[RRE]The Practical Republic

From: Phil Agre (pagreat_private)
Date: Thu Oct 04 2001 - 23:56:17 PDT

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      The Practical Republic:
      Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship
    
      Philip E. Agre
      Department of Information Studies
      University of California, Los Angeles
      Los Angeles, California  90095-1520
      USA
    
      pagreat_private
      http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
    
    
      This is an early, informal draft.  You are welcome to forward it,
      but please do not quote from it.
    
      Version of 4 October 2001.
      5300 words.
    
    
    I've been reading political philosophy, and I've been struck both by
    its frequent brilliance and by its often complete innocence of the
    actual workings of politics.  Exceptions are found, particularly among
    authors who do fieldwork; see, for example Jane Mansbridge, Beyond
    Adversary Democracy (Basic Books, 1980) and Carmen Sirianni and Lewis
    Friedland, Civic Innovation in America (University of California
    Press, 2001).  But more often this literature is abstracted from
    everyday political life.  To illustrate what I mean, I want to talk
    about three concepts: social capital, deliberative democracy, and
    civic republicanism.  All three are the objects of vast literatures
    -- the literature on social capital being relatively recent, that
    on deliberative democracy being ancient in its roots but explosive
    in the last couple of decades, and that on civic republicanism being
    one of the most venerable of any literature on earth.  All of these
    literatures are brilliant, but all of them are analytically flawed
    in fundamental ways.  I want to talk about these flaws, speculate
    briefly about the reasons for them, and then sketch an alternative.
    
    //1 Social capital
    
    The concept of social capital originates in a dim way with Bourdieu,
    but nobody knows what he means by it, since he believes that writing
    intricate prose can substitute for defining his terms.  The phrase
    really entered broad circulation with Robert Putnam's thought-provoking
    book, "Making Democracy Work".  Half of good research is having a
    good question, and Putnam's question was this: why does northern Italy
    work so much better than southern Italy, given that they have the
    same government, language, and religion?  The answer is probably not
    white versus red sauces.  The real answer, Putnam suggests, lies in a
    nonobvious aspect of culture.  Southern Italy is clientelistic: when
    people in southern Italy have a problem, they look up and down social
    hierarchies.  Northern Italy, by contrast, is associationistic: when
    people in the north have a problem, they look laterally to people like
    themselves.  They form associations, and the social connections that
    result then become resources that people can draw on in the future.
    By "social capital", Putnam refers to two things: the stock of social
    network connections and the prevailing atmosphere of trust that is
    conducive to making more such connections.
    
    Now, one problem with the concept of "social capital" is that it's
    not clear why we should call it "capital".  An individual's own social
    network is probably a type of capital, but "capital" is not the sort
    of thing that a society can have.  And even if the sum total of a
    population's social networks were its collective capital, it's hard to
    understand why a prevailing sense of trust should be called "capital".
    At least one is stretching the term.
    
    But I'm willing to let that problem go.  In a world where people can
    speak of marriage as a "market", referring to "social capital" is a
    minor crime.  The real problem, in my view, is that "social capital"
    ought to include a third element that is often left out, namely social
    skills.  Because Putnam was comparing northern and southern Italy as
    regions, we learn less about differences within those regions.  But
    in my experience, life chances even within a single region, especially
    a region as complex as Los Angeles, depend heavily on one's ability
    to fashion precisely the kinds of lateral connections that Putnam is
    talking about.  Those social skills are themselves a kind of capital
    -- economists would call "human capital" if they considered them at
    all -- and social capital is only going to accrue to individuals who
    possess the skills to create it.  Of course, the ability to acquire
    those social skills is related to associations and trust: if you
    associate with people who are skilled at organizing people, and you
    have relations of mutual trust with them, then you perhaps you can
    acquire the necessary skills through apprenticeship.  Even so, access
    to the skills of creating social capital is hardly a given.
    
    So the three elements -- networks, trust, and social skills -- are
    interrelated.  And the element of social skills should not be taken
    for granted.  Many people grow up in environments where the necessary
    social skills do not exist, either because everyone is too busy
    scratching out a subsistence living, or because they have acquired
    the social skills they need to live in a different kind of society, or
    because they have internalized conservative ideologies that keep them
    from creating associations that might threaten established interests.  
    A person from such a disadvantaged background might excel in school
    and get a good job, only to stall in their careers because they are
    not building strong networks for themselves.  People whose careers
    stall in this way are often mystified; they are working hard, doing
    what they are told, projecting a positive attitude, and all of the
    other skills that are required to get along in a clientelistic world.
    But they lack the skills of association; and not only that, but they
    lack even a clue that the skills of association exist.  They might
    decide that they are being discriminated against (which does happen),
    or (even worse) that they really do deserve the subordinate social
    status to which they had originally been assigned.  Either would be a
    tragedy compared a world in which the necessary skills are universal.
    
    Foundations love the concept of social capital because it promises
    concrete guidance for social development projects, both in poor areas
    of industrial countries and in emerging democracies.  Accordingly,
    they have spent huge sums in recent years on social capital research,
    and several books about social capital have appeared, most famously
    Putnam's own extremely detailed study of the decline of social capital
    in the United States.  (His earlier work on the United States, though
    widely publicized, had not been well-received by scholars; the new
    work is generally regarded as more persuasive.)  Don't get me wrong;
    I think that the foundations' intuitions are right, as far as they go.
    But I would predict that social reform activities based on building
    social capital will not succeed, or will even reinforce existing
    social inequalities, unless explicit attention is paid to building
    the necessary social skills among those segments of the population
    that don't have them.  As a college professor, I can tell you that
    those segments of the population include virtually everyone, even
    students who have ascended to highly regarded public universities.
    
    Why doesn't the skill dimension of social capital receive more press?
    I don't know Putnam personally, so I don't want to speculate about
    him.  It's really about the whole institutional culture that has made
    social capital into an industry.  As I say, I am not hostile toward
    them.  I think that building social capital is a good thing.  But I
    have also observed many times that experts have forgotten what it's
    like to be beginners, and people who long ago learned the skills of
    association, or who acquired them tacitly through their socialization
    into the habitus (another Bourdieu word) of professionals, often
    have a hard time articulating them.  This is a general pattern that
    Hernando De Soto also remarks on in his celebrated and insightful if
    problematic book, The Mystery of Capital (Basic Books, 2000): people
    in the first world are so accustomed to a very complex institutional
    environment that they literally cannot comprehend life in a society
    where that environment is lacking.  Institutions consist first and
    foremost of social skills, and what Putnam was really seeing in Italy
    was *institutions* that are present in the north and not the south.
    
    //2 Deliberative democracy
    
    Here is the great myth of democracy: the citizens gather around in
    the community meeting-house, they have a open and rational discussion,
    they come to a consensus or hold a pleasant vote, decisions get made,
    and everyone becomes a better person in the process.  It's a nice
    myth; it makes you feel good just to think about it.  It's called
    deliberative democracy, and it does describe the reality of democracy
    in any time or place.  Of course, the more sophisticated theorists
    of democracy, such as Jurgen Habermas, do not present this picture
    as a descriptive theory but as a system of regulative norms.  But
    even as a norm, deliberative democracy is so profoundly disconnected
    from reality that something must be analytically wrong with it.
    
    Not that I'm the first person to say this.  Read Michael Schudson's
    debunking book, The Good Citizen: A History of American Public Life
    (Free Press, 1998).  He explains, inter alia, that the classical
    New England town meetings were largely staged events in which social
    hierarchies were placed on display.  And for sophisticated, grounded
    accounts of democracy in a country that really cares about democracy,
    read the work of Johan Olsen, especially his old-but-not-outdated
    book, Organized Democracy: Political Institutions in a Welfare
    State, the Case of Norway (Universitetsforlaget, 1983).  My target
    here, then, is not political theory as such, but a relatively narrow
    tradition, albeit one that goes all the way back. 
    
    The problems with the concept of deliberative democracy are numerous.
    It ignores the embedding of formal democratic processes in a other
    social structures.  It neglects the endless struggles over the
    constitutional framework that supposedly organizes deliberation in
    any democracy.  And it ignores the plain fact that most people are
    terrified to speak at public meetings.  Any one of those observations
    should cause us to replace the myth of deliberative democracy almost
    completely.  To disagree with the myth is not to assert that reality
    is the opposite; rather, it argues that the neglected dimensions of
    reality belong at the center of any realistic analysis.
    
    I want to focus on one of these neglected dimensions: the simple fact
    that democracy today means mass democracy.  Deliberative democracy
    takes as its paradigm the local group: the small town, for example,
    or (especially in northern Europe) the workplace.  This attention
    to small-group democracy is not entirely wrong, of course.  Dewey,
    for example, emphasized the small group because that's where children
    learn the values of democracy, or else don't learn them.  Classrooms
    that tacitly instruct children in the values of authoritarianism
    are as wrong as they ever were.  Conservatives in the United States
    have emphasized political localism for their own, almost opposite
    reasons.  The problem in either case is simply that society is big
    and interconnected.  And the problem obviously comes to the fore in a
    society that is rapidly becoming globalized and wired, as the issues
    that citizens debate in a democracy become themselves increasingly
    intertwined with the issues that citizens debate in other places.
    
    Of course, political parties and other structures of mobilization
    have existed for centuries, but now the interconnections through
    which political opinions and polices are formed are much more complex.
    The point is not that political decision-making is "moving up" in
    a hierarchy -- moving away from local councils and toward the central
    government.  Political theory has no trouble with that.  The point,
    rather, is that a wired society is making obtrusive the role of
    large-scale processes in organizing even very local decision-making.
    In a society where communications technologies are poorly developed,
    even in the early days of radio and television and the literatures
    on "mass society" that they provoked, it is possible to conceptualize
    the influences of large-scale processes on local decision-making in
    the nebulous terms of "ideology".  Ideologies waft outward from the
    center and brainwash people (in some abstract way), thus shaping a set
    of attitudes (e.g., democratic or deferential) that people bring to
    the affairs of their community.  That, in its dimness, is the picture
    that centuries of political theory have left us.
    
    The real picture is different.  Listen to real people argue about
    politics, and you will generally hear them recite arguments that
    they got from professional opinion-makers that they happen to agree
    with.  From the point of view of the deliberative democracy model,
    this observation is an embarrassment, or even an elitist insult to
    the native good sense of the common citizen.  But it is nothing of
    the sort.  Coming up with novel political arguments requires a lot of
    work.  Human beings are finite, and nobody has the time or knowledge
    to invent thought-out arguments on every issue all by themselves.
    Even the professional arguers are mostly pooling arguments among
    themselves: appropriating arguments from others, refashioning them,
    and contributing their own incremental improvements.  You can think
    of opposing political tendencies as industries that generate arguments
    and deliver those arguments to their members.  A political tendency,
    in this sense, requires an infrastructure (magazines, radio programs,
    associations, Web sites, and so on), and a political infrastructure
    is successful if it delivers the right arguments to the right people
    at the right time.  This has always been true.  What's different now
    is simply the scale and speed with which debates collectively unfold
    in a society.  Think, for example, of the titanic clash of party lines
    during the 2000 election controversy.  Episodes like that are making
    clear that local debates are not constituted only by their members,
    or conditioned only by an evolving climate of competing ideologies,
    but are embedded -- in great detail and in real time -- in larger
    systems.
    
    Now, it may be argued that this new picture is still deliberative
    democracy, only shifted from the local group to what Kroeber called
    the superorganic level.  But that won't do.  Central to deliberative
    democracy is a certain picture of the human person: self-possessed,
    fully rational, engaged with others, respectful of rules, and so on.
    The capacity to participate in collective decision-making is, for the
    ideal of deliberative democracy, the highest state of human life, and
    people who cannot participate in collective decision-making (whether
    because of outside political constraints or for lack of the relevant
    skills or attitudes) are not fully realized human beings.  This is why
    critiques of the deliberative democracy theory are taken so seriously:
    they explode a normative picture of human development, thereby leaving
    rudderless whole territories of moral and educational thought.  Surely
    this reassertion of the collective level in politics diminishes the
    significance of the individual and obliterates the case for liberal
    political freedoms?  Not so.  Recognizing the embedded nature of
    political debate does explode a certain story about those topics, but
    it does not explode the topics themselves.
    
    What *does* it do?  Well, to start with, viewing individual citizens
    as participants in debates on a collective level does not cast us
    into the outer darkness of antihumanist political theories, such as
    that of Foucault, that view the human individual as wholly the product
    of impersonal "discourses".  One could make some minimal sense of
    the collective level of public deliberation, for example, simply by
    appealing to longstanding metaphors of the "marketplace".  Under the
    marketplace metaphor the individual, no longer centrally a producer
    of arguments, is at least a discerning consumer, picking and choosing
    through the arguments on offer.  The marketplace metaphor hardly does
    justice to the phenomena, given that the advertising and the goods
    are pretty much the same.  It doesn't explain the phenomena that are
    central to Foucault's approach: the ways that individuals' political
    participation is organized through their enrollment into social roles
    such as professions.  It eliminates any sense that the citizen has
    responsibilities, as opposed to private rights.  And it provides no
    account of the actual process of debate, as opposed to the forming
    of opinion.  But at least, in describing the tensions among the
    various received theories, we can get beyond the deliberative model
    and set about reconstructing the values of democracy in the context
    of democracy as it is actually lived.
    
    //3 Civic republicanism
    
    A republic is the opposite of a monarchy.  A republic, in other words,
    is a polity that does not have a king (or, of course, queen).  This
    may not seem like much of a definition, but so long as most of the
    world was ruled by kings -- until well into the twentieth century --
    it was a powerful idea.  The very possibility of a society without a
    king was already well-known to the Greeks, however, and republicanism
    is a nearly continuous thread throughout the history of the West.
    (For an accessible history, see William Everdell's book, The End of
    Kings (University of Chicago Press, 2000).)
    
    In the United States, however, attempts to discuss republicanism
    are frustrated by the upside-down idea that the United States is
    a republic because it is not a democracy.  This bit of conservative
    obfuscation originates with an isolated mistake in Madison that
    is representative neither of his philosophy generally, or of the
    history of political thought with which he was certainly familiar.
    Conservativism is rule by a narrow elite, as opposed to democracy,
    which is rule by the people -- a distinction that is unrelated to
    the one between republicanism (which can be either conservative or
    democratic) and monarchy (which also can be either conservative or,
    in a constitutional monarchy, democratic).  Conservative philosophy
    is contemptuous of the common people, and it stereotypes democracy as
    rule by the mob, the erosion of culture and morals by demotic values,
    and the leveling of aristocratic excellence into a general mediocrity.
    Democracy is held to lead inevitably to tyranny, and rule by elites
    (which is what conservatives mean by representative government)
    and a powerful executive is understood as a counterweight to the
    mindlessness and degradation of the mass.  This odious doctrine is,
    of course, the opposite of everything that the United States stands
    for, and the American conservative movement generally consists of the
    losing parties in the founding debates of the country -- aristocrats,
    theocrats, and anti-federalists -- who have taken to pretending that
    they actually won.  It is embarrassing that so many ordinary Americans
    have fallen for the public relations campaign that calls itself
    "conservatism", and I can only wonder what they make of the haughty
    disparagements of their values on the editorial pages of the Wall
    Street Journal.
    
    Having gotten that nonsense out of the way, we can consider the real
    ideas of civic republicanism.  The "civic" part points to the positive
    agenda for society that is supposed to occupy the void left behind by
    the departing monarch.  People are supposed to rule themselves, not
    be ruled by kings, and this obligation makes certain demands on them.
    The most venerable aspect of this venerable idea has historically
    been known as civic virtue -- roughly, the idea that good citizens
    place the welfare of the whole above their own private welfare as
    individuals.  Of course, stated in that way the principle of civic
    virtue could mean several things.  It is not, for example, communism,
    which is itself logically unrelated to the question of republicanism
    versus monarchy.  In particular, civic virtue is not an institutional
    question, such as whether private property should exist or what other
    laws should be passed; rather, it is a cultural norm.  Citizens, it
    is said, should pitch in, be public-spirited, and recognize that their
    fates are conjoined.  If the modern ideal of market supremacy were
    actually true -- that is, if it were even theoretically possible that
    each individual's welfare could be reduced to his or her own private
    property -- the civic virtue would not be necessary.  But the market
    ideal is not remotely true, and civic republicanism is founded on its
    denial.
    
    The history of civic republicanism has mostly been written, like most
    history even still, as the history of leaders.  This is, to my mind, a
    vestige of the aristocratic worldview, in which the fate of the polity
    depends on the personal qualities of the narrow few who are in charge
    of it.  Successful republicanism has historically been regarded as
    a miracle, and credit for the miracle goes to the leaders who manage
    to hold it together.  Or else it has been credited to institutions
    such as the separation of powers that hold back the depravity of
    human nature.  While talented leaders and well-designed institutions
    are certainly necessary, however, they are more nearly products of
    republican society than producers of it.  The success of republicanism
    is founded just where it's supposed to be -- on ordinary people.
    The problem with the philosophy of civic republicanism, historically,
    is precisely its emphasis on civic virtue.  Civic virtue is certainly
    a good thing, but a preoccupation with civic virtue as the central
    condition of republican government speaks too much of a polemical
    defense against conservative pessimism about humanity, and too little
    of the actual practical work of republican self-government.
    
    Once again -- and there's a pattern here -- what's missing is a clear
    conception of the individual citizen.  The word "citizen", like many
    words in politics, is unfortunate because it has two independent
    meanings: it's either a bundle of rights (such as the rights enjoyed
    by citizens of the United States versus people who are here on visas
    or illegally) or a bundle of responsibilities (voting, civic virtue,
    being informed about public issues, engaging with fellow citizens,
    expressing views) and the construction of self that goes with them.
    The civic republican tradition, which has not (unlike democracy)
    been centrally concerned with spreading the rights of citizenship as
    widely as possible, has understood citizenship mainly in the latter
    sense, as a bundle of responsibilities.  In many cases, citizenship
    has been understood as love of country, respect for the flag, civility
    in debate, and other injunctions that, while perhaps necessary, are
    motivated more by a fear of citizens rather than by respect for them.
    With rare exception, republicanism's understanding of the skills of
    citizenship has been superficial and formalistic.  The recent election
    controversy did remind us that not everyone is born knowing how to
    vote, but that is almost nothing compared to, for example, having and
    using a public voice.
    
    Republicanism also has a deeper meaning, one that begins to connect
    with the other themes that I have been developing.  Republicanism is
    not simply the absence of kings -- that is its negative meaning.  It
    is also the capacity for collective self-government.  Obeying a king
    is not simply a consciously chosen method of running a society; it
    is also an existential condition.  No form of government is feasible
    in the long run unless the people regard it as legitimate, and the
    only way to legitimize monarchy is through internalized habits of
    deference -- that is, through the deeply rooted belief that one is,
    by nature, inferior to the monarch, and by extension to the hierarchy
    of authorities that God Himself, through the agency of His monarch,
    has instituted.  Republican conservatism is, in historical terms, a
    transitional form of society in which deference to authority remains
    but is legitimized by an abstract appeal to tradition rather than
    to a divinely ordained monarch.  The historical significance of the
    United States, and its greatest contribution to the world, is that
    it broke definitively with deference as an organizing principle of
    political culture.  Tom Paine was the prophet of this shift, John
    Adams its reactionary opponent.  From the cultural revolution of the
    1790s, through the populist eras of the early and late 19th century,
    through the labor movement of the Depression to the civil rights
    era and the new social movements that followed it, the history
    of the United States has been a story of progress: the progressive
    undoing of internalized deference and the progressive realization
    of democratic republican values.  Overcoming the habits of deference
    means realizing, at the deepest level, that one can, and deserves
    to, participate in determining one's own fate.  Only when the lights
    go on in individuals' minds will they take the initiative to fulfill
    -- indeed, to invent -- the promise of citizenship.
    
    //4 Citizenship
    
    The United States is a democratic republican country, and it needs a
    democratic republican theory of citizenship.  Although such a theory
    cannot be simple, elements of it can be found in the correctives that
    I have offered to the ideas of social capital, deliberative democracy,
    and civic republicanism.  To my mind, what is needed is something
    like a manual -- a how-to, that most American of genres.  The central
    problem that the citizen faces is how to participate meaningfully
    in a society of hundreds of millions.  It is a common and reasonable
    question: how does my voice count?  Some theorists actually seem to
    revel in the difficulty, spinning arguments that predict that nobody
    should even find it worthwhile to vote, much less involve themselves
    in the minutiae of public issues.  That won't do.
    
    Other theorists point more reasonably to the institutions of "civil
    society" that mediate between individuals and the state.  Perhaps the
    average citizen cannot have much effect on national legislation, but
    having an effect on the policy positions of one's profession, party,
    church, union, political club, interest group, or civic association
    is more imaginable.  The concept of civil society has its weaknesses;
    it works better for some societies than for others (see John Comaroff
    and Jean Comaroff, eds, Civil Society and the Political Imagination
    in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2000)) and it leaves no place
    for a wide variety of legitimate political activities, e.g., in the
    cultural sphere, among other problems.  But at least it provides a
    point of departure for a serious consideration of the practical work
    of politics in a complex modern society.  (For a forcefully analytical
    argument for the central role of civil society, see Graeme Gill's
    excellent book, The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil
    Society, and the Transition Process (St. Martin's Press, 2000).)
    
    Given the arguments above, it follows that a how-to for democratic
    republican citizenship would have several elements, including skills
    for building social capital and participating in the collective
    production and circulation of political arguments.  I cannot provide
    such a how-to here, but I can sketch perhaps the central idea that is
    undreamt in the philosophies that I have been describing.  That idea
    is as follows: it is absolutely central to the political process that
    individuals, in their public personae, are associated with issues.
    People make their careers in politics by identifying issues that are
    likely to come to prominence, researching and analyzing them, staking
    out public positions on them, and building social networks of other
    people who have associated themselves with related ideas, especially
    those whose positions are ideologically compatible.  Ideologies,
    in their practical political aspect, are designed to rationalize and
    cement coalitions among individuals who have staked out a wide range
    of issues, and the social networks whose construction the ideologies
    facilitate then become the connective tissue of political movements.
    
    This process is fractal: its logic is essentially the same on the
    global stage as on the national, and it is essentially the same
    on a regional stage as on a local.  What is more, it is essentially
    the same within a wide variety of institutional contexts.  Thus,
    individuals can stake out issues and build political networks within
    their professions, their churches, their unions, or their political
    organizations.  The politics of the local PTA is, in this regard,
    largely isomorphic to the politics of a national political party.
    The key is that political personae and political issues are both
    constructed in the same process.  What is more, the individuals
    who stake out a given issue in different institutional contexts
    will create a network among themselves.  An issue network, then,
    has three dimensions: in the vertical dimension, those who stake out
    a given issue on the national level will network with those who stake
    out the same issue on either the global or the regional level; in the
    institutional dimension, those who stake out a given issue within one
    institutional context will network with those who stake out the same
    issue in other institutions; and in the ideological dimension, those
    who stake out ideologically related positions on different issues will
    network with one another.  (A fourth dimension, often, is geographic:
    individuals who stake out issues in a given geographic jurisdiction
    will generally build issue networks with their counterparts in other
    jurisdictions.  But I will stick with three dimensions for simplicity.)
    
    This three-dimensional network structure is the essence of civil
    society.  Note, though, how different it is from the three concepts
    that I described at the outset.  First of all, the three-dimensional
    issue network is not simply a large quantity of social network
    connections, but a very definite network structure.  Nor does it
    require high levels of trust, but rather a large number of particular
    negotiations and issue-by-issue coalition-building stabilized by
    ideology.  Above all, the issue network is sufficiently complex that
    it will never happen without high levels of political skill diffused
    throughout the society.  In this sense, the crucial type of capital
    that a society needs is social skill; the rest will follow from the
    intrinsic cognitive and informational demands of republican politics.
    
    Secondly, the three-dimensional issue network could hardly be
    more different than the idealized picture of deliberative democracy.
    Political decision-making, it turns out, is embedded in long-term
    relationships.  Its center is ideology, not the making of particular
    political decisions.  Whereas the deliberative democracy theory
    portrays every citizen as having the same relationship to every
    issue, in reality citizens tend to specialize in particular issues.
    This makes perfect sense in terms of the cognitive limits of citizens
    in complex societies with many complicated issues, but it also
    makes sense in terms of the long-term construction of public political
    personae.  Individuals fashion themselves into "brand names" by
    articulating positions on particular issues that will attract coherent
    groups of followers, whether as organization members, contributors
    of money or labor, or voters.  And the central task of a citizen,
    it turns out, is to organize the circulation of arguments, both within
    the three-dimensional issue network and between that network and the
    individuals who follow the network's position.
    
    Finally, specifying the actual practice of citizenship shifts the
    focus of civic republicanism from civic virtue to the skills of civic
    life.  Civic virtue is no doubt necessary, but its exercise is heavily
    embedded in the structure of relationships that defines civil society.
    This embedding helps to make civic virtue less mysterious: it becomes
    partly reducible to the negotiations through which coalitions are
    built, for example in the segmentary politics that continually ripples
    up and down the vertical dimension of the issue network.
    
    The operation of issue networks is obviously closely tied to network
    technologies of information and communication, and these technologies
    become especially important when we consider the democratic aspects
    of citizenship.  Historically, theories of issue networks have focused
    their attention on the highest echelons of interest group politics,
    for example in the endlessly shifting alliances among interest
    group organizations in Washington.  In fact, similar issue-networking
    processes take place throughout the society, and civil society can
    be strengthened if access to the skills and technologies of issue
    networking are further democratized.  This includes the curricula of
    civics classes, of course, which ought to teach the practical skills
    of political organizing.  But it should also include the curricula of
    professional schools, the citizenship tests given to immigrants, and
    many other contexts where the practical foundations of a democratic
    republic can be reinforced.
    
    Politics has been understood since the Greeks as a practical skill,
    and so it may seem surprising that the actual skill of politics has
    remained largely unarticulated across centuries.  But in hindsight
    it is not surprising at all.  Civilization is the story of the human
    struggle to emerge from the moral darkness of conservatism, to turn
    the lights on in individual minds and overcome the habits of deference
    that turn people into machines.  Democratic republicanism is a story
    not of perfection but of progress.  It is a story that is written
    afresh in every era, and in every life.  Technology provides most of
    the organizing themes for that story in our own era.  But technology
    is not central; what is central is the choices that we make, each of
    us, in laying claim to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship
    in our own lives.
    
    end
    



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