What changes in state power must occur for commoning to flourish as a legal form of self-provisioning and governance? What does the success of the commons imply for the future of the state as a form of governance?
My colleagues and I at the Commons Strategies Group puzzled over such questions last year and decided we needed to convene some serious minds to help shed light on them. With the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, we convened a Deep Dive workshop on February 28 through March 2, 2016, called “State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship.”
Now a report that synthesizes and distills our conversations is available. The executive summary of the report is published below (and also here). The full 50-page report can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
Participants in the workshop addressed such questions as: Can commons and the state fruitfully co-exist – and if so, how? Can commoners re-imagine “the state” from a commons perspective so that its powers could be used to affirmatively support commoning and a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance? Can “seeing like a state,” as famously described by political scientist James C. Scott, be combined with “seeing like a commoner” and its ways of knowing, living and being? What might such a hybrid look like?
These issues are becoming more important as neoliberalism attempts to reassert the ideological supremacy of “free market” dogma. As a feasible, eco-friendly alternative, commoning is often seen as posing a symbolic or even a political and social threat. It is our hope that the report will help inaugurate a broader discussion of these issues.
Silke Helfrich and Heike Loeschmann deserve much credit for helping to organize the event, with assistance from Michel Bauwens. I wrote the report, and Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel have produced a beautiful publication and webpages. Thanks, too, to the workshop participants who shared their astute insights.
It was 1858 in San Fransisco, California. Gold had been discovered at nearby Sutter’s Mill just ten years before. Initial planning for the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was underway, and Congress had recently authorized funding for any company which could ensure stage coach delivery of mail from St. Louis to San Francisco in less than 25 days.
Following San Fransisco’s first great fire of 1849 and a series of destructive fires in the early 1850s, the booming port town formed a volunteer Fire Department and, in 1858, installed its first fire hydrants.
As one San Fransisco museum describes, “The men comprising the first volunteers of the Fire Department consisted of some of the most influential men of the community. None were so high in office or so proud of position that he was not honored by a membership in the early fire brigade.”
While the volunteers put pride aside when a fire was particularly serious, individual fire companies were notoriously competitive, always seeking to put “firs water” on a fire – a competition which “led to many physical combats, and some of the fights reached riot proportions.”
Following the alarm bells one afternoon, the poorly under-manned Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 was falling behind, much to the mockery of rivals Manhattan No. 2 and Howard No. 3. A fifteen year old child from a locally prestigious family saw the Knickerbocker’s plight while walking home from school. The teen immediately jumped into action, helping to man the fire truck’s ropes and shouting, “Come on, you men! Everybody pull and we’ll beat ‘em!”
The teen was no man. She was Lillie Coit, who continued to play an important role to Company No. 5 and San Fransisco firefighters for the rest of her life.
As a woman, she never officially occupied the same role as her male counterparts. She was elected an “honorary” member of the Knickerbockers in 1863 and is commonly referred to as the “patroness” of San Fransisco’s volunteer fire companies. But throughout her youth, she played an active role in the company – always dashing off at the sound of the alarm and otherwise engaging in activities unseemly for a young lady of her standing.
As an adult she was known for having a number of shocking habits such as wearing trousers, smoking cigars, and gambling. Stories say she often dressed as man in order to participate in the latter activity. And she always remained involved and supportive of her beloved fire company.
Upon her death in 1929, Coit left one-third of her fortune to San Fransisco, “to be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved.”
In 1933, those funds were used to build the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, which stands 64 m tower atop Telegraph Hill. A notable sight along a city’s skyline. And while the story is said to be apocryphal, one can’t help notice the similarity between the tower’s design and the popular story: that in honor of the remarkable Lillie Coit, the tower is shaped like the nozzle of a fire hose.
I am fleeing the country heading to Augsburg, Germany for the 2016 Summer Institute of Civic Studies. It is aimed at participants from Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, but they are convening this summer in Germany (thanks to the generosity of the DAAD). The other organizers are my friends Dr. Tetyana Kloubert (Augsburg) and Prof. Karol Soltan (Maryland). I’ll paste the syllabus below; it may be interesting because of its European focus. It ends with a practical training on nonviolent resistance that should be particularly illuminating when experienced right after relatively abstract discussions of democracy and civic society. I will unfortunately miss that part because I’m coming back to the US on August 29, and I will resume blogging then.
Monday, July 25 9:00 – 9:30
9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
Introductions and Inspirations
Framing Statement for the Summer Institute
Seamus Heaney, “In the Republic of Conscience”
Images: fist of Otpor and open hand from Chandigarh
Vaclav Havel, Address at Wroclaw University (December 21, 1992)
Myroslav Marynovych “Civic virtues after Maidan”
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
Democracies: Constitutional, Illiberal and Façade
Fareed Zakaria “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” (1997)
Viktor Orban’s Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University and Student Camp (2014)
Attila Agh, “De-Europeanization and De-Democratization Trends in ECE” (2015)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
I. The main theoretical debate of civic studies: JürgenHabermas vs. Elinor Ostrom
1. Venue: Negotiation and Deliberation
Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes (2d ed.), Chapter 1 “Don’t Bargain Over Positions” pp. 3-14.
Archon Fung, “Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design Choices and Their Consequences” in Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 11, No. 3. (September 2003), pp. 338-67.
Bernard Manin “Deliberation: Why We Should Focus on Debate Rather Than Discussion.”
17:30 – 19:00 Reception at the Augsburg University
Tuesday, July 26 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
2. Theorist: Jürgen Habermas
James Finlayson (2005), Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (Chapters 1, 2, 4) pp. 1-27, 47-61
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
3. Key concepts: Pluralism
Peter J. Boettke et al. (2014), “Polycentricity, Self-governance, and the Art & Science of Association,” in The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 28, Issue 3 , 311-335
Leszek Kolakowski (1990), “How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist”, Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago, 1990).
Isaiah Berlin (1988), “On the Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
4. Theorist: Elinor Ostrom and the commons
Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolsak, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern (2002), “The Drama of the Commons”, in Drama of the Commons, ed. Elinor Ostrom, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, pp. 3-26
Elinor Ostrom (1996), “Covenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources”, in The Constitution of Good Societies, ed. Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen L. Elkin, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 23–38
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (invited speaker)
Wednesday, July 27 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
5. Key concepts: Social capital
Robert D. Putnam, “Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance,” in Ravitch and Viteritti, eds., Making Good Citizens, pp. 58-95;
Jean L. Cohen, “American Civil Society Talk,” in Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal, pp. 55-85
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
II. Civic action and reflection: Education and Civic Education
1. Key concepts: Civic Education – The person in development as a citizen
Benson, Scales, Hamilton, and Sesma (2006), “Positive Youth Development: Theory, Research, and Applications”, in Theoretical Models of Human Development, ed. R. M. Lerner (Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 1., 6th ed.), pp. 894-941
Joel Westheimer and Joseph E. Kahne (2004), “Educating the ‘Good Citizen’: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals”, in Political Science and Politics, 37,2, pp. 241–247
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
2. Key concepts: Civic Education – Principles of German political (adult) education: Bildung and Mündigkeit as core categories
Hendrik Bohlin (2008), “Bildung and Moral Self-Cultivation in Higher Education: What Does it Mean and How Can it be Achieved?“, in Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table.
Zeuner, Christine (2013), “From workers education to societal competencies: approaches to a critical, emancipatory education for democracy”, in: European journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 4, 2, p. 139-152
Martha Friedenthal-Haase (1996), “The Knowledge-Base of Democracy”, in Democracy and Adult Education, ed. J. Jug et al., Frankfurt am Main et al: P. Lang, pp. 133-138.
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (invited speaker)
Thursday,
July 28 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
3. Theorist: Freire
Myles Horton and Paulo Freire (1990), We Make the Road by Walking, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 115-138
Paulo Freire (2000 [1970]), Pedagogy of the oppressed, New York: Continuum (Chapter 1. The justification for a pedagogy of the oppressed, Chapter 2. The “banking” concept of education as an instrument of oppression)
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
4. Re-education and Rethinking the Past
James F. Tent (1984), Mission on the Rhine : reeducation and denazification in American-occupied Germany, University of Chicago Press (Chapter: From Reeducation to Reorientation).
Richard von Weizsäcker (8. Mai 1985): „Zum 40. Jahrestag der Beendigung des Krieges in Europa und der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft“ (English translation)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
III. Civic theorists respond to modernity
5. James C. Scott
James C. Scott Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, introduction and chapter 3, chapter 9.
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (proposed by participants)
Friday, July 29
9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
6. Modernity after Auschwitz
Theodor Adorno (2003), Can one live after Auschwitz? : a philosophical reader, Stanford University Press (Chapter 2: Education after Auschwitz)
Theodor Adorno (with Hellmut Becker): Education for Maturity and Responsibility
Daniel Lévy, Natan Sznaider (2005), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1-39.
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
7. Theorist: Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (1967): On Revolution. Excerpts.
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
8. Roberto Mangabeira Unger and radical modernism
Roberto Unger, False Necessity, Chapter 1 (1-40)
Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized, “A Manifesto” (263-77)
Weekend : Free for private activities; optional sightseeing programs will be available
Monday, August 1, 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
9. Theorist: Max Weber
Max Weber (1965), Politics as a vocation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press (Max Weber (1988 [1919]), Politik als Beruf, in ders.: Gesammelte Politische Schriften, hrsg. von Johannes Winckelmann, 5. Aufl., Tübingen: Mohr, pp. 505-560 – excerpts)
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
10.Theorist: Edmund Burke
Robert Nisbet (1986), Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-46
William Ophuls (with A. Stephen Boyan) (1992), Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, New York: Freemann (Chapter 8), pp. 222-249.
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
11. Theorist: Friedrich von Hayek
Friedrich Hayek (1960), The Constitution of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, (Chapter 1, Chapter 4 and Postscript)
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (proposed by participants)
Tuesday, August 2, 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
IV. Constitutional Democracy
1. Key concepts: Constitutional Patriotism
Müller, Jan-Werner (2008), A General Theory of Constitutional Patriotism, in International Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 72-95.
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
2. Key concepts: Thinking constitutionally
The Federalist Papers, ? 10 (The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, November 23, 1787), ? 51 (The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments, February 8, 1788).
Stephen Elkin (2004), “Thinking Constitutionally: The Problem of Deliberative Democracy”, in Social Philosophy and Policy, 21, pp. 39-75.
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
3. Key concepts: Thinking about constitutions
Democracy Reporting International: Ukraine (2014), “The Promise and the Risk of Constitutional Reforms”, Briefing Paper 46, March 2014
Ackerman, Bruce (2000), “The New Separation of Powers”, 634-69, 685-94, 712-25.
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (proposed by participants)
Wednesday, August 3, 9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
4. Key concepts: Corruption
John Ackerman (2014), “Rethinking the International Anti-Corruption Agenda”, in American University International Law Review, 29, 2, pp. 293-333.
Creative Union TORO Ukraine and the UNCAC Coalition (2011), UN Convention against Corruption. Civil Society Review. Ukraine 2011
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
V. Toward a broader civic perspective
Venue: Civic Studies for European Union
Weiler, J.H.H. (2011): On the political and legal DNA of the Union and the Current European Crisis
Dahrendorf (1997), After 1989: morals, revolution, and civil society, Oxford (15. From Europe to EUrope: A Story of Hope, Trial and Error.)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
2. Global Civic Work
James Nickel, “Human Rights,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/)
Andrew Clapham (2006), Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors, Oxford University Press, pp. 535-48 (Section 11.1 “Dignity”)
James Speth (2008), The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Yale University Press, pp. 199-216
United Nations Organisations (1948), Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Earth Charter Commission (2000) The Earth Charter
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation (invited speaker)
Thursday, August 4
9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
VI. Democracy from below
1. Venue: Community organizing and popular education
John Gaventa (1980), Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, pp. 3-32
Saul Alinsky (1969 [1946]), Reveille for Radicals, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 76-81; 85-88; 92-100, 132-5, 155-158
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
2. Venue: Social movements
Charles Tilly (2004), Social Movements, London: Paradigm Publisher, pp. 1768-2004
Marshall Ganz (2004), “Why David Sometimes Wins: Strategic Capacity in Social Movements,” in Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion, ed. Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.177-98.
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
3. Venue: Social Movements in the Shadow of Gandhi
Bhikhu Parekh (2001), Gandhi, Oxford University Press, (Chapter 4 “Satyagraha”) pp. 51-62
Timothy Garton Ash (2009), “Velvet Revolution: The Prospects,” New York Review of Books, December 3
16:30 – 17:30 Evening Presentation
Workshop: Nonviolent civic strategies (Dmytro Potekhin)
Friday, August 5
9:30 – 11:00 Morning session
Workshop: Nonviolent civic strategies (Dmytro Potekhin)
11:30 – 13:00 Noon Session
Workshop: Nonviolent civic strategies (Dmytro Potekhin)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Afternoon session
Workshop: Nonviolent civic strategies (Dmytro Potekhin)
17:30 – 22:00
Summary of the Summer Institute: Perspectives and Challenges in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Germany in international comparison
Farewell Evening – Social gathering
At Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life, we are working with State Rep. Jonathan Hecht and Healthy Democracy to bring the Citizens Initiative Review to our commonwealth this summer. I’ve blogged about the project already, but this 2-minute video by Suffolk student intern Elainy Mata is both more fun and more informative.
As many of you know, NCDD’s 2014 conference in Reston, VA had more students and young people in attendance than any conference before it, and it made a huge difference – the energy and fresh thinking that young people bring to our conferences and to our field was and is inspiring and indispensable. NCDD continues to be committed to cultivating the next generation of leaders in our field, and that’s why we are aiming to have even more youth and student attendees at NCDD 2016 this Oct. 14th-16th in Boston!
As part of that commitment, we are pleased to announce that NCDD is offering a super-low student registration rate of $250 (that’s $200 off!), and we have opened up our application for NCDD 2016 scholarships. These scholarships are intended to help young people in D&D and other deserving applicants who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend by offsetting the costs of travel, housing, and registration as needed.
The scholarship application can be found at www.surveymonkey.com/r/NCDD2016-scholarship-app.
But we need our NCDD members’ help encouraging the promising and engaged young people and students in this field to attend the conference! Do you work with an outstanding young person who is passionate about the work of dialogue and deliberation? Are you connected to a student who is working to bridge divides in their community? Make sure to tell them about NCDD 2016 and encourage them to register today!
Also, please note that we are offering group discounts to incentivize teachers and other practitioners who are bringing groups of students or youth from their programs or organizations. The group rate will be worked out on a case-by-case basis, but the more 
people in your group, the bigger the discount! Contact our Conference Manager Courtney Breese at courtney@ncdd.org with questions about group rates.
We also encourage you to recommend young people you think NCDD should support to our Youth Engagement Coordinator Roshan Bliss at roshan@ncdd.org so we can reach out and invite them directly.
Lastly, don’t forget that NCDD offers a discounted Students & Young Professionals membership rate of just $30/year that is designed to make NCDD membership more affordable for students, recent graduates, and folks 35 and under still getting established in the field. We encourage you to learn more and sign up to become a member today at www.ncdd.org/join.
We are looking forward to another great intergenerational conference, and we’re counting on our members to help us make sure the best and brightest are there. We can’t wait to see you all in October!
In his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, Samuel Clemens – better known as Mark Twain – describes his changing relationship with the great river.
He grew up along the Mississippi, working as a typesetter and dreaming of some day becoming a steamboat pilot. In fact, his chosen pen name, “Mark Twain” is a steamboat cry, indicating a safe depth of 2 fathoms. In his early 20s, Twain was taken on as an apprentice pilot and he spent the next two years learning everything there was to know about the Mississippi.
He describes a magnificent sunset which left him bewitched in when steam boating was new to him, and he describes the awe he felt at the secret knowledge he was learning to glean from the river’s captivating surface.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book ‐ a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilotʹs eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dread‐earnest of reading matter.
Twain knew something the “uneducated passenger” didn’t know. He could see more and feel more as his knowledge of the river deepened. But, eventually, something changed:
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and has come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!
…No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beautyʹs cheek mean to a doctor but a ʺbreakʺ that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown think with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesnʹt he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesnʹt he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
Gaining full knowledge of the river removed the mystery, removed the wonder. The river was no long a thing a beauty – it was an object to be analyzed factually.
Interestingly, Henry Thoreau expressed something similar as he worried about his work as a surveyor and found himself complicit in defining the wilderness of land as private property:
I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapped in my mind’s eye – as, indeed, on paper – as so many men’s wood-lots, and am aware when I walk there that I am at any given moment passing from such a one’s wood-lot to another’s. I fear this particular dry knowledge may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly. No thicket will seem so unexplored now that I know that a stake and stones may be found in it.
As Kent Ryden describes in Landscape With Figures, “In the end, Thoreau viewed his profession of surveyor with a profound and deep-seated ambivalence, in that it simultaneously sustained and destroyed the visual, spiritual, emotional, and imaginative relationships with landscape and nature that he valued so highly.”
Knowledge has practical purpose and value, both Twain and Thoreau seem to find, but it also destroys something greater; knowledge is incompatible with beauty and wonder.
I don’t believe I could disagree with that sentiment more strongly.
In his autobiography, A Mathematician’s Apology, the brilliant G. H. Hardy wrote: “It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.”
Physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek has written extensively on the beauty of natural laws, which he argues is a sentiment with deep historical roots in physics:
The nineteenth-century physicist Heinrich Hertz once described his feeling that James Clerk Maxwell’s equations, which depict the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism, “have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser…even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.” Not long after, Albert Einstein called Niels Bohr’s atomic model “the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.” More recently, the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, describing his discovery of new laws of physics, declared, “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” Similar sentiments are all but universal among modern physicists.
Both Twain and Thoreau describe the loss of beauty through a process of learning, but more importantly, through a process of objectification. Through their respective work they come to see nature as a thing to be conquered, an object which can be possessed. They come to view the river or the woods through completely utilitarian means. They domesticate the natural world.
Real knowledge isn’t about that. It is about understanding the world, about reading the wonderful book as Mark Twain so eloquently describes; but ultimately it’s about constantly unlocking deeper levels of mystery, finding new layers of awe.
Knowledge builds beauty; the book never ends.
