(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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You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. — President Ronald Reagan, Normandy, June 6, 1984

From World War I until recently, leaders of both major political parties routinely claimed that the United States was a democracy. Politicians often called us “the greatest democracy on earth” and asserted that the purpose of both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War had been to defend democracy. The main debate was whether we had attained a democracy or were still struggling to be one, with the strongest skeptics on the left. A perennial argument pitted left critics–who asserted that our domestic and foreign policies were anti-democratic–against conservative defenders of our credentials as a real democracy.

This consensus about goals has broken down because the hard right now says that we were not founded as a democracy and should not be one.

For example, when Rush Limbaugh reprinted Reagan’s 1984 Normandy speech on his website, he ended the long excerpt just before the invocation of “democracy” that I quoted above. (The words “BREAK TRANSCRIPT” mark where that passage would start.) If the sainted President Reagan said that our men died at Normandy for democracy, Limbaugh would have to agree. But a current right-wing talking point holds that we are a republic and not a democracy. So Reagan’s speech is truncated.

I have been involved in writing a new voluntary framework for state social studies standards. A conservative blogger named Shane Vander Hart reviewed a draft, writing, “I noticed that on pg. 29 it is mentioned we live in a constitutional democracy when in fact we live in a constitutional republic. It is troubling that those writing this document couldn’t get something as basic as that right.”

It is debatable whether the United States is a democracy, but you aren’t making a factual error if you use the word that was preferred by virtually all 20th century presidents.

First of all, even if the US was not founded as a democracy, the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th amendments to the Constitution, the state constitutions, two centuries of legislation, and Lincoln’s interpretation of the Civil War as a struggle for government “by the people” have made us a representative government on the basis of one person/one vote, which is a reasonable definition of a democracy.

Second, it is not clear that the founders intended a republic in contrast to a democracy, if we look past the words (whose meanings vary depending on the writer and the time) and think instead about the underlying ideas.

Madison wrote of a “pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He was thinking of Athens and other Greek city states. He did not recommend this model: “Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

Note that Madison says “such democracies,” referring to the “pure” type, which is small and direct. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of other types of democracy. He calls his own preferred form of government a republic, which is (a) representative and (b) very large. He considers both features as definitive and essential to success. If a republic’s representatives were directly chosen by the people on the basis of one person/one vote (as ours are today), that would fit most definitions of a “democracy,” although it would no longer be the pure and original type. It would still meet Aristotle’s criterion that “the partnership (koinonia) of democracy is based on numerical equality” (NE 1241b). Thus we could say that Madison co-founded a republic that became a democracy with the passage of the 17th Amendment.

Jefferson is more favorable than Madison to popular rule. He does not use the word “democracy,” but “the core of [his] thought is a project for democracy.”* Like Madison, he prefers the word “republic,” but he uses it to name the very system that Madison would call a democracy:

Indeed, it must be acknowledged, that the term republic is of very vague application in every language. Witness the self-styled republics of Holland, Switzerland, Genoa, Venice, Poland. Were I to assign to this term a precise and definite idea, I would say, purely and simply, it means a government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority; and that every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens. — Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816

His idea of a republic is not a constitutional system, because the majority not only governs but establishes the rules and can alter them at will. Jefferson goes on to say that a real republic must be small, and he cites the New England township as a model. But, he adds, one can mix the “ingredient of the direct action of the citizens” with other ingredients to produce hybrid systems at larger scales. They may incorporate elected or appointed offices as well as popular votes. “The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism.”

Madison and Jefferson jointly founded the Democratic-Republican Party in 1791. It was often simply called the Republican Party, although the terminology was unofficial and varied. It rested on democratic/republican societies, which variously chose the words “Democratic,” “Republican,” “True Republican,” “Constitutional,” “United Freeman,” “Patriotic,” “Political,” “Franklin,” and “Madisonian” in their names. They were the opponents of the Federalists. Once the French Revolution turned bloody, “the very name ‘Democracy’ was used as part of the Federalist attack on [these] societies. ‘Democracy’ was carefully distinguished from ‘republicanism,’ and the former was equated with French Jacobinism. A poem entitled ‘Democracy,’ published in 1794, linked democracy with lawless confusion.”** Yet the Federalists were badly beaten in the election of 1800, and the party that Madison and Jefferson founded dominated American politics for a generation.

The word “democracy” still had partisan overtones in Lincoln’s day. Although deeply democratic himself, he often often used the word pejoratively to mean rule by his opponents, the capital-D Democrats. His Republican successor Teddy Roosevelt, however, called our system a “democratic republic” in his inaugural address of 1905. That was about the time when a bipartisan consensus formed that our aspirations ought to be democratic.

Today, we have a mixed form of government with a strong element of popular or majority rule.  Jefferson would call that element “republican”; many people today would call it “democratic.” No one, then or now, would assert that we have a pure democracy. In the social studies framework, we called our system a “constitutional democracy” to indicate that the powers of the people are checked. The government is not in “direct and constant control by the citizens.” [Likewise, the powers of the federal government are limited.]

How did this semantic ambiguity arise? The word “democracy” is of Greek origin. It literally means “rule of (or by) the people.” One could hold that the sovereign power in the US is the people–and hence we have a democracy in the etymological sense. Like all old words, however, “democracy” has accumulated resonances beyond its etymological origins. It may invoke the Greek city-states (whether seen as ideals or as disasters) or mass modern societies.

“Republic” comes from the Latin. My Latin dictionary says that “publicus” means “belonging to the people.” Thus “res publica” means the “thing belonging to the people,” whereas “democracy” is the “people’s rule.” If there is a significant difference in the etymological sense of these words, it is the difference between something that the people have (a republic) versus a power they wield (democracy). A better translation than “the public thing” is “commonwealth.” The words “republic” and “commonwealth” invoke the Roman regime before Caesar Augustus, the Cromwellian state, the early American colonies, and the ante-bellum US system. The meaning of “republic,” however, is malleable, because it depends on which features of the Roman republic and its descendents one considers definitive.

Ultimately, the United States can be called republican and democratic. The two words have interestingly different origins and resonances but are not sharply distinguishable. Nor do we have either a pure republic/democracy. Some limitations on the republic/democratic element are wise, but our current system is flawed by most standards. Although our democratic/republican aspirations are only partly realized, they remain beacons.

*Michael Hardt,  “Jefferson and Democracy, ” American Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Mar., 2007). **Sheldon Foner, The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Greenwood, 1976). p. 25

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Alumni of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies have designed a series of discussions at Frontiers of Democracy about mass incarceration, juries, and citizenship. The discussants include Andrew Nurkin (Executive Director of Princeton AlumniCorps, Princeton), Peter Pihos (doctoral candidate, University of Pennsylvania) and Joshua Miller (Philosophy professor at Morgan State)–all of whom teach in prisons. I will try to write more about their impressive and troubling thoughts after the conference ends. Meanwhile, we were treated to a virtual discussion among three of my friends on the topic of the jury. The discussants are Josh Miller, Albert Dzur (Bowling Green), and John Gastil (Penn State). The whole thing is worth watching, but if you are pressed for time, listen to and think about the questions they pose at the very end (minute 20).

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About 150 people are gathering at Tufts for Frontiers of Democracy 2013: Innovations in Civic Practice, Theory, and Education.

In my introductory remarks (below the fold), I will explain how the conference draws together separate streams of discussion and organizing, and I will propose a conceptual framework for our common work.

As organizers of this conference, we generally try to avoid doing a lot of talking, but my colleagues have prevailed on me—or indulged me—to make some introductory remarks about who has gathered here this weekend and for what purpose.

I’d ask you to consider the conference as a tree. That’s not the most original metaphor, but it will work.

Its deepest roots are the individual stories of the 150 participants, every one different, but each one planted in its own rich soil of community, of personal and collective history and memory, and of civic practice and experience.

For instance, people have been meeting to talk about their common problems and aspirations for thousands of years in every inhabited continent. Since the 1960s, there has been something of a boom of explicit, organized, deliberative processes and experiments—deliberation that you can see and name; deliberation at a human scale. In 2002, many of the groups that had been helping to organize these citizen deliberations, both in the US and overseas, came together at Airlie House in Virginia and launched the Deliberative Democracy Consortium to promote research and learning, networking, and advocacy. Matt Leighninger directs the DDC today.

People have also been teaching the next generation to be good citizens for thousands of years, and universities have been operating in our societies for more than a millennium. But since the 1980s, there has been something of a renaissance of explicit efforts to strengthen the civic role of higher education. In 2006 and 2007, a group of highly experienced academics and civic leaders from outside academia met to share their work and discuss the potential of higher education to enhance American democracy as a whole. They launched a consortium called The Democracy Imperative, or TDI for short, to connect practitioners to academics and convene people who approach “educating for democracy” in diverse ways: intergroup dialogue, interdisciplinary problem-based learning, social justice, Sustained Dialogue, conflict resolution, community organizing, community-based participatory research, and so on. TDI was formed to bring these (and others) together so that they would not feel alone on their campuses. Today, Nancy Thomas directs that effort.

In 2012, Nancy came to CIRCLE and Tisch College at Tufts. CIRCLE, which I direct, studies the civic learning and engagement of young Americans and tries to focus on those not in college or on a path to college. The forms of practice that we tend to study include civic education in middle schools and high schools and in community-based organizations that serve working-class young people.

Meanwhile, Tisch College aims to prepare all Tufts students be lifelong active citizens and creates an enduring culture of active citizenship on this campus. CIRCLE and Tisch College are your hosts today, and Tisch College supports this conference generously. Kathy O’Connor and Charlotte Ringle, who work for Tisch, are the dedicated and talented logistical leaders of the conference.

In 2008, DDC and TDI teamed up to organize a conference called “No Better Time” at the University of New Hampshire. I was just a participant, so I can say it was a great success—perhaps in part because the political moment was optimistic and propitious in 2008, but No Better Time also drew a great group of people for an engaging format.

Just months before “No Better Time,” seven scholars from a variety of disciplines had met at the University of Maryland. They all shared the view that mainstream scholarship is not useful to citizens—people who want to improve or even co-create their worlds. It’s not only that theory is disconnected from practice, but the prevailing theories themselves are misguided. Mainstream scholarship ignores human agency and creativity. It separates fact from value in harmful ways. It can tell you, for example, that the odds of starting a social movement are low—but not what you should do if you want to start a good one.

The scholars who gathered at Maryland included the late Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Jane Mansbridge, the current president of the American Political Science Association, and our friend Harry Boyte, who is following this conference from South Africa. The whole group wrote a manifesto entitled The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for the Future.

This manifesto led to a concrete experiment. Since 2008, Karol Soltan from the University of Maryland and I—both co-authors of the original statement—have been trying to practice the new civic politics by co-teaching an annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts. It is an intense, theoretically rich academic exercise that has now involved about 100 people who have come from Bhutan, Singapore, China, Mexico, South Africa, and numerous other countries and backgrounds to debate civic renewal. Many are here today, and some have organized the “track” on Civic Theory, which has a focus on prisons and crime.

In 2008, the Summer Institute culminated in a public panel that C-SPAN covered on cable. The next year, we decided to join forces with DDC and TDI to repeat the “No Better Time” conference but at Tisch College instead of UNH. And we have held some version of a public conference each year. It has gradually turned into Frontiers.

Meanwhile, The Center for Engaged Democracy has been holding summer institutes for four years. Based at Merrimack College, the Center acts as a hub for people who run or want to start certificates, minors, and majors focused on civic and community engagement, broadly defined. The Center’s 2013 annual meeting has been taking place here, and many participants are sticking around for Frontiers. Dan Butin leads the Center.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation is an association of more than 2,000 members who practice and promote deliberative democracy. Sandy Heierbacher leads that effort. One of their signature methods is to hold meet-ups or regional gatherings, one of which has been happening here, as part of Frontiers 2013, so NCDD is another root of our tree.

Earlier this year federal program, the United States Institute on Civic Engagement, selected The Center for Civic Engagement at Miami University Hamilton to host student leaders from the countries of Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. They are here today and represent yet another root.

These roots have come together to support a pretty impressive trunk. But we could certainly ask what else should be included.

We could press for more demographic diversity and representativeness—we do not necessarily reflect our communities. This year, Frontiers focuses especially on women and gender inequality in politics.

We could also ask about strategies and forms of work that may be missing. Civic education, broadly defined; deliberative democracy and dialogue; and civic scholarship are all well represented here. If you think those are all the most important and relevant forms of civic work, you can be satisfied. I personally believe that a many other forms are also important—and some are also represented here even though I haven’t named them yet.

For example, many people collaborate to manage and strengthen public resources: watersheds and forests, public libraries, cyberspace. They may talk and deliberate, but that isn’t really the heart of their work, which is more about management and co-production.

Many people are building alternative economic institutions—land trusts, community development corporations and social enterprises—that are more governable and accountable than transnational firms.

Many people struggle for political reforms and rights, not only in Egypt and the Palestinian Territories but also right here in the US.

Many people are involved in strengthening the civic health or capacity of communities by organizing citizens into effective groups and networks. These may not be primarily spaces for discussion. Service, belonging, and advocacy may be more central to their work.

Many people are trying to improve the media environment and serve what the Knight Foundation calls “the information needs of communities.” They are creating innovative software, formats, and organizations, some of them for-profit. Again, those people may deliberate and may educate, but the heart of their work is elsewhere.

I have begun to offer a list, and I could go on. Any list requires some kind of conceptual framework. You should be able to explain what deep principles define your list and encourage you to include some things and omit others. I do not expect my own conceptual framework to be shared by everyone who has gathered here today. On the contrary, debate about our frameworks is essential and exciting. One of the reasons that we need theory as well as practice is that we must be able to define what we are for. I’ll tell you my own framework in about one minute, not to settle the matter, but to provoke discussion.

I think that good citizens deliberate. By talking and listening to people who are different from themselves, they enlarge their understanding, make themselves accountable to their fellow citizens, and build a degree of consensus.

But deliberation is not enough. People who merely listen and talk lack sufficient knowledge and experience to add much insight to their conversations; and talk alone rarely improves the world. Deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work—when citizens bring their experience of making things into their discussions, and when they take ideas and values from deliberation back into their work. Work is especially valuable when it is collaborative, when people make things of public value together. They are typically motivated to do so because they seek civic relationships with their fellow citizens, relationships marked by a degree of loyalty, trust, and hope. In turn, working and talking with fellow citizens builds and strengthens civic relationships, which are scarce but renewable sources of energy and power.

A combination of deliberation, collaboration, and civic relationships is the core of citizenship—in my personal view. If we had much more of this kind of civic engagement, we could address our most serious problems. Indeed, more and better civic engagement is a necessary condition of success; none of the available ideologies or bodies of expertise offers satisfactory solutions, which must emerge instead from a continuous cycle of talking, working, and building relationships.

Unfortunately, genuine civic engagement is in decline in the US and in many other countries, neglected or deliberately suppressed by major institutions and ideologies and by the prevailing culture. Our motivation to engage has not weakened, but we have lost institutionalized structures that recruit, educate, and permit us to engage effectively.

In fact, we face serious obstacles or deficits:

• Our political system is organized to favor professionally-led, well-funded interests instead of creative, deliberating communities and grassroots movements.
• Our major social policies are hostile to active civic participation. (For example, education is driven by standardized tests that experts write; public health depends on insurance companies and state bureaucracies rather than co-ops and community-based organizations.)
• Our voluntary associations no longer have the means to recruit millions of Americans and develop the skills and motivations to participate as active citizens.

• Our companies, because of their ability to withdraw investment, are virtually ungovernable by local authorities and communities.
• Our culture lacks positive and plausible descriptions of collective agency, although it provides many depictions of lone heroes and of apolitical groups of friends.
• Our news media generally overlook examples of deliberation and public work but relentlessly cover competition among professional politicians.
• Despite their commitments to political rights and their heritage of experiments with participatory democracy, liberals and progressives are enamored of expertise, command-and-control regulation, and redistributive politics to the exclusion of active citizenship.
• Despite their resistance to technocratic elites and their heritage of experiments with decentralization, conservatives are enamored of markets and negative liberties to the exclusion of active citizenship.
• Our schools and colleges offer inadequate civic education, distributed unjustly to favor the most advantaged students, with an emphasis on factual knowledge instead of civic skills.
• Our scholars in the social sciences and humanities produce an inadequate supply of knowledge relevant to active citizens (people who make moral and strategic judgments about how to improve the world directly).
• Our funders—in both the state and philanthropic sectors—provide negligible streams of money for participatory processes, as compared to the funds available for concrete services.

On the other hand (sooner or later, there had to be another hand), we live in period of civic innovation, when, against the odds, people are at work on demanding, sophisticated, and locally effective forms of civic engagement. I estimate that 1 million Americans are involved in such work each year. Certainly they have many kindred spirits in other countries. These people see the need for citizenship and are building impressive practices and models. Their work remains scattered and local because it is contrary to the mainstream of national policy. Civic engagement cannot achieve sufficient scale and power without reforms in our most powerful institutions. The way to achieve such reforms is to organize the most active citizens into a self-conscious movement for civic renewal.

We are not 1 million Americans. We are about 150 international people out of the 7 billion human beings on earth. But we are deeply rooted in networks and communities that reach many more. That is why our gathering is so important. Of course, neither the root nor the trunk of a tree reflects its whole value. Its value is manifest in what it produces, its branches, leaves, and fruits. So, having come together, we must now branch out and produce a new harvest of civic theory and civic practice.

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Philip Pettit and some others have been reviving the classical theory of republicanism as a theory that treats “domination” as the basic evil to be avoided. Domination often takes the form of arbitrary commands (“Do it because I say so”). Republican institutions, such as elections, legislatures, and judicial review, look attractive because they minimize domination, which is not the same as maximizing individual liberty.

I see the appeal, but it seems to me that non-domination is a virtue in a whole range of settings, some of which are not, and cannot really be, republics. Families and workplaces are two important examples. The remarkable American management theorist Mary Parker Follett (1868 – 1933) offers insights about how workplaces can reduce “arbitrary command” without becoming–or pretending to be–republics. For instance, in The Illusion of Final Authority (1926?), she writes that “Arbitrary command, the exaction of blind obedience, breaks initiative, discourages self-reliance, [and even the] lover’s self-respect.”

I think the solution is …  to depersonalise the matter, to unite those concerned in a study of the situation, to see what the situation demands, to discover the law of the situation and obey that. That is, it should not be a case of one person giving commands to another person. Whenever it is obvious that the order arises from the situation, the question of someone commanding and someone obeying does not come up. Both accept what the situation demands. Our chief problem then is not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover what the order shall be. When that is found the employee could issue direction to the employer as well as employer to employee. This often happens quite easy and naturally: my stenographer or my cook points out the law of the situation to me, and I, if I recognise it as such, accept it even although it may reverse some previous direction I have given.

An order then should always be given not as a personal matter, not because the man giving it wants the thing done, but because it is the demand of the situation. … But while people should not be asked to follow directions blindly, at the same time a subordinate should not have the attitude of carping, of finding fault, of thinking things from above wrong. The attitude most desirable for receiving orders is intelligent scrutiny, willingness to suggest changes, courtesy in the manner of suggesting, and at the same time no prejudice in regard to what is prescribed, but the assumption that the way prescribed is probably the best unless one can show some convincing reason to the contrary.

For what it’s worth, that would also be my philosophy of parenting. Parents should strive to create a climate and set of situations in which neither the giving of orders nor carping and whining are common; instead, the family will generally do what the situation demands. Note that this has little to do with democracy (equal political power), nor does it always require explicit reason-giving and deliberation; but it is non-domination.

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I don’t want to seem overly intellectual about the Zimmerman trial, because I am angry about it, but I can report a relevant discussion in today’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies seminar. We have been reading thousands of pages about democratic theory, community organizing, social movements, Gandhi, etc. One question that arose this morning is whether we ought to be discouraged. All this talk about bottom-up strategies for social change, and yet the available strategies seem rather unpromising in the aftermath of the trial.

One response is that the Trayvon Martin case actually became national news only because of the skillful and organized efforts of civil rights groups. Thus it is not the case that a news event occurred and we are unable to do much about it. People first made the killing into a news event. Then again, there may be something fundamentally disempowering about “news” defined as that which is new and transitory. In some ways, the important thing about the Martin case is that it is not news.

We had read John Dewey in The Public and its Problems:

“News” signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without coordination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds. Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests in procuring suppression, secrecy, and misrepresentation, we have an explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much of what passes as news. The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident, family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms of breaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the new par excellence, even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they happened last year or this, so completely isolated are they from their connections.

To be sure, many writers are busy placing the Martin case in broad historical perspective. Searching for Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin yields 233,000 web results, although the most prominent bear headlines like “Liberals shamelessly liken Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till.” These search results show that the broad context is being contested and debated. The question is whether that focus can be sustained in any useful way given the definition of “news” as what’s new. In other words, what happens after the Zimmerman trial moves down and then off news websites?

Another issue that are readings have addressed is the question of “root causes.” I would subscribe to the theory that racism was at the root of the Martin case. But it is a different question whether an effective citizen should generally confront causes understood to be “roots.” The word “radical” means a concern with roots; and traditionally, radicals have been the ones who advocate dealing with the root causes of problems: the control of property in Marxism, race in critical race studies. But Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that presuming an immutable connection between one underlying cause and its consequences limits human imagination and strategic options. This limitation was most clearly displayed in the record of the communist states, which abolished the one cause they saw as a “root,” private property, but hardly innovated at all when it came to politics. They borrowed their committees, secretaries and general secretaries, police forces and jails, newspapers, and even industrial corporations from the old regime. The results were predictably bad.

Unger would advocate brainstorming all the possible changes we could make in the light of the Zimmerman verdict and then acting where we have the best chance of success.  Confronting racism is one option, but not necessarily the most promising one. Abolishing “stand your ground laws” is another. But that’s just the beginning of the brainstorm. What about: investigatory grand juries whenever anyone is killed, truth and reconciliation commissions, restorative justice, enhanced rights to civil lawsuits in response to stand-your-ground killings, no guns for anyone, armed groups of black teenagers patrolling neighborhoods to deter crime, no jury trials, juries that are twice as large …?

Hope is a scarce but renewable resource, essential in times like the present. Unger would advise that limiting our responses to root causes is an obstacle to hope.

Finally, we discussed the question of nonviolence (having just read about Gandhi). My own view is that the line between violence and non-violence is not the essential question. The essential question is how to act effectively while setting strict limits on one’s means of action, because otherwise we tend to escalate until the results are tragic. The rule, “I will not cause physical harm to you even if you harm me” is not a moral imperative all on its own. (Physically harming someone lightly is not as cruel as financially ruining them.) But nonviolence creates a relatively bright line that prevents unplanned escalation, which is almost always disastrous.

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