Coming very soon: the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society, edited by Michael Edwards. As the blurb says, “In the past two decades, ‘civil society’ has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations.”

The Handbook provides 38 chapters, including Theda Skocpol on “Civil Society in the United States,” Nina Eliasoph on “Civil Society and Civility,” Craig Calhoun on “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Harry Boyte on “Civil Society and Public Work,” Mark E. Warren on “Civil Society and Democracy,” and me on “Civic Knowledge.” I have mentioned authors whose work I happen to know especially well, but of equal importance are the chapters on civil society in other parts of the world. The price is steep at $150, but you can recommend that your friendly librarian order it from Oxford University Press.

(Macon, GA) The Great Depression of the 1930s left a visual signature: black-and-white images of hobos and 5-cent apples, Hoovervilles and gaunt Appalachian farm women.

What will be the memorable images of the Great Recession? That aesthetic question is certainly not the most important one, but it raises deeper issues about what kind of period we are going through, how it compares to our national experience, and how it will be remembered.

I pose the question on a day when we learned that GDP growth rate remains miserable three years after the initial crash and has been worse that whole time than we thought–while Congress is considering an austerity package that may cut another half percent off GDP.

We should be cautious comparing our times to the Great Recession. As this helpful table from CNN indicates, all the gross economic statistics were much worse then. Besides, the baseline was much lower in 1928; thus people were far more vulnerable to destitution. The Great Depression produced clearly visible signs of suffering, such as thousands of people loading their last few possessions onto Model T’s and heading to California.

But the current recession is quietly devastating. It has, for example, reduced the median net worth of Hispanic households to $6,325 and of African-American households to $5,677–figures that have a 1930s ring to them.

Moreover, those black-and-white WPA photos tell an exaggerated story when juxtaposed to today. Life went on in 1931, as it does in 2011. In fact, my family’s house and our whole suburban neighborhood were built early in the Great Depression. The ceilings were lower than they would have been in the 1920s–to economize on heating–but they were middle-class homes, experienced in living color by the people who owned them. At the peak of the Depression, one quarter of American workers were unemployed, but three quarters were still at work, doing things like building our suburb.

So what will evoke our times decades from now? Images of foreclosure signs in desert subdivisions? Abandoned strip malls? Or will we think of iPads and Facebook and let memories of the economic decline slip away?

The Frontiers conference took place at Tufts on July 21-23. We hadn’t invited many individuals or even advertised the conference widely, but 117 people attended, ranging from high school and college students to senior professors and CEOs of important civic organizations. They came from as far as Germany, California, and Forida.

As I said at the opening, it would be presumptuous to try to characterize all their views, but I think we formed a community that, in general,

• Struggles for diverse, equal, and inclusive civic engagement.
• Believes that “engagement” means more than just voting, but must also encompass better ways of talking and listening with fellow citizens.
• Yet is not satisfied with deliberation alone but wants to connect it to action, work, co-creation, “civic artisanship,” or power.
• Seeks innovative forms of democracy (“not your grandfather’s civic engagement”): hence the conference track on engaging the online public.
• Creates spaces for people to make their own decisions and to set their own goals and values, and is therefore drawn to the ideal of “neutrality”–but is also committed to values such as equality and diversity. Hence our conference track on the dilemmas of neutrality.
• Seeks to reflect on practice and to bring ideas and ideals into the real world: hence our track on theory and practice.

The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better Time, a meeting held in 2009 at University of New Hampshire. The atmosphere then was optimistic, to say the least. Even the participants who had not voted for Barack Obama were encouraged by the outpouring of civic activism in 2008 and the expansion of relevant federal programs such as AmeriCorps. We talked then about how we would flourish as soon as the recession ended.

Now is not “no better time.” During our conference itself, the headlines screamed that a murderous racist had hunted and killed more than 90 children in one of the world’s safest and strongest democracies; the Speaker of the House walked out on the President of the United States during negotiations to save the full faith and credit of the Republic while the economy continues to sag; and the whole country baked in heat that seemed to portend the climate we will leave to our children. We conference organizers had hoped to engender optimism, hope, and confidence in our field. I am not sure we succeeded, or if that goal was possible.

But I did witness a great deal of learning, network-building, and productive mental and emotional struggle. To name one example, we had intentionally focused on the Nobel-Prize-winning theory of Elinor Ostrom because it is rich with possibilities for civic action and has been developed in close partnership with practitioners. Yet Ostrom’s work is not about deliberation nearly as much as it is concerned with changing the incentives for investment and consumption. If you are a deliberative democrat–like the majority of conference attendees–your ideal may be a room full of citizens talking and listening. If you are an “Ostromite,” you may think instead of municipalities, firms, and public boards negotiating contracts to govern the use of scarce water across the Los Angeles basin.

And yet deliberation can play an important role in such work; and getting people to deliberate is a collective-action problem for which Elinor Ostrom proposes solutions. So the potential is great for Ostrom’s economic theory to enrich deliberative democracy, and vice-versa, in both research and practice. Such are the exchanges and collaborations that I believe we began to build together at Frontiers.

Today, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we discussed James Madison’s famous definition:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Also today, the New York Times’ conservative commentator, David Brooks, writes:

American conservatism now has a rich network of Washington interest groups adept at arousing elderly donors and attracting rich lobbying contracts. … [Grover] Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible. …

The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners. …

Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. They have created a climate in which purity is prized over practicality….

For many legislators, the purpose of being in Congress is not to pass laws. It’s to create clear contrasts you can take into the next election campaign. It’s not to take responsibility for the state of the country and make it better. It’s to pass responsibility onto the other party and force them to take as many difficult votes as possible. …

They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes.

Are the House Republicans and their movement allies a faction, in the Madisonian sense? The first issue is whether they are “united and actuated by some common impulse.” Their ability to enforce party-line votes and to use coordinated talking points are evidence that they are united, at least compared to any party 20 years ago.

Next, are they “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”? Brooks attributes bad motives to some of them, but if the test is subjective intent, they may not be factional. I suspect that many think they are putting their own reelection in jeopardy by supporting policies (such as deeply defunding the federal government) that promote the “permanent and aggregate interest of the community.”

But Madison’s definition does not require intent. A cause can be well-intentioned, or partly so, and yet “adversed” to the common interest–as long as we are able to say what the common interest is. I would say, and I believe polls show that Americans agree, that the common interest includes:

• A deliberative legislature in which reasons hold sway and are answered with reasons–hence brinkmanship and hostage-taking are contrary to the common interest.
• Preservation of the full faith and credit of the United States, even if it undercuts short-term policy goals.
• Recognition that there are rival parties which have legitimate places in the political system; hence one should economize on differences, where possible, because one will have to cooperate later.
• Shared sacrifice: responses to economic crises should generally mean imposing costs on all sectors and economic strata, perhaps tilted in favor of the poor, but not the rich.

By this standard, the House Republicans may be acting as a faction, and a majority faction within government that has the potential to capture the other two branches in 2012. That is a dangerous for our constitutional design.

In Downsizing Democracy,* Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg suggest that 19th and 20th century nations needed mass support in order to field huge armies and float national debts. But postmodern nations need neither mass conscription in wartime nor huge numbers of their own citizens to buy bonds. Their governments really do not need mass support, and that is why turnout has fallen and the influence of wealthy donors has risen in countries like the United States. (One could also observe the apparent success of non-democratic countries like China.)

To buy this theory, you need not presume that “elites” are aware of any of the above and have deliberately orchestrated mass participation and then demobilization. A roughly Darwinian account–survival of the fittest–would explain the trends instead. (This is my conjecture, not directly out of Crenson and Ginsberg.)

Go back to 1600, and you will observe nation states in Europe and other parts of the world that are run by monarchs and aristocratic castes. A king must borrow money to hire professional soldiers to protect himself and conquer others. The ones who cannot borrow are at risk. King Philip II of Spain, for example–although he inherited the greatest empire of the age–went bankrupt in 1557, 1560, 1576, and 1596. It is not coincidental that both the Netherlands and England flourished at Spain’s expense during his reign.

The Dutch invented an alternative. They borrowed money from their own people to field a highly professional, permanent army and navy. Their people were willing to buy government bonds because their government was republican, hence accountable to the citizen-lenders. The Dutch economy, empire, and influence grew, only to be checked by England when it had adopted the same mechanisms–parliamentary government and a national debt. England became republican in the mid-1600s and then a constitutional monarchy in the 1700s not because its leaders saw that mass support would give them an edge in war, but for complex internal reasons. Regardless of the reasons, this change rendered them “fitter” than their competitors, and soon Britannia ruled the waves. The Glorious Revolution was like a random mutation that conferred evolutionary advantage on its organism.

The United States adopted the Anglo-Dutch model as we rose to global power. In 1900, 73 percent of American men voted (even though a significant number were effectively blocked by racial discrimination). The popular democracies had dangerous rivals in the form of dictatorships, which used a combination of authentic mass support and terror to mobilize their people. But the democracies prevailed in 1945 and 1989–voting seemed to work better than terror.

Since then, the world’s most powerful militaries have renounced conscription because they are deadlier using highly trained professionals and expensive technology. Governments no longer need large numbers of their own people to buy bonds, because they can borrow from institutions and millionaires around the world. Mass support no longer gives countries a Darwinian edge, and neither the European nor the North American democracies can really claim mass support any more.

That is a sobering thought if you favor popular democracy.

*Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized its Public (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)