Author Archives: Peter Levine

call for papers

I’m on my way to the National 4-H Center for a meeting organized by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. We’re calling it a “Research & Practitioner Meeting,” because it combines leading scholars who study public deliberation with practitioners who run actual public discussion forums. Our goals are to set an ambitious research agenda for the field, and also to pick some small projects that can be funded out of our existing money. I was on the planning committee for the conference, so I’m excited about it.

Connected to this conference is a proposed book that John Gastil has organized, although I’m the co-editor. Anyone who might like to write a chapter on a particular approach to public deliberation should check out the Call for Papers that John has written.

On a completely unrelated note, I had a chance last week to meet Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski. With the loss of Senator Wellstone, she is the only community organizer in the Senate. Not knowing anything about me, she said that America needs a new progressive era. I couldn’t help replying that I had written a book with that very title. I’m sure this made me sound like a self-promoting academic; and if I were going to promote myself, I would have preferred to tell her about our community work in Prince George’s County. In any case, she then made a speech in support of Americorps, which she has championed since it was created.

the capabilities approach

I was just refreshing my memory about the “capabilities approach” pioneered by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. (I have been asked to comment on a paper about “positive youth development,” and I thought that Sen’s ideas would be relevant and helpful.) The rough idea is that we ought to implement social policies that maximize people’s capabilities. The important human capabilities can be listed, although theorists differ somewhat about what belongs on the list. Enhancing capabilities is better than maximizing a set of behaviors or goods, because people should be able to choose what to own and how to behave, within broad limits; and different things are valued in different cultures. Thus trying to maximize goods or behaviors is too prescriptive. Enhancing capabilities is also better than simply giving people what they say they want or need. People can want completely bad things, e.g., crack cocaine. Or they can want too much, as in the case of Hollywood actors who want to have six Hummers. Or they can want too little, which is a common problem among the world’s very poor.

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hard-headed research on service-learning

I am going to give a plenary address to the annual Service-Learning Research Conference in a few weeks. (“Service-learning” means a combination of community service with academic work on the same topic: a common approach today.) I’m going to argue that research on service-learning needs to be much more tough-minded. Proponents need to show that average service-learning programs produce better outcomes over the long term than rival approaches, considering not only the benefits but also the costs (in time and money) and the risks. Such research requires random assignment of students to service-learning projects and to rival methods, and then long-term follow-up.

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defining “public intellectuals”

I’m still being interviewed (by email) for a journal article. In response to one question, I proposed a general definition of a ?public intellectual.? This is someone, I said, who tries to help (or even prod) concrete groups of people to become self-reflective and thoughtful about their own problems and interests; conscious of their own opportunities, choices, limitations, and tradeoffs; aware of their disagreements and the reasons for them; and capable of ?political? action (broadly understood).

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analytic versus continental philosophy

Ten to 15 years ago, when I first studied philosophy, the great divide was between the “analytic” and “continental” traditions. Some people wouldn’t talk to colleagues in the opposite camp, and departments fell apart as a result. I think the conflict is dying down today, partly because of the waning significance of the French postmodern thinkers. They were the figures in the continental canon who provoked the deepest contempt from the analytic side. Many analytic philosophers can understand why one would study Hegel, Nietzsche, or Husserl, but not Derrida or Baudrillard.

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