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My new article entitled “Civic Studies,” in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly (Vol 32, No 1 (2014) is meant to be an overview in just a few pages. I also argue for the importance of conservative thought and suggest that much civic engagement work is conservative–in the best sense.
Peter —
I appreciate your careful thought in this piece, as always, as well as your respect for conservative arguments, but it seems to me that in this treatment you neglect sufficient attention to “agency,” another key dimension of civic studies in addition to “co-creation” (though of course the “do” in “what should we do” points toward action and the capacity to act, as you’ve argued elsewhere).
Enhancement of agency, or civic agency in collective terms, implicitly raises questions of democracy, and also, in civic studies terms, the instrumentalities through which people act and deepen their capacities for action. “Institutions” is too abstract (a conceptual way, born of modern positivist modes of thought, of reifying what are in fact complex communities; one of our key lessons of organizing for “institutional transformation” over the last 25 years is that one has to reconceive “institutions” as “communities” which can be organized).
I’d suggest the concept of free spaces is helpful here — and points beyond left and right, or in Yuval Levin’s terms, the Burkean impulse focused on continuities and stabilities in the “little platoons” of daily life rooted in the life of communities, or the “temper of Thomas Paine, desiring to “make the world over.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which free spaces, found at the heart of democratic movements, are the places which hold in tension impulses — toward change and continuity; tradition and “escape from parochialism”; the quotidian and the large-scale; the private and the public – otherwise sundered in conventional civic and democratic theory. Here’s a blog on the point, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-boyte/higher-education-and-the-_3_b_5747818.html . This summer in both South Africa and Scotland, I was also quite taken with how much the formal public narrative of change and movements — the ‘People’s Palace” in Glasgow, purported to be about working class politics and life; or the photo exhibits of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa — leave out or render invisible “middling spaces” which have taken on free space qualities. The narrative is private life on the one hand, often filled with oppression and suffering, and then mass politics — defiance, mass demonstrations, etc. — on the other. By the way, this view of ‘movements” also seems to infuse the climate march in New York, visible in the 350.org documentary “Disruption.”
I think, by way of contrast, that themes of places which develop a “freedom spirit” of natality grounded in sustainable settings come through powerfully in the forthcoming collection, Democracy’s Education, to which you have contributed such a splendid essay.
Harry Boyte