=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 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 You are welcome to forward it, but please do not quote from it.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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