Harry C. Boyte

CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics.

Tracing citizen activism back to the American Revolution, Boyte shows how this touchstone of democratic practice emerged in our past and continues today among diverse citizen groups who grapple with the problems of housing, education, environment, and youth development in their communities.

Constructive Politics as Public Work: Organizing the Literature

This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis.

Public Work and the Politics of the Commons

Elinor Ostrom’s share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics is cause for celebration among supporters of the commonwealth and democracy alike. While her work provides powerful conceptual resources for sustaining shared resources, it also points toward a democratizing politics that has large implications for overcoming the bitter divisions in today’s political landscape and making signifi cant changes in contemporary societies as well. Th e theory-building of Ostrom and others associated with the “Bloomington School,” based at Indiana University, has considerably helped to counter widespread pessimism about the fate of the commons. Specifi cally, they refuted Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 article, “Th e Tragedy of the Commons,” which summed up conventional wisdom that common resources are doomed. Hardin, defi ning the commons as a “free resource” open to all, predicted its inevitable ruin as each individual pursues his or her own self-interests. 1

A Commonwealth of Freedom: Response to Beltrán

This response to Cristina Beltrán’s essay “Going Public” endorses Beltrán’s effort to sustain a concept of politics as free action by unique agents against the grain of a technicized, marketized world. Beltrán illuminates the “festive anger” of undocumented workers coming out of the shadows of invisibility to assert their humanity in the demonstrations of 2006. Yet, building on aspects of Hannah Arendt (but neglecting others), Beltrán mistakenly sunders public actions from the organizing work which led up to them. Her argument about labor is confounded by theory and practice of civic agency in broad-based organizations and elsewhere, which teaches the power, freedom, and civic authority to be gained from affirming that people co-create the common world, the commonwealth, through their work, even if not under conditions of their choosing.

Information Age Populism

Recoveringpopulism In recent years, in public discussion “populism” hasmost oftenmeant a folksy style, demagogic leaderswhoprofess to champion victimized people, or regulatory, tax and otherpolicies that championcommonpeople againstpredatory interests. Populismalsohasdeepermeanings. In thequoteabove,SaulAlinsky, the iconoclasticJewishactivistwho isoftencalled the father of community organizing in theUnited States, passionately restated the basic populist

The American Dream

Values education needs to become much more closely tied to education for civic agency, the skills, capacities, and identities needed for effective collective action on issues that also advances values of the common good, in environments where civic values are under siege. This will require a bolder and more political conception of the role of values educators, tied to the challenge of redeeming a democratic understanding of the American dream.

Facilitating citizenship: An interview with peg michels

This interview with an experienced political campaign field organizer and manager suggests that attitudes toward the current practice of electoral politics overlook the connection between citizenship and empowerment. Self government cannot be passive, and active citizenship requires both knowledge of issues and personal political involvement.