President Arthur Hadley of Yale had argued for “political education” that would enhance the motivations, virtues, skills, and knowledge that people needed to be good citizens. He wrote, “A man may possess a vast knowledge with regard to the workings of our social and political machinery, and yet be absolutely untrained in those things which make a good citizen.” But by 1933, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins announced, “‘education for citizenship’ has no place in the university.”

This shift at the university level also had implications for how we teach children and adolescents. From the 1920s through the 1960s, most high school students took courses entitled “civics” or “problems of democracy” that investigated the students’ role in community life and how they could address public problems together. The assigned textbooks tended to address the students as “you” and invited consideration of what you, the citizen, should do. Both courses have now almost vanished from the curriculum, but a third class, “American government,” remains highly prevalent, reaching nearly 90 percent of all high school graduates. This course mimics college-level political science in its impersonal treatment of institutions and processes.

At times, the APSA has actually been hostile to forms of civic education that are normative and concerned with the role of citizens. A 1971 report by argued that the job of political education was to provide “knowledge about the ‘realities’ of political life.” According to this report, most high school civics teachers imparted “a naïve, unrealistic, and romanticized image of political life which confuses the ideals of democracy with the realities of politics.” Understanding and teaching the realities of politics would be another apt definition of mainstream political science.

I think the impact on k-12 civic education has been harmful. And the APSA’s definition implies a misguided view of politics that distorts even the most advanced scholarship in the discipline. My colleagues and I are using the phrase “Civic Studies” to describe a nascent discipline that would put citizens back at the center and combine empirical, normative, and strategic analysis. The flourishing of Civic Studies would have consequences for civic education at the k-12 level. It would reorient political science and the other social sciences. And it would connect academic work to global movements for civic renewal.When I invoked the word “citizen,” I did not mean someone who possesses legal rights and responsibilities in relation to a particular government, but rather a member of one or more communities, which may range from a block of houses or a single church to a nation-state to the whole earth. If you are a citizen, you want to address these communities’ problems and influence their directions, but more than that, you want to make them through your work, your thought, your passion. You want to be a co-creator of your worlds.

For you, political science and other forms of scholarship ought to be resources. With more than 300,000 different new books published in the US every year (not to mention articles, websites, old books, and works from overseas), you can surely find valuable texts to read. And yet, overwhelmingly, scholarship is not addressed to you as a citizen.

The social sciences are most useful as sources of descriptive and causal facts. You need facts to be an active and responsible citizen. Who controls the traffic light at your corner or the incarceration rate in your state? Would raising the high school graduation rate lower the incarceration rate? How much would that cost? What does the public think about taxation and education? The social sciences present themselves as providers of such empirical information.

Almost all students of these disciplines are taught that truth is elusive because the observer has biases. The social scientist should work hard to overcome or minimize biases, using elaborate techniques for that purpose (for example, double-blind clinical trials; or achieving agreement among many observers). But since such efforts will never fully succeed, social scientists are told to disclose and acknowledge their biases as limitations or caveats. They then present the facts as best they can.

Once they convey what they believe is true, their readers are supposed to apply values to decide what ought to be done. For instance, unemployment is bad; it would be worth spending billions to lower unemployment. These two value propositions are not themselves results of social science. Citizens must bring values into the discussion because social scientists do not claim special expertise about values.

Once we put facts together with values, we can make recommendations for society. And once we have recommendations, we can act effectively—or hope that someone else acts—to improve society.

That is the implicit, standard model. It is widely taught in graduate schools. It explains how most scholars approach social issues and the division of labor in their disciplines. It trickles down to high school government class. But the standard model presents a host of problems, some well-known and some a little subtler.

First, purported facts are always imbued with norms. Education, for example, is related to employment—but what is education? The average number of years that people spend in school looks like a hard number, an objective fact, but no one believes it’s worth measuring unless it is a proxy for education, rightly understood. The real definition of education is a process that enhances human flourishing. Thus measuring education requires a theory of the human good. According to the standard model taught to social scientists, moral theories are just biases or opinions held by ordinary citizens that should be disclosed as biases if they influence scientists. But to call a theory of human flourishing a mere opinion or bias is to deny the difference between right and wrong. What we need is a good theory of the human good.

That brings me to the second criticism of the standard theory. It assumes that values are opinions, tastes, preferences, or biases. But moral assertions can be right or wrong. I am sitting on a chair; I must not kill a random stranger for fun. Both statements are right. The methods we use to know right from wrong are controversial, but it’s easy to see that some opinions about values are contemptibly wrong: not just Mussolini’s or Chairman Mao’s, but the opinions of everyday people who happily waste more than they create, burden society and the earth, and sow more sorrow than joy. To say that morality is a mere matter of opinion is to deny the existence of vice and evil.

We certainly do not experience making moral decisions as a matter of preferences or opinions, like choosing a flavor of ice cream. We feel that we are striving to make the right choices, to reach objectively the right conclusions, regardless of our own preferences and tastes. If that feeling is meaningful at all, then moral reflection must be some kind of inquiry into truth.

Third, empirical information influences norms. The fact that we can have reasonably stable democratic governments is an essential reason that we ought to have democratic governments. We have learned from experience, not only what works but what is important and attractive. If I thought we could revolutionize or abolish the family to enhance justice for children, I’d be interested in that idea, but I’d need a lot more examples of success before the pure philosophical argument became attractive. Most people think that “ought implies can”: if there is a moral obligation to do something, that act must be possible. I would add that sometimes, “can implies ought”: if something has been demonstrated to work well, we are obligated to do it. This is another way in which facts and values are intertwined.

Fourth, strategic considerations rightly influence norms. We might propose that everyone has a right to a job. I would agree with that. But then I owe an explanation of how everyone can be afforded a job without very bad effects on the economy, freedom, or work itself. And it’s not enough to say that a government could enact a particular package of reforms that would achieve that end. I must also ask what would cause an actual government to act in helpful ways. My statement that “everyone has a right to a job” could help if it proved persuasive. Or my statement could be unhelpful. It might gain no traction, provoke a public backlash, divide an existing political coalition, or lead to a massive new government program that does not work. Depending on the situation, I might do better advocating a particular reform in the welfare system that has a real prospect of passage. Unless I have a plan for getting everyone a job, my statement that everyone has a right to a job may be worse than no theory at all.

Fifth, strategy and values influence empirical evidence. For instance, how do we get the employment statistics that we have? They are not generated automatically. People struggled to persuade government agencies to collect certain job-related data. Those agencies defined “unemployment” so that you are unemployed if you once held a full-time job, were laid off, and are actively seeking employment, but not if you left high school to help raise your young sister. The definition of unemployment reflects choices that people struggle over—not only in their heads and on paper, but by taking political action to change what is measured. Meanwhile, other information is not available at all. In short, our values and strategic actions influence even the data we possess.

A citizen needs knowledge of rights and wrongs, facts and explanations, and strategies. The citizen should be accountable for all of that: explaining what she believes and why. Her strategies must include the citizen herself. For example, it is not strategy to say that the government should provide high-quality education for everyone. That is a wish. A strategy would explain how we—you and I—can get the government to provide such education. It is essential that the education is effective (that is the factual part) and that it enhances human lives (the values). Again, all three strands must be integrated, because there is just one fundamental question: What should you and I do?

I said “you and I” instead of just “I” because purely individual actions are usually ineffective, and also for a deeper reason—because the good life is lived in common. Toddlers demonstrate “parallel play,” sitting side-by-side but doing their own thing. With maturity comes the ability to play together, to decide together what to play, to learn from the other players, to bring new players into the game, and to make up new games. That is what we do when we are co-creators of a common world. Not only are the results better, but we lead deeper and richer lives when we strive together.

Scholarship is not well organized to serve people who see themselves as citizens, meaning co-creators of their common worlds. The disciplines that assume there may be a real difference between right and wrong (philosophy, political theory, theology, and some other portions of the humanities) are rigidly separated from the disciplines that deal with purported facts. The professional schools teach strategies to prospective business leaders, lawyers, and doctors, but no department teaches strategies for citizens. Philosophy addresses the nature of justice but not what actions available to you and to me might make the world more just. Political science, as I noted earlier, is positivistic and concerned with institutions and behavior; it is not an investigation of what you and I should do together.

Meanwhile, scholars often hold a peculiar stance toward practice. Consider an educational strategy, such as asking students to conduct community service as part of their courses. Some political scientists have used this practice, known as “service-learning,” in their own teaching, and others have criticized it as insufficiently political. (I think Meira Levinson would take that latter position.) In any case, I offer it as an example; the same analysis would apply to medical treatments or welfare programs—to any body or field of practice that involves human beings.

The standard scholarly stance is to determine whether the practice “works” by collecting and analyzing evidence of impact. If the practice does work, the scholarly findings can arm practitioners with favorable evidence, persuade policymakers to invest in it, and contribute to general knowledge. If the practice doesn’t work, the scholarship implies that it should stop. Scholarly authors do not disclose their feelings of hope, satisfaction, or disappointment when they publish their results

But if service-learning “works,” why is that so? Surely because dedicated practitioners stuck with the idea even in the face of evidence that it was not successful in the early attempts and improved their methods. For them, service-learning was not a hypothesis to be tested and rejected if proved wrong. It was a practice that embodied empirical, strategic, and value assumptions. Perhaps the practitioners hoped to engage students in service because they were communitarians who believe that the good life requires close and caring interactions. Or perhaps they sought economic equality and hoped to boost the job prospects of disadvantaged youth by engaging them in service. No doubt, their commitments varied, but they built a community of practitioners with some loyalty to each other, whose actual methods have evolved. Their commitments and the community they produced are fundamental; the methods and outcomes constantly shift.

Scholars of service-learning can be understood as part of the same community. Like the practitioners, the scholars are motivated by core beliefs. They have not randomly selected service-learning as an “intervention” to assess; they hope that it will work because it reflects their commitments. They study it in order to build a case for it while also providing constructive feedback to the practitioners, with whom they have formed working relationships. When they get negative results, their loyalty keeps them looking for solutions. All of this is perfectly healthy, except that the scholars’ hope, loyalty, and other emotions and values are not considered scientific, so they leave them out of their professional writing. Most research on service-learning makes it sound like a laboratory experiment.

Civic Studies is a strategy for reorienting academic scholarship so that it does address citizens—and learns from them in turn. In fact, it treats scholars as citizens, engaged with others in creating their worlds. Civic Studies integrates facts, values, and strategies. Those who practice this nascent discipline are accountable to the public for what they believe to be true, to be good, and to work. They are accountable for the actual results of their thoughts and not just the ideas themselves.

Civic Studies is being built by scholars and practitioners who share commitments to particular forms of civic action in the world. That is the connection between Civic Studies and civic renewal.

For example, people have successfully managed common resources such as forests and fish stocks throughout human history, even though a simplistic theory of human interaction would suggest that these resources must be destroyed by the Tragedy of the Commons and related problems. The late Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their students, often known as the “Bloomington School,” studied how citizens successfully manage common goods. They learned from practical experience and contributed sophisticated political theory and formal modeling of human interactions; indeed, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics. They developed practical guidance for citizens who try to manage common goods. They had an implicit moral framework in which good citizenship meant overcoming collective-action problems. My colleague on this panel, Paul Aligica, describes and develops this first stream of work.

Although the management of common-pool resources is very old, it is not static. Today, people are busily working to protect various threatened commons: watersheds and fisheries, public libraries and other sources of free public information, cyberspace (understood as an open network of privately owned components), and the global atmosphere—to name just a few examples. Movements to protect and enhance the commons are one aspect of the civic renewal movement, which Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland named as such about ten years ago and which I describe in detail in my about-to-be published book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America.

I would owe a longer explanation of what “civic renewal” means and why certain practices deserve that name while others don’t. Instead, I will just offer a quick list of these practices. In addition to efforts to protect common-pool resources, I would name broad-based community organizing; community-based economic development; community-based participatory research; deliberative democracy as a set of practical experiments; the creation of new forms of public media; and educational programs that enlist young people in deliberation and collaboration. Each of these streams of practice involves a combination of actual projects, organizing, theory, and empirical research. Each reflects a normative commitment to enhancing ordinary people’s capacity to make their worlds. Each also reflects hard-nosed strategic thinking about what will flourish in the real world. In each case, the interested scholars are part of the same community of practice as the practitioners.

These are the streams that feed into the larger river of Civic Studies.

References:

American Political Science Association, “What is Political Science?” (n.d.) https://www.apsanet.org/content_9181.cfm. For context, see James W. Ceasar, “The Role of Political Science and Political Scientists in Civic Education” (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2013). Arthur Twining Hadley, “Political Education,” in The Education of the American Citizen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1901), p. 135. Nathaniel Schwartz, “How Civic Education Changed (1960 to the present), MS paper, quoted with the permission of the author. See also United States Bureau of Education, Teaching of Community Civocs  (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915).

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James Ceasar has published an interesting and provocative essay through the American Enterprise Institute entitled “The role of political science and political scientists in civic education.” I disagree with part of it–and with that aspect of Ceasar’s overall thought. He rests a great deal on the idea of a regime (roughly per Montesquieu). The United States is said to have had one regime or deep structure since the founding era, regardless of subsequent changes in policies. The goal of civic education should be to maintain this regime and transmit its values. Political education, on the other hand, aims to transform the regime. Today, “progressivism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism” are “hostile” to the regime and seek to change it.

I think the American regime has changed profoundly several times and has always been a field of debate about its purpose and values. I see progressivism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism as just examples of the usual hurly-burly of public debate in the American republic, not threats to it. Today, purist liberatarianism seems to me the most radical challenge to mainstream civic education. I note that Ceasar offers no  examples of progressivism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, and I suspect that he would find the actual proponents to be more complex, more varied, and generally less radical than he wants to portray them. Could, for example, a cosmopolitan like Martha Nussbaum or a multiculturalist progressive like Meira Levinson really be described as hostile to the regime?

That said, I cite the paper because I am wholly in agreement that political science ought to be supportive of civic education, and it is not. Ceasar notes:

The current official definition of political science from the American Political Science Association deliberately casts a wide net while avoiding giving undue offense (or providing any focus): ‘Political science is the study of governments, public policies and political processes, systems, and political behavior.’ … Civic education no longer occupies the central place that it did under the Aristotelian conception. The subject is of relatively minor interest in political science today, even allowing for a recovery of some its questions and concerns within the modern subfield known as ‘political socialization.’

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). Ceasar 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.)

In any case, I’ll be leading a discussion about the role of political science in civic education at the APSA:

August 29, 2013 @ 8:00 AM
Hilton Chicago

1. Theme Panel: “Power and Persuasion from Below: Civic Renewal, Youth Engagement, and the Case for Civic Studies,” Aug 30, 2013, 4:15 PM-6:00 PM
Chair: Peter Levine, Tufts University. Participants: Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University; Carmen Sirianni, Brandeis University; Karol E. Soltan, University of Maryland; Filippo A. Sabetti McGill University; and Meira Levinson, Harvard University

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“Political philosopher and activist Levine (The Future of Democracy) argues that global problems can best be addressed by a targeted increase in deliberative democracy and citizen action. But the U.S. is currently marked by a decline in civic engagement, Levine notes, resulting largely from structural changes since the mid-20th century that have eroded many working-class organizations. Wielding an impressive command of research and statistics, as well as finer points of moral and political philosophy, Levine’s discussion of the benefits and contours of public engagement draw on lucid analogies and real-world examples (like the annual budget summits convened by Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams, which empowered groups of citizens to deliberate on an area of central import to the whole community). Throughout, the message is that deliberative action among diverse networks of citizens goes beyond injecting public influence into the formal policy apparatus. The necessary goal, Levine writes, “is to democratize the whole process of shaping our common world.” Free market libertarians and others wary of civic engagement–especially where it impinges on market forces or the operation of business–will raise objections, although Levine anticipates these arguments to some degree. Broad in scope yet eminently practical, this book should be an enduring contribution to the study of democratic theory and social action.” -Publishers Weekly

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