[RRE]The Practical Republic

From: Phil Agre (pagreat_private)
Date: Mon May 19 2003 - 19:52:01 PDT


[This is a much revised version of something I sent out earlier.]

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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 a draft.  You are welcome to forward it, but please do not
  quote from it.

  Version of 18 May 2003.
  8300 words.


Political philosophy, for all its frequent brilliance, is also
frequently innocent of the actual workings of politics.  Exceptions
are found, particularly among authors who do fieldwork, for example,
Mansbridge (1980) and Sirianni and Friedland (2001).  But more often
the arguments of the political philosophers are abstracted from
everyday political life.  To illustrate what I mean, I will discuss
three prominent political theories: 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.  Each of them, I will argue, suffers for lack of
a theory of social skills -- the practical skills of political life
broadly construed.  I will conclude by sketching such a theory with
particular reference to the United States, and by demonstrating that
social capital, deliberative democracy, and civic republicanism must
all be reconceptualized as a result of it.

//1 Social capital

The concept of social capital draws on a long tradition, starting with
medieval sources and Tocqueville.  But the phrase "social capital",
as well as its connection with the mapping of social networks, begins
with Loury (1977), for whom it served as part of an explanation of
poverty in terms of poorly-functioning community support systems.
Social capital for Loury was the sum total of other people's capital
(e.g., equipment available for borrowing) to which an individual
has access through social connections of friendship and association.
A related concept, mainly intended to explain the persistence of
social stratification, originates with Bourdieu and Passeron (1977).
Social capital was then theorized more fully by Coleman (1990) and
by such scholars of social networks as Lin (1982, 2001) [1].

The idea of social capital entered broad circulation, however, with
Robert Putnam's _Making Democracy Work_ (1993).  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
the two halves of the country share the same government, language, and
religion?  The 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 the association's members can draw on in the
future [2].  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 such connections [3].  Thus,
although the concept of social capital originates in social theory
rather than in political philosophy, Putnam's conception of social
capital is essentially political.  Civic engagement is one of
its elements, but even the founding of businesses and nonpolitical
associations draws on the same generalized reservoir of trust and
network connections as do formal political processes.

One problem with the concept of social capital is that it is not clear
why we should call it "capital" (Arrow 2000, Hodgson 2001: 162, Smith
and Kulynych 2002; but cf. Lin 2001: 19).  An individual's own social
network, though lacking a price in the market, is arguably 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 is hard to understand why a prevailing
sense of trust should be called "capital".  At least one is stretching
the term.

A more serious 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.  In reality,
life chances, even within a single region, depend heavily on one's
ability to fashion the kinds of lateral connections that Putnam
discusses.  Those social skills are themselves a kind of capital --
economists would call them "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 acquisition of such
advanced 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 perhaps you can acquire
the necessary skills through apprenticeship or osmosis.  Even so,
access to the skills of creating social capital is hardly a given.

So the three elements of social capital -- 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.  People 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 [4].  People
whose careers stall in this way are often mystified; they are working
hard, doing what they are told, projecting a positive attitude,
and generally exercising the skills that are required to get along
in a clientelistic world.  But they lack the skills of association.
Indeed, they probably lack even a clue that the skills of association
exist.  They might decide that they are being discriminated against
(which does happen, skills or no), or that they really do deserve the
subordinate social status to which they had originally been assigned.
Either would be a tragedy compared to a world in which the necessary
skills are universal.

Intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations have expressed
great enthusiasm for 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,
these organizations have spent huge sums in recent years on social
capital research, and several books about social capital have
appeared, most famously Putnam's (2000) own extremely detailed study
of the decline of social capital in the United States [5].  These
intuitions are probably right, as far as they go.  But social reform
activities based on building social capital may not succeed, or may
even reinforce existing social inequalities, unless explicit attention
is paid to building the necessary social skills among those segments
of the population that lack them.  You can give people social capital,
but it is better to teach them the skill of making social capital for
themselves.

Why does the skill dimension of social capital receive so little
press?  It is hard to know for certain.  But experts have generally
forgotten what it is 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 of professionals, often
have a hard time articulating the skills for others.  This is a
general pattern that De Soto (2000) also remarks on in his analysis
of the institutional foundations of economic development: people
in the industrialized countries 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 really saw in
Italy was institutions that are present in the north and not the south
[6].

//2 Deliberative democracy

From its earliest days to the present, democracy has always been
attended by a certain myth: citizens gather around in the community
meeting-house, they have an 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.  This powerful legitimating
myth is called deliberative democracy, and it is almost unrelated to
the reality of democracy in any time or place [7].  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.

Objections to the empirical utility of the myth of deliberative
democracy are not new.  Schudson (1998), for example, presents
a wide variety of debunking arguments from American history [8].
For example, he argues that the classical New England town meetings
were largely staged events in which social hierarchies were placed
on display (1998: 16-19).  And sophisticated, grounded accounts
of democracy in practice are certainly available; see, for example,
Olsen (1983).  My target, then, is not the study of politics as such,
but a relatively narrow tradition, albeit one of great importance
historically.

The problems with the myth of deliberative democracy are numerous.
It ignores the embedding of formal democratic processes in other social
structures.  It ignores the behind-the-scenes work, both strategic and
tactical, in which any skilled citizen or politician engages before
bringing an issue to a public forum.  It neglects struggles over the
constitutional framework that is supposed to organize deliberation
in any democracy.  And it ignores the plain fact that many people are
afraid to speak at public meetings (Mansbridge 1980: 60-64, Schudson
1997a: 301-302).  To disagree with the myth of deliberative democracy
is not to endorse the opposite myth of a mass democracy manipulated
by elites [9].  Rather, it argues that the neglected dimensions of
democratic reality belong at the center of any realistic analysis.

I want to focus on one of these neglected dimensions: the issue of
scale (Calhoun 1998).  Democracy today occurs on a mass scale.  Yet
deliberative democracy takes as its paradigm the local group: the
Greek polis, the small town, 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 is where children learn or do not learn the values of
democracy.  Classrooms that tacitly instruct children in authoritarian
values are antidemocratic.  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 policies are formed are much more complex. 
The problem for political theory is not that political decision-making
is moving upward in a hierarchy, away from local councils and toward
a representative central government.  The problem, 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 that provoked the literature
on "mass society", it is possible to conceptualize the influences
of large-scale processes on local decision-making in the nebulous
form of "ideology".  Ideologies waft outward from the center, or
upward from the supposed masses, and influence individuals' general
cognitive orientations, thus shaping the attitudes (e.g., democratic
or deferential) that they bring to the affairs of their community.
That, in its dimness, is the picture that centuries of political
theory have left us.

The reality is different.  Listen to real people argue about politics,
and you will generally hear them recite arguments that they got
from professional opinion-makers (politicians, pundits, journalists,
scholars, workplace authorities, and so on) that they happen to
agree with (Tarde 1969 [1898]: 312, cited in Schudson 1997a: 304-305).
From the point of view of the deliberative democracy model, this
observation is an embarrassment, if not an elitist insult.  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, for example by refashioning arguments
they have appropriating from others and applying general schemata
to particular cases.  Political tendencies can be thought of as
industries that generate arguments to suit their respective interests
and strategies, and then deliver those arguments to their members.
A political tendency, in this sense, requires an infrastructure
(magazines, radio programs, associations, Web sites, think tanks, 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 is 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 American
election controversy of 2000 (Agre 2001).  Such episodes make 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
(Agre 2002).

Now, it may be argued that this new picture is still deliberative
democracy, only shifted from the local group to what Kroeber
(1917) 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 procedural 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 social and educational thought.  This is
just as well, given the standard theory's tendency to abstract the
citizen away from the individual's concrete identity and location
in the social system (Bohman 1999).  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?  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 the metaphor of the "marketplace of ideas" [10].
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 nearly the same.  It does not explain the phenomena that
are central to Foucault's theory: the ways that individuals' political
participation is organized through their socialization into social
roles such as professions.  It eliminates any sense that the citizen
has responsibilities, as opposed to private rights.  It fails to
suggest a satisfactory political analog to marketplace's regulations
against fraud.  And it provides no account of the actual process of
debate, as opposed to the forming of opinion.  But it does provide
something of an existence proof that a theory of collective political
argument does not extinguish individual political agency.  Perhaps,
in analyzing the tensions among the various received theories, we
can transcend 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 queen.  This may not seem
like much of a definition, but so long as most of the world was ruled
by monarchs -- until well into the twentieth century -- it was a
powerful idea.  The very possibility of a society without a monarch
was already well-known to the Greeks, however, and republicanism is
a nearly continuous thread throughout the history of the West [11].

In the United States, however, attempts to discuss republicanism are
frustrated by the widespread idea that the United States is a republic
because it is not a democracy.  This unfortunate dichotomy originates
with an isolated mistake in Madison that is representative neither
of his philosophy generally nor of the history of political thought
with which he was certainly familiar (Everdell 2000: 5-6).  In fact,
the concepts of republicanism and democracy are logically unrelated.
Conservativism is rule by an elite, or a stratified social order
administered by that elite, as opposed to democracy, which is rule
by the people.  Republicanism (which can be either conservative or
democratic), for its part, is opposed to monarchy (which also can
be either conservative or, in the case of a constitutional monarchy,
democratic).  Conservative philosophy 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 (Femia
2001).  Democracy is held to lead inevitably to tyranny, and rule by
elites (which is what conservatives mean by representative government)
is understood as a counterweight to the mindlessness and degradation
of the mass.

Such distinctions having been drawn, we can consider the real ideas
of civic republicanism.  The word "civic" 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 monarchs, and this obligation makes certain demands on
them.  Good citizens, it is said, place the welfare of the whole above
their own private welfare as individuals.  Of course, stated in that
way the principle could mean several things.  It is not, for example,
communism.  In particular, it is not an institutional question, such
as whether private property should exist or what other laws should be
passed; rather, it is a norm of political culture.  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 -- then the civic values of republicanism would not be
necessary.  But the market ideal is not true, and civic republicanism,
while not opposed to markets as such, is founded on its denial.

The history of civic republicanism has mostly been written, like most
history, as a story of leaders.  This is a vestige of the aristocratic
worldview, in which the fate of the polity depends on the personal
qualities of the few who are in charge.  Successful republican
government has historically been regarded as a wonder, and credit
for the wonder goes to the leaders who manage to hold it together.
Or else it goes to institutions such as the separation of powers that
compensate for 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.  In reality, the
success of republican government, like that of nearly any institution,
is founded on ordinary people.  The problem with the philosophy
of civic republicanism, historically, is precisely its overemphasis
on the civic values of placing the good of the whole above one's own.
Civic-mindedness is certainly valuable, but a preoccupation with civic
values as the central condition of republicanism 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 is a pattern here -- what is missing is a
clear conception of the individual citizen [12].  The word "citizen",
like many words in politics, is unfortunate because it has two
independent meanings: it is either a bundle of rights (such as the
rights enjoyed by citizens of a country versus people who are in
the country on visas or illegally) or a bundle of responsibilities
(voting, 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, suggest more a fear of citizens rather than respect
for them [13].  With rare exception, republicanism's understanding
of the skills of citizenship has been superficial and formalistic.
It is highly developed in some areas, for example in its inheritance
from the tradition of rhetoric.  It has also drawn on the lengthy
tradition of advice manuals for rulers (as opposed to citizens).
But it provides little guidance about the great majority of social
interactions that organize political life outside the giving of
speeches.

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 monarchs -- that is its negative meaning.
It is also the capacity for collective self-government.  Obeying
a monarch 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 the monarch.  The historical significance of the United States,
and its greatest contribution to the world, is that it broke with
deference as an organizing principle of political culture (Shalhope
1990, Wood 1992).  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 Machiavellianism

These considerations on republicanism provide a convenient occasion
to discuss the most important modern analysis of social skill and its
role in society, that of Fligstein (2001).  Fligstein observes that
social theory, despite its endless concern with the relationship of
agency to social structure, has been remarkably unconcerned with
either the nature or the substance of the skills that social agents
employ.  He has sought to remedy that omission by sketching a theory
of social skill that draws on ideas from symbolic interactionism [14].

Fligstein's starting point is the concept of a social field, which is
roughly speaking an institution in which various social groups contest
their respective interests.  The social skills he describes are those
of a "skilled actor" or "institutional enterpreneur" who negotiates
the interactions between powerful and powerless groups within the
social field in order to arrive at a set of rules to govern their
future relationships.  Social fields, he observes, tend to be highly
stable.  The opportunities for a skilled actor to change things tend
to emerge in periods of crisis, especially when the territory of the
social field is being invaded by some other social field.  In those
situations, the skilled actor can employ a wide range of interpersonal
strategies, maintaining the appearance of community-mindedness by
manipulating rules and tailoring communication to the beliefs and
identities of each particular audience.  Having thereby mediated the
emergence of a new system of rules, the skilled actor must once again
stabilize the field by instilling in the field's participants a new
set of habits.

Fligstein's theory restores a missing piece to social theory.  It does
so, however, through a striking reinvention.  Although he does not
seem aware of it, Fligstein's theory is isomorphic, and in remarkable
detail, to that of Machiavelli (whom he mentions only in passing, when
observing that the skilled actor tries not to appear Machiavellian)
[15].  The skilled actor or institutional entrepreneur in Fligstein's
account is analogous to Machiavelli's prince.  The field is the
Renaissance city-state.  The powerful groups are the oligarchic
families, and the powerless groups are the populo, mainly the
guilds.  The powerful groups/oligarchic families must negotiate
among themselves, lest their rule collapse into factionalism.
The various groups among the powerless/populo must also maintain
solidarity to have any chance of curtailing the rule of the powerful.
The "rules" that govern a field are the laws of the city-state.  The
field/city-state alternates in each theory between stasis and crisis;
the crisis can be caused by internal dynamics but is more often caused
by invasion.  It is very hard to change the rule of a field/city-state
while it is static.  The would-be prince must wait for a crisis.
The field/city-state is ruled not directly by the ruler, but through
the mediation of a set of habits that the field/city-state instills
in its participants/citizens.  This, after all, is what the fifteenth
century meant by republicanism.  The elements that Fligstein takes
from symbolic interactionism have been known since ancient Greece
as rhetoric.  The prince/skilled actor fashions appearances and
manipulates rules/laws, operating largely by flattery.  And he is
very concerned to be seen as acting in the community interest, whether
he is or not.

The one important divergence between the theories comes at the point
where, each says, the prince/skilled actor's attempt to institute
a new order can fail.  The main motivation of Machiavelli and
his readers is to prevent political crisis from producing a tyrant.
For that reason, Machiavelli advises the prince to resort to violence
when necessary to institute his new republican order.  Fligstein and
his readers are not motivated by the danger of a tyrant, at least not
consciously, and that may explain why Fligstein observes much more
dispassionately than Machiavelli that the prince/skilled actor's
attempts can fail.  He is not clear on what happens next, though from
the logic of his argument I would assume either that the old order
limps along in a reduced form, or else that the field is subsumed by
its neighbors.

My purpose here is not to criticize Fligstein, who has done social
theory a service by reviving a theme that was once central to Western
theories of politics as a whole.  Fligstein's accomplishment speaks
volumes about the immense reorientation of political inquiry from a
practical art to a distanced, abstract, and only marginally applicable
would-be science.  Even Marx, who was emphatic about the unity of
theory and practice, provided his readers with almost no concrete
instruction in the arts of politics.  It is time to repair the damage.
Yet Machiavelli's theory, even when updated with modern social-
theoretic vocabulary, is not the theory of social skill that a modern
democracy needs.  Machiavelli, like the great majority of authors of
guides to practical skills before the modern era, wrote only for an
elite.  He presupposes that only one individual possesses the skills
that he writes about.  Everyone else is treated passively as raw
material for the entrepreneural manipulations of the prince.  This is
not a theory of democracy.  It is not even a theory of republicanism.
What would a polity be like in which everyone had advanced social
skills, and what would the ideal skills be like for a polity in which
political skills are widespread?

//5 Citizenship

The United States is a democratic republic, and it needs a democratic
republican theory of the skills of citizenship [16].  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.  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, in the tradition
of Downs (1957), actually seem to revel in the difficulty, making
it seem mysterious that anyone 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 [17].  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
[18].  But at least it provides a point of departure for a serious
consideration of the practical work of politics in a complex modern
society.

From 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 central to the political process that individual
citizens, in their public personae, are able to associate themselves
with issues.  Citizens, whether politicians or activists, make their
political careers in entrepreneurial fashion by identifying issues
that are coming to prominence, researching and analyzing them,
staking out public positions on them, and building social networks
of other citizens who have associated themselves with related issues,
especially those whose positions are ideologically compatible [19].
Ideologies, in their practical political aspect, are designed to
rationalize and cement coalitions among citizens 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, their industries,
or their political organizations.  The politics of the local PTA
is, in this regard, largely isomorphic to the politics of a national
political party.  Issue entrepreneurship, in this sense, is a
pervasive organizing logic of a democratic republican society, and
not the preserve of the social movement leader-hero or the occasional
prince.  The key is that political personae and political issues, on
every scale, are both constructed in the same process.  This social
network among individuals who have publicly associated themselves
with particular political issues -- drawing on a mathematical metaphor
(Birkhoff 1967), call it an issue lattice -- has four dimensions:

 * in the vertical dimension, individuals who stake out a given issue
on the national level will generally network with those who stake out
the same issue on either the global or the regional level;

 * in the geographic dimension, individuals who stake out issues
in a given geographic jurisdiction will generally network with their
counterparts in other jurisdictions;

 * in the institutional dimension, individuals who stake out a given
issue within one institutional context will generally network with
those who stake out the same issue in other institutions; and

 * in the ideological dimension, individuals who stake out
ideologically related positions on different issues in similar
institutional locations will generally network with one another.

This four-dimensional lattice structure is the essence of civil
society [20].  Yet, note how different it is from the three concepts
that I described at the outset.  First of all, the four-dimensional
issue lattice 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 a great deal of issue-by-issue coalition-building
stabilized by ideology.  Above all, the issue lattice is sufficiently
complex in its detailed workings that it will never emerge without
high levels of political skill diffused throughout the society.  From
this perspective, the crucial type of capital that a society needs
is not social networks but social skill; the rest, social networks
included, will follow from the entrepreneurial energy of individuals
and the cognitive and informational demands of republican politics.
Social capital, on this theory, does not depend crucially on the
founding of associations, in the sense of formal organizations among
nominally equal citizens.  Associations are epiphenomena of the more
fundamental skill of forming an issue lattice [21].

Secondly, the four-dimensional issue lattice 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
phenomenon follows naturally from the cognitive limits of citizens in
complex societies, but it also follows from demands 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, subscribers, volunteers,
or voters.  It follows that a central task for a citizen is to
organize the circulation of arguments on an issue, both within the
three-dimensional issue lattice and to the individuals who subscribe
to the citizen's position.  Of course, deliberative meetings still
occur.  The point is that these meetings are thoroughly embedded
in longer-term, multiply-scaled political processes that extend far
beyond the walls of any given meeting-house.

Finally, specifying the actual practice of citizenship shifts the
focus of civic republicanism from civic values to the skills of civic
life.  Civic values are no doubt necessary, but their exercise is
heavily embedded in the structure of relationships.  This embedding
helps to make civic values less mysterious: they become 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 lattice.  More importantly,
the success of republican government no longer seems to depend on the
altruism of civic selflessness, and instead to depend on the diverse
incentives to pursue civic careers.  Of course, a polity of global
scope without powerful norms of civic selflessness may no longer be
republican in any recognizable sense.  The question is not trivial:
one must determine whether the classical ideal of the self-governing
city-state is the very definition of republic, or whether that
ideal was simply one means, limited by the available technology and
the unequal distribution of entrepreneurial social skills, to a more
fundamentally republican end.

The operation of issue lattices is, then, closely tied to the
technologies of information and communication, and these technologies
become especially important when we consider the democratic aspects of
citizenship [22].  Historically, theories of political networks have
focused their attention on the highest echelons of interest group
politics, for example in the endlessly shifting alliances among
interest groups in Washington (e.g., Laumann and Knoke 1989).  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 building networks around political issues 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 [23].  In particular, the issue entrepreneurship theory
argues that the main democratic potential of technologies like the
Internet does not rest in their ability to support deliberation (Agre
2002: 311-312).  Instead, it rests mainly in their ability to support
the work of issue entrepreneurs: identifying and researching emerging
issues, distributing analyses of current events to an audience,
organizing events, and networking with other entrepreneurs in the
issue lattice.

Politics has been understood since the Greeks as a practical skill,
and so it may seem surprising that the most central 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 are the choices that we make, each of
us, in laying claim to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship
in our own lives.

//* Notes

[1] On the concept of social capital and its applications, see
Dasgupta and Serageldin (2000), Grootaert and Van Bastelaer (2002),
Lin (2001), Putnam (2002), Rotberg (2001), and Woolcock (1998).
Fine's (2001) bibliography is invaluable.

[2] For critical discussion of Putnam's argument see Edwards and Foley
(1998), Levi (1996), and Sabetti (1996).

[3] For Loasby (1999: 46), by contrast, social capital is located not
in networks but in practial skills:

  Institutions are a response to uncertainty.  They are patterns
  acquired from others which guide individual actions, even when these
  actions are quite unconnected with any other person.  They economise
  on the scarce resource of cognition, by providing us with ready-made
  anchors of sense, ways of partitioning the space of representations,
  premises for decisions, and bounds within which we can be rational
  -- or imaginative.  They constitute a capital stock of other
  people's reuseable knowledge, although, like all knowledge, this
  is fallible.  In fact, just as Marshall recognized the importance
  for firms of supplementing their own internal organisation with an
  external organisation, so each of us finds life much more manageable
  if we supplement our own internally organised cognition with
  the externally organised social capital which is the accretion of
  many other people's cognition.  We are therefore not restricted to
  our own apparatus of classification in trying to make sense of our
  surroundings.

Somewhat similarly, Ostrom (2000) locates social capital in the
governance systems that local communities evolve for managing common
resources such as water.  A significant difference between Putnam
and these authors is that, for Putnam, social capital is sufficiently
generic that it can readily be transferred from one institutional
setting to another.  For Loasby and Ostrom, by contrast, social
capital consists of quite concrete practical skills that are embedded
in particular institutions.

[4] For extensive empirical evidence that the structure of social
networks affects career advancement, see Burt (1995) and Lin, Cook,
and Burt (2001).  For background see Rauch and Casella (2000) and
Smelser and Swedberg (1994).

[5] This new work makes a stronger empirical case for claims that
Putnam originally put forth in his celebrated but controversial
article alleging a decline of social capital in the United States
(Putnam 1995).  For critical analysis of Putnam's original argument
see Schudson (1996).

[6] Cohen and Fields (2000) argue that Putnam's theory of social
capital as a generalized disposition toward association does not
explain the economic success of Silicon Valley, with its high
levels of network-building and near-zero levels of civic engagement.
Instead, they argue that Silicon Valley's social capital cannot
be dissociated from its unique ensemble of institutions.  Those
institutions include the great research universities, government
research and development policies, venture capital, stock options,
and the specific nature of the computer industry.  The social capital
of other economic and political regions, even ones as superficially
similar as the Route 128 technology corridor near Boston, may well be
embedded in quite different institutions.

Krishna (2000) also connects the concept of social capital to that of
institutions.  He usefully subdivides social capital into two kinds:
institutional capital, which is the collection of formal mechanisms
for organizing activity with which a given community has experience,
and relationship capital, which is the collection of established
personal relationships among the individuals in a community.  The two
forms of social capital are complementary, and each is necessary for a
strong and flexible social system.  This way of defining the concepts
is somewhat problematic: institutions comprise more than just formal
rules, and relationships are generally organized by institutions.
Even so, Krishna's analysis does provide one way of overcoming the
industrial world's inattention to the institutional foundations of
development.

See also Hoff and Stiglitz (2001) on the role of institutions in
development and Bellah (2000) and Berman (1997) on institutions in
civil society.

[7] Very unusually in the literature, Mansbridge (1980) actually
found and studied two polities that approximate the deliberative myth.
She emphasizes the ongoing work of maintaining relationships outside
of the venues of formal decision-making, and she argues that the
ideal of deliberation requires the citizens to have the same interests.
For both these reasons, she concludes that the deliberative ideal is
inapplicable to large-scale politics.  See also Dryzek and Berejikian
(1993), who use interviews and quantitative analysis to reconstruct
citizens' conception of democracy and the deliberative process.

On the idea that participation in politics makes one a better person,
see Gutmann and Thompson (1996) and Mansbridge (1999).  Although
Mansbridge argues that the idea in its full-blown form is recent,
elements of it are much older.

On the concept of deliberative democracy generally, see Bohman and
Rehg (1997), Dryzek (2002), Elster (1998), Gutmann and Thompson
(1996), Koh and Slye (1999), and Nino (1996).  On the related but
distinct concept of participatory democracy, see Pateman (1970).
Of course, these theories of deliberative democracy vary, and
not all of them subscribe to every element of the myth that I have
described.  The overall picture, though, is quite consistent.  For
diverse criticisms of Habermas' theory of deliberative democracy in
particular, with Habermas' informative response, see Calhoun (1992).

[8] See also Schudson (1997a, 1997b).

[9] It is, however, to acknowledge somewhat ruefully the empirical
accuracy in most democratic polities to date of what Etzioni-Halevy
(1993) calls the demo-elite theory.  According to this theory, the
feasibility of democratic government depends on the elites of many
different institutional fields (business, education, the arts, and
so on) having enough resources under their command to maintain their
autonomy in relation to the state.  If the state is able to undermine
the autonomy of these institutions, then the result will be some
form of corporatism, or worse.  In a society where the social skills
of association are unevenly distributed, being in essence restricted
to the various elites, this conclusion most likely follows.  Whether
the autonomy of sectoral elites is a significant consideration in a
society where political skills are universally taught in grade school
is another matter.

[10] The phrase "marketplace of ideas" is widely attributed to John
Stuart Mill's _On Liberty_ (1974 [1859]), but as Gordon (1997: 235)
observes, "[t]his metaphor does not come from Mill's own text ... and
quite to the contrary ... does not reflect accurately Mill's views
on free speech".  The metaphor is also often falsely attributed to
Milton's _Areopagitica_.  It is best known from its use in Oliver
Wendell Holmes' dissent in Abrams v. US, 250 US 616 (1919).  Yet
even there the precise phrase, "marketplace of ideas", does not occur.
Holmes in fact says: "the ultimate good desired is better reached
by free trade in ideas" and "the best test of truth is the power of
the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market"
(both at 630).  The text is available at
<http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/43.htm>.

[11] On republicanism and its history see Connell (2000), Pettit
(1997), Sunstein (1993), Van Gelderen and Skinner (2002), and
Viroli (2002).  An especially accessible history is Everdell (2000).
For the debate on the role of republican ideas in the founding of
the United States, see Appleby (1984), Pocock (1975), Rahe (1992),
Rodgers (1992), Shalhope (1990), Wood (1969), and Zuckert (1994).

[12] On the concept of citizenship and its history see Hadenius
(2001), Ignatieff (1995), Pocock (1995), and Riesenberg (1992).

[13] For a contemporary version of this, see Sandel (1996).

[14] Fligstein (1997) presents an earlier version of the theory.

[15] See, for example, Machiavelli's _Discourses on Livy_, Book 1,
Chapter 9.  The convergence of Fligstein's theory with the account
of Machiavelli in Coleman (2000) is especially striking.

[16] For a rare discussion of the role of social skill in democratic
society, see Elkin and Soltan (1999).  On democratic republicanism
see, e.g., Baker (2001).

[17] Although the concept of civil society is arguably ancient, its
extraordinary contemporary revival begins with Keane (1988a, 1988b,
1998).  See also Alexander (1998), Cohen and Arato (1992), Gellner
(1994), Hall (1995), and Seligman (1992).  For a forcefully analytical
argument for the central role of civil society in the contemporary
trend toward democratization, see Gill (2000).  For historical
perspectives see Black (1984), Ehrenberg (1999), and Ferguson (1995).
Seligman (1995) argues that the concept of civil society, with its
emphasis on the citizen's private attributes, is incompatible with
republicanism, with its emphasis on the public self.  The concept was
also employed for rather different purposes by American conservative
intellectuals in their campaign for welfare reform in the 1990s; see
Berger and Neuhaus (1996), Eberly (2000), and Mansfield and Winthrop
(2000).

[18] For comparative perspectives, see Chambers and Kymlicka (2001),
Hann and Dunn (1996), Howell and Pearce (2001), Kaviraj and Khilnani
(2001), and Schechter (1999).  For an especially forceful critique,
see Comaroff and Comaroff (2000).

[19] On business entrepreneurship see Swedberg (2000) and Casson
(2000).  On entrepreneurship in the university context see Clark
(1998).  In the context of cultural institutions see DiMaggio (1982a,
1982b).  In the context of social movements see McCarthy and Zald
(1987) and Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus (1997).  McCarthy and Zald
(1987: 18) use the phrase "issue entrepreneurs".  Their emphasis,
however, is on movements generally, and they do not develop a general
theory of the issue entrepreneur as an individual, or of issue
entrepreneurship as a form of social practice.

It has often been observed that experts, for example the members of
professions, play distinctive cognitive roles in society (e.g., Bohman
1999).  My point here, though, is more general: a democratic republic
will make available a repertoire of institutions and action-forms that
enable any citizen, whether formally credentialed or not, to pursue a
career as an issue entrepreneur.

[20] Lin's (2001: 36-39) theory of social capital assumes that the
social system is organized as a hierarchical social network, but
offers little explanation of how individuals attain their particular
locations on one stratum or another except to say that they invest
effort in new social links with people on the strata above them.

[21] Arguing from a conservative perspective, Zijdervald (2000)
asserts that social networks are replacing the institutions
within which people formerly found their positions in society.  He
worries, though, that mere networks may be incapable of serving the
socializing, value-instilling function of traditional institutions.
Similarly, Sandel (1984: 93) argues that "[b]y the mid- to late
twentieth century ... the [United States] proved too vast a scale
across which to cultivate the shared self-understandings necessary to
community in the formative, or constitutive sense.  And so the gradual
shift, in our practices and institutions, from a public philosophy
of common purpose to one of fair procedures, from a politics of good
to a politics of right, from the national republic to the procedural
republic".

[22] See Agre (2002); Barney (2000); Becker and Wehner (2001);
Buchstein (1997); Florini (2000); Hacker and van Dijk (2001); Hague
and Loader (1999); Hoff, Horrocks, and Tops (2000); Netanel (2000);
and Norris (2001).  On the civic networking movement see Doctor and
Dutton (1999), Friedland (1996), Schuler (1996), and Tambini (2001).

[23] Berkowitz (1996) argues that proposals for deliberative democracy
unfairly tilt the political playing field towards the very sorts
of sophisticated and articulate individuals who tend to support them,
and a similar objection might be raised to my own proposals here.
In each case, though, the obvious response is the same: you cannot
have a democratic republic without an educated citizenry, and one
purpose of a democratic republican political theory is to sketch the
syllabus for the necessary education.

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