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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dzur, Albert W., author.
Title: Democracy inside : participatory innovation in unlikely places / Albert W. Dzur.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018009284 | ISBN 978–0–19–065866–3 (hard cover) | ISBN 978–0–19–065867–0 (pbk.) | ISBN 978–0–19–065868–7 (updf) | ISBN 978–0–19–065869–4 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Group decision making. | Political participation. | Democracy. | Democracy and education. | Education and state—Decision making. | Education and state—Citizen participation. | Restorative justice—Decision making. | Restorative justice—Citizen participation. | Municipal government—Decision making. | Municipal government—Citizen participation.
Classification: LCC HM746.D98 2018 | DDC 302.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009284 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Kiran and Neena
Preface
And now, methinks, this wider wood-path is not bad, for it admits of society more conveniently. Two can walk side by side in it in the ruts, aye, and one more in the horse-track.
Henry David Thoreau
Trails
It is hard to see the forest path in the fall just after the leaves come down, blown by cool winds. It is hard to see in winter on days when there is enough snow. It is hard to see, too, in early spring with the new grass and also after a summer storm washes mud and sand around. I know it is there, though, and I find it every time by moving along.
Democracy is hard to see sometimes too. It keeps getting covered up and we keep having to find it, together. It is in how we work, and talk, and live, though, as this book will show. Is it part of our nature? No. Is it everywhere the same? No. Does it make everything it touches better? No. Democracy is simply the sharing of power to handle collective problems. It takes many forms and can be both efficacious and fraught with compromise or indecision. At the moment, though, we seem to have lost hope in its possibilities; we are not able to find the path.
I want us to get a better grip on democracy, as a concept, because we often set either too low or too high a standard. In some high school and college government textbooks, democracy is achieved merely by following the rules, obeying the law, and showing up to vote (when we feel strongly enough, that is). In other, more philosophical conversations, democracy is attained only when certain cognitive, deliberative, or distributive demands are met that protect decision-making forums from public ignorance, strategic bargaining, and
resource inequalities. By contrast, I want to bring things down to earth: to specific places, routines, and above all to specific people in proximity to one another sharing tasks, information, and decisions. Democracy means sharing power to shape a common public life with others who are not the same as us. This is more demanding than rule-following, obedience, and voting, but it also differs from the philosophers’ standards.
Consent, legitimacy, sovereignty, and myriad other terms used in political theory can sound legalistic and formal, as if democracy were only about laws, regulations, and voting rules. Instead of the legal, regulative, and electoral, however, I want to stress the productive as being the vital core of democracy: we share tasks that constitute us as a reflective and democratic people— we produce education, justice, security, and more.1 We learn how to do this task-sharing productive activity well or poorly, consciously or not, in schools, workplaces, street corners, hospitals, courtrooms, and many other places. Cognition does not drive democratic work in democratic places; it follows it. Laws and rules help shape institutions that allow citizens to act, of course, but it is the action itself that makes them democratic.
Pessimism and abstraction pervade contemporary thinking about democracy, as we will discuss in Chapter 1. In academia, some worry about “oligarchic” and “neoliberal” democracy while others raise alarms about “populist” and “demotic” influence. Still others, as if seeking to shift from the world as we know it to the world as it could be, build sophisticated models for “minipublics” while fine-tuning procedures and deliberative rules. Outside the university, widespread vertical distrust of politics and politicians is common in advanced democracies, as is a pervasive lack of horizontal trust in each other as resources for long-term constructive social change.2
I think that pessimism, abstraction, and distrust are all deeply rooted in the non-participatory and professionally managed public world Americans live in, which we will survey in Chapter 2. Yes, we have social movements, but many civil society groups have become top-down hierarchical organizations that mobilize support, fundraise, and advocate narrowly for an otherwise unlinked membership population.3 Where once such groups tutored people in the practical communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills useful for effective civic participation, today they are managed by increasingly professionalized staff. Yes we have politics, but in government too, public institutions that could welcome, indeed require, citizen contributions simply do not. Courts, for example, once heard most cases through a jury trial made up of citizens acting—for a few days—as part of their government. Now only 1 to 4 percent of state and federal criminal cases reach the trial stage, with
the rest plea bargained or settled.4 Or consider the decline in the numbers of school boards from 200,000 in the 1930s to 20,000 today, shrinking the access points between community members and a vital democratic institution.5
We might suspect, and we wouldn’t be wrong, that the organization of modern life is unfriendly to democracy. Our institutions are fields of action, but so often they depress, thwart, and even repel citizen participation. We have good reason to be anxious about concentrations of power and nontransparency in our institutions, good reason to be distrustful and to seek to create wholly different models of democracy. Yet if we know where to look, we will see some powerful examples of democratic innovation that could serve as signposts, at least, for thinking of ways out of our current situation. Collective work in unassuming, everyday places is happening all around us and inviting us in, sometimes even when we don’t feel like it.
Rooms
Loathing of airbrushed, sparkle-toothed politicians presiding over public relations events masquerading as town meetings does not translate into fondness for bland, local democratic action. It should.
The photographer Joel Sternfeld traveled the country documenting locations where injustices occurred—murder, vehicular homicide, corporate and political criminality. Here are the camp remains stretched out under the open sky of Cody, Wyoming, where 110,000 Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II; here is the cozy leafy street in Queens where Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death while thirty-eight bystanders failed to come to her aid or call for help; here is the curve in a Los Angeles highway, winding past a neighborhood park toward the Angeles National Forest in the distance, a patch of road where Rodney King was pulled over by police officers in 1991 and savagely beaten. Then, at the very end of On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, after the acknowledgments, almost like an afterword and easy to miss, is a picture of an unassuming place where justice was made; a flawed place for flawed people.
The room is in a mosque on Central Avenue, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, famous for the six-day riot in 1965. A rust-colored pile carpet covers the floor, two mismatched couches and an overstuffed upholstered chair cluster along one corner in violation of feng shui, an ancient wall heater that looks like a cheese grater runs up one wall, fluorescent lights hum in a stained white spongeboard ceiling—you can almost see divots where bored people have tossed pencils up into it. Three feet below the ceiling, a cord with
Preface
a dividing cloth wrapped loosely around it is stretched diagonally across the room. The picture, taken at seated eye level from the far end, draws your eye into the warm barren expanse of rust carpet in the center. It is an ugly room, a room you want to get out of as soon as possible. But it was here, Sternfeld notes, that the deadly gang rivalry between the Crips and Bloods came to a halt. The deliberation that gang leaders held, seated in those grungy couches, eying that carpet, listening to the fluorescent lights, saved hundreds of lives in a truce lasting more than a decade.
Rooms like these help us open up a different future. We sit together side by side, we talk, we drink bad coffee, we wait, we listen, we talk some more. It is common to use the words “meeting” and “dialogue,” but in rooms like these we make things when we meet and talk. We make safer neighborhoods, we make parents of teenage boys less restless at night, we make emergency rooms and morgues and funeral homes less populated. These dingy rooms are where we find and express our democratic agency, even if we want to linger not on their dusty lumpy furniture gazing out over the rust-colored carpet. “Let’s do this,” I can hear the participants say, together, before eagerly releasing themselves out of the room into the streets made instantly more peaceful.
People
We are often told that there are some more capable, more knowledgeable, and more skillful at making decisions than others, and this is true up to a point. But nobody has ever found the formula or rulebook for doing the right thing at the right moment in the right way for the right reasons. The one thing that is essential, the ability to see others in their differences, similarities, and complexities, is exactly what is denied those who are least proximate to others and sealed off from sharing by their expertise or authority.
The democratic professionals we meet in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are working in the fields of education, criminal justice, and public administration. Many are situated in institutions such as schools, court complexes, and government agencies in which organizational pressures and professional incentives encourage hierarchical, bureaucratic, non- collaborative decision-making. Yet they push back against these pressures and are motivated to open up their domains— a classroom, police department, city manager’s office—to substantive participation by the sometimes nonprofessional and usually non-trained layperson. Real participation means sharing power to define what an institution is producing: education, justice, government. “Power” looks different in different contexts; in a classroom it
could be about making a scheduling decision or influencing what is served at lunch; in a prison it could be about taking part in a seminar on Plato; in a local government it could be about being part of a budgeting roundtable. Small or large, I see sharing tasks like these as integral to a more participatory democracy that brings institutional worlds closer to citizens and brings citizens closer to each other, not once every two or four years but routinely every day.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are based on a four-year qualitative research project, in which I interviewed more than fifty democratic innovators in these three fields and engaged in participant observation and site visits to better understand how and why they have opened their institutions to participation and how they seek to sustain and grow these practices. Drawing on extensive civic engagement networks connected to organizations devoted to democratic renewal, I found examples of participatory innovation throughout the United States in every region, in small and large cities, and in urban and rural areas. I have tried to embed the qualitative narratives of democratic professionals in a theoretical framework they themselves recognize as valid, drawing from the intellectual resources they indicate as relevant to their work while also seeking connections to a more general understanding of participatory democracy.
It would be a misunderstanding to view these reformers as role models and their institutional contexts as “best practices.” Democracy is something people work out together in open-ended, context-sensitive ways without following specific “gold standard” techniques. Playing, non-ironically, on the idea of “best practices” more than a few local governments use “meeting in a box” kits to help community members organize productive neighborhood gatherings.6 This pragmatic way of reaching disengaged citizens may be necessary, but it also risks trivializing democracy to think you can package it up and mail it out. The chapters to follow are not trying to provide a “democracy in a box.” Yet, they also want to appreciate that these sorts of small, sometimes silly techniques can be part of real attempts at sharing power. They alert students of democracy to the need to change the way we operate so as to recognize the value of such ground-level participatory innovations and to engage, constructively, in critique, evaluation, and support. Chapter 6 considers how the motivations that spark reformers and the barriers and openings to innovation they encounter inside institutions might be taken up as issues in democratic inquiry without mythologizing or de-mythologizing leading practitioners. The book’s conclusion reflects on the potential of the university in supporting horizontal and grounded forms of inquiry that serve as openings rather than barriers to democratic innovation.
Preface
If not “best practices,” then what? Maybe the best word is “pathways” or “trails” we can take, or not, shape into new directions, get lost and frustrated on while bitten by mosquitoes, feel close connection to what is most important, sometimes change our lives, or just return home muddy and tired. It is a folksy, organic image to be sure, but notice how many trails exemplify stigmergy, the self-organization of beings acting without a centralized command structure and without specific economic or self-interested motivations.7 In their making and in their use, trails bring people together in proximity in quasi-voluntary fashion—Thoreau’s “one more in the horse track.” None are the same but there is an isomorphism across different times and contexts. They can lead to valuable destinations but are also inherently valuable as one can learn about oneself and others and the world around well before any peak or vista or camp is reached. And then again, they may not; you know only by moving along.
What are you going to get out of this book? A little pressure, I hope, to look for participatory innovation where you live, and work, and travel. An invitation to reflect on your own and with others about ways you feel shut out of important problems and how you might begin to work your way in to solutions.
Acknowledgments
It is fitting that this book is a collective effort in practice as well as theory. More people have lent a hand than can be mentioned here, but I want to recognize a few for their help in shaping and sometimes also contesting the ideas presented here.
This book has benefited from discussions in welcoming academic environments at the universities of Canberra, Durham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Oslo, Sheffield, and Tromsø. Thanks are due to a number of colleagues abroad: Henrik Bang, Christopher Bennett, Thom Brooks, the late Nils Christie, John Dryzek, Antony Duff, Selen Ercan, Pamela Fisher, Vidar Halvorsen, and Carolyn Hendriks. Their engagement with this work has improved it immeasurably. Special thanks are due to Ian Loader and Richard Sparks for helping me better understand connections between democracy and criminal justice. Closer to home, I am grateful to Harry Boyte for many conversations about professionals, public work, and participatory democracy.
This research project owes much to supportive but never uncritical coconspirators at the Kettering Foundation—the “experiment that never stops experimenting.” I am indebted to Derek Barker, John Dedrick, Kim Downing, David Holwerk, the late Bob Kingston, Valerie Lemmie, David Mathews, and Stacie Molnar-Main, who have each said something, maybe more than once, that has made its way into this book.
For providing homes for my interviews with democratic innovators, and for terrific editorial guidance, thanks are due to colleagues at the Boston Review, The Good Society, The International Journal of Restorative Justice, and National Civic Review. I want to single out Ivo Aertsen and Estelle Zinsstag for their indefatigable support for creative and practical thinking about criminal justice reform.
This book could not have been written without the insights of democratic innovators. I want to especially acknowledge Lauren Abramson, Helen
Acknowledgments
Beattie, Vanessa Gray, Max Kenner, Kimball Payne, and Donnan Stoicovy. I want to thank them for welcoming me into their work lives, for their time, and for their devotion to the ongoing effort of humanizing and democratizing institutional worlds.
This book is dedicated to Kiran and Neena Dzur, a ray of light and a new hope.
Democracy Inside
Democratic Professionals as Agents of Change
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
Democratic Professionalism
Democratic professionals are reform-minded innovators working in education, journalism, criminal justice, healthcare, city government, and other fields. They are democratic professionals not because they do democracy professionally, but because they do professionalism democratically. They are democratizing specific parts of our public world that have become professionalized: our schools, newspapers, TV stations, police departments, courts, probation offices, prisons, hospitals, clinics, and government agencies, among others. They use their professional training, capabilities, and authority to help people in their fields of action solve problems together, and even more important, to recognize the kinds of problems they need to solve. They share previously professionalized tasks and encourage lay participation in ways that enhance and enable collective action and deliberation about major social issues inside and outside professional domains.
Professionalism, broadly understood, has important meanings and implications for individuals, groups, and society at large. To be a professional is to have a commitment to competence in a specific field of action— you pursue specialized skills and knowledge so you can act well in difficult situations. Professionals understand their work as having an important normative core: beyond simply earning a living, the work serves society somehow. Sociologists of the professions stress the ways occupations draw boundaries around certain tasks, claim special abilities to handle them, police the ways in which they are discharged, and monitor education and training. Democratic professionalism is an alternative to a conventional form of professionalism
I call social trustee professionalism, yet it is also different from some other approaches critical of professional power, which I call the radical critique.
The social trustee ideal emerged in the 1860s and held prominence for a century among traditional professions such as law and medicine as well as aspiring professions such as engineering and social work. It holds that professionals have a more general responsibility than just a fiduciary or function-specific obligation to their clients.1 Of course, professionals are obligated to competently perform their tasks, but they also have general responsibilities that stem from their social status, the trust clients place in them, and the market protection governments have permitted them through licensing and other regulations. As Talcott Parsons put it, “A full-fledged profession must have some institutional means of making sure . . . competence will be put to socially responsible uses.”2 For example, the medical profession heals people, but it also contributes to the larger social goals of curing disease and improving public health. And the legal profession, besides defending their clients’ rights, also upholds the social conception of justice.
Social trustee professionals may represent public interests in principle, but in fact this representation is very abstract. Serving “the community” is not seen by professionals as something that requires much say from diverse members of actual, present-day communities. Under the terms of the social trustee model, professionals serve the public through their commitment to high standards of practice, a normative orientation toward a sphere of social concern—doctors and health, lawyers and justice—and self-regulation. The model is held together on the basis of an economy of trust: the public trusts the professionals to self-regulate and determine standards of practice, while the professionals earn that trust by performing competently and adhering to the socially responsible normative orientation. Those public administrators, for example, who see themselves as social trustees assert quite straightforwardly that they are hired to manage issues for which they have specialized training—public budgeting, town planning, and the orchestration of service provision, among others. If their communities disapprove of the way they do their jobs, they can fire them, but true professionals do not need to listen to their communities.
A radical critique emerged in the 1960s, drawing attention to the ways professions can be impediments to the democratic expression of public interests rather than trustworthy representatives. Though aware of the benefits of modern divisions of labor that distribute tasks to different groups of people with specialized training for the sake of efficiency, productivity, and innovation, critics such as Ivan Illich and Michel Foucault worried about
task monopolies secured by professionals that block participation, shrink the space of democratic authority, and disable and immobilize citizens who might occupy that space.3
Professions shrink the space of democratic authority when they perform public purposes that could conceivably be done by laypeople—as doctors aid human welfare and criminal justice administrators serve needs for social order. Critics stressed that these services and products have public consequences: how they are done affects people not just as individuals but also as members of an ongoing collective. And sometimes professionals quite literally shrink the space of participation by deciding public issues in institutions, far from potential sites of citizen awareness and action. Think of how healthcare professionals promote certain kinds of treatment and healing over others and how criminal justice professionals construct complex anger management and life-skills programming for convicted offenders. Professionals can disable and immobilize because, in addition to taking over these tasks, their sophistication in, say, healing or sentencing makes people less comfortable with relying on their own devices for wellness and social order. Professions are professions by virtue of their utilization of abstract, specialized, or otherwise esoteric knowledge to serve social needs such as health or justice. The status and authority of professional work depend on the deference of nonmembers—their acknowledgment that professionals perform these tasks better than untrained others. But with deference comes the risk that members of the general public lose confidence in their own competence—not only where the task itself is concerned, but for making informed collective decisions about issues that relate to professional domains of action.
The social trustee model and radical critique are contrasted with the democratic professionalism alternative in Table 1.1 below.
How can professional actors help mobilize rather than immobilize, expand rather than shrink democratic authority? The radical critique leaves this question largely unexplored. Critics offer few alternatives to social trusteeism for reform-minded practitioners who wish to be both professional and democratic: to de-professionalize or to develop highly self-reflective and acutely power-sensitive forms of professional practice that draw attention to the ways traditional practices and institutions block and manipulate citizens. Yet these reform suggestions fail to register the ways professional power can be constructive for democracy. To the extent that professionals serve as barriers and disablers, they can also, if motivated, serve as barrier removers and enablers. Especially in complex, fast-paced modern societies, professional skills and knowledge help laypeople manage personal and collective affairs. What we
Table 1.1 Ways of Understanding Professionalism
Main characteristics of a profession
Social Trustee Radical Critique Democratic Professionalism
Knowledge, self-regulation, social responsibility
Power to define interests for the public
Source of professionals’ social duties
Professionals’ view of laypeople
Group experience, functional purposes, tacit exchange
Clients, consumers, wards
Professionals’ ideal role in society Expert, specialist, guide
Political role of professions Protect professional interests and social functions
Interest in retaining status and market security
Incompetent at high-level tasks
De-professionalize, resist temptation to monopolize tasks
Disabling intermediary between citizens and institutions
Commitment to knowledge, but also to co-direction of professional services
Professional training and experience, but also from public collaboration
Citizens with a stake in professional decisions
Share authority and knowledge through task-sharing
Enabling intermediary between citizens and institutions
need is not an anti-professionalism, but a democratic professionalism oriented toward public capability.4
So, how might democratic professionals go about their work? While heeding the conventional obligation to serve social purposes, they also seek to avoid perpetuating the civic disenfranchisement noticed by radical critics of professional power. Democratic professionals relate to society in a particular way: rather than using their skills and expertise as they see fit for the good of others, they aim to understand the world of the patient, the offender, the client, the student, and the citizen on their terms—and then work collaboratively on common problems. They regard the layperson’s knowledge and agency as critical components in resolving what can all-too-easily be seen as strictly professional issues: education, government, health, justice, public safety.
Re-thinking Democratic Change
Democratic professionals in the United States are already creating powersharing arrangements in institutions that are usually hierarchical and nonparticipatory. Their stories, which will begin in Chapter 3, can help us understand both the obstacles confronted and the resources available for cultural change today. To appreciate these, however, we must release ourselves from the grip of a common view of how and where democratic change happens, notice some underlying social issues as more important and more politically significant than they seem, and avoid some prevailing trends in democratic theory.
Drawing on the historical precedents of the abolition, women’s suffrage, labor, civil rights, and student movements, discussion of democratic change typically focuses on the power of people joined together in common cause and pressing for major legislative action. Core factors in the process include leadership; mobilization; organizational capacity; consciousness-raising; forms of protest such as strikes, marches, and sit-ins; and electoral pressure on political parties and candidates.
While our default perspective is crucial for understanding some vital types of democratic action—as, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated—it is state-centric and privileges resources and commitments that are exogenous to daily life. Political action appears as a burst of collective energy that then dissipates after certain legal or policy targets are met: slavery abolished, voting rights for women established, the eight-hour day guaranteed, military conscription for Vietnam ended. A large enough number of people temporarily leave their everyday routines to join in a collective effort. For this reason, Sheldon Wolin has called democratic movements “fugitive,” since at the end of the protest, or strike, or campaign, most people return to their families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, leaving the business of government to insiders.5
Yet some purposeful democratic action is not fugitive. Harry Boyte, John McKnight, and other students of community organizing have drawn attention to the public work of self-directing community groups that band together to secure affordable housing, welcome new immigrant groups, and repair common areas such as parks and playgrounds.6 Though deeply relevant to many neighborhoods’ quality of life, such public work barely registers in the mass media and academia because it does not usually expend its energy on law and policy.
Even less noticed are the alterations democratic professionals are making to their organizations: they 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 the fields of 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. As Table 1.2 indicates, democratic professionalism offers a different path to democratic change than social movements.
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 activists and putting pressure on government officeholders to make new laws or rules, or convening temporary participatory processes such as citizens’ juries or deliberative polls, democratic professionals make direct changes to their institutional 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.
In Chapter 3 we will meet Donnan Stoicovy, a principal in State College, Pennsylvania, who turned her kindergarten through 5th grade institution into an explicitly “democratic” school by designing curricula and internal
Table 1.2 Two Paths of Democratic Change
Social Movements Democratic Professionals
Driven by: Cognitive shifts Proximity
Sites: Outside formal bodies Inside formal bodies
Goals: Law or policy change Role, habit, practice change
Participation: Optional Not fully voluntary
structures to encourage student voice and participation in setting school policies. In Chapter 4 we will hear from Lauren Abramson, who convenes community justice conferences in some of the most distressed neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland, to address harmful actions before they become formal crimes and enter into the criminal justice system. In Chapter 5 we will learn from democratic public administrator Kimball Payne how racial tensions fueling distrust were mitigated through widespread citizen action in Lynchburg, Virginia. Stoicovy, Abramson, Payne, and the other democratic professionals we will meet are changing routine, everyday practices where we all live and work. Their democratic practices are not, therefore, “fugitive” in Wolin’s terms because they are part of our daily life.
Democratic professionals have leverage on the social world, but it differs from that of the political actors and movement organizers we are used to. The energy involved is not a large burst but a slow burn fueled not by a shift in public consciousness, but through load-bearing work that fosters relations of proximity within classrooms, conference rooms, and administrative offices, spaces newly reopened to the public as civic spaces.7 This proximity in public space—getting close enough to see and understand others as fellow citizens— is taken for granted, and yet it is in astonishingly short supply. We live in a democracy, but it is very easy to go through life without ever working democratically on a public problem with others different from oneself in race, class, or education.
Asocial Structures and the Proximity Deficit
Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, astute observers noticed that coexisting alongside highly participatory elements of American democracy, such as frequent elections, town meetings, and jury trials, were significant evasions of civic responsibility and a cultivated lack of political awareness. Alexis de Tocqueville saw what he called “individualism” as a common vice of the new world: not the selfishness or egoism he was accustomed to in Europe, but a cool conscious retreat from the public sphere into the familial private domain. Americans could go off into the forests of Michigan, build cabins, farm, hunt, and live quietly without contributing much to the outside world or relying on it.8 Tocqueville saw this as a personal, if ultimately mistaken, choice made possible by relative equality of conditions and bountiful natural resources.
John Dewey, writing a hundred years later in his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems, worried similarly about the difficulties individuals had in
