Category Archives: civic theory

How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?

You might think that the USA must change deeply over the next decade, which will unfold 250 years after the decade in which our republic originally took shape and will include the first eight years after the Trump Administration.

You might also think that this change should be “civic.” Perhaps we need reforms to make our republic and society more civic, or we should change our economy, environment, and other aspects of our world in civic ways–or both.

To advance this conversation, we need sharper definitions of the word “civic” and concrete ideas about what civic reforms should look like in the late 2020s and 2030s.

One of the best places to look is the new special issue of Daedalus entitled “How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?” It grew out of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship and is edited by Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu. It is entirely open-access. I have not yet read every article, but all the contributors are excellent, and the topics are compelling, ranging from congressional reform to high school civic education, from local journalism to tech. platforms.

I offer the concluding contribution, entitled “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture.” The abstract says:

Americans must disagree better to sustain a healthier civic culture. This is not only a matter of individual behavior and values but also a question of institutional design. An example of an institution that generally supported disagreement, conversation, and collaboration in the twentieth century was the metropolitan daily newspaper, but its business model has collapsed. To recover civic culture, we need business models (defined broadly) for new institutions that can enable discussion and self-governance.

In the article, I actually argue that disagreeing well is insufficient. We must also produce and protect common-pool resources. For me, that combination comes close to defining the word “civic.”

To quote a bit more from my piece:

I think the main challenge of our moment is to develop civic organizations that can flourish and grow, teach civic skills and values, and serve as venues for constructive disagreement. The “upswing” that furnishes the title of the book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, … was an impressive period of innovation and expansion in U.S. civil society from 1900 to 1960.6 If we saw a similar civic renaissance today, not only would more people participate in familiar groups that discuss issues and manage common-pool resources (such as congregations and other traditional associations) but new forms would emerge to meet the needs of our time.

For example, during the period that Putnam and Romney Garrett label “the upswing,” reliable daily newspapers became prevalent in the United States. By 1972, 69 percent of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) that they read a newspaper “every day.”7 It is easy enough to envision a daily publication about serious matters, written by professionals to inform a whole community. The hard part is the business model. Why would many people pay for such a product? The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and occasional readers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily; the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

Also during the upswing, many colleges and universities offered some measure of civic education while contributing knowledge and culture to their communities and serving as significant venues for public debate. Universities collected state subsidies, tuition, philanthropy, and clinical fees, and they offered economic mobility, access to licensed professions, ambitious research prized by industry and the military, vigorous social life, and quasi-professional sports, along with civic benefits. This model is now under considerable stress, though it has not fully collapsed, as with the daily newspaper.8

Similarly, Putnam and Romney Garrett show that after 1910, high schools rapidly spread across the United States and became another pillar of civic culture, not only preparing students to be more capable citizens but also serving as foci for adult community life.9 No national policy made this happen. Instead, most communities found that they needed at least one high school to be economically competitive, and they taxed themselves to build and maintain their own schools. This model worked in many localities, although spending was never adequate in poor communities or for students of color. This model survives, notwithstanding consolidations that have removed high schools from some smaller towns and growing state subsidies for private schools.

Today, it is not hard to envision a social media platform that serves as an excellent venue for disagreeing well. Any platform must use an algorithm to decide what material each user sees, and a good algorithm would favor substantiative content from a deliberately diverse range of views. The question is how to capitalize such a platform so it can expand to rival the huge for-profit social media outlets of the present, which do the opposite for billions of users, favoring material that induces outrage and reinforces users’ prior assumptions. In other words, the problem is the same as the one that confronted proponents of professional journalism circa 1900, but we haven’t yet found a workable business model for our time.

Source: Peter Levine, “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture,” Daedalus 155(3) Summer 2026, pp. 203-207. See also: Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing (a video discussion with me).

Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

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I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.

what it would take for the public to trust science

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On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

love of the world

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I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Juergen Habermas (1929-2026)

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Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday. His death has been the occasion for several substantial and interesting obituaries. So far, I prefer Gal Beckerman’s in the New York Times.

I took a seminar on Habermas in 1988, when I was a college junior. Georgia Warnke was the professor, and I have kept her useful packet of readings to this day. Habermas crystallized my early thinking about politics and philosophy and has remained a pillar for me ever since. I discuss him in most of my books, with the most general and extensive presentation in chapter 5 of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (2022) The title of that book basically captures Habermas in a phrase. I have also recorded a 29-minute introductory lecture on him.

It is misleading to treat Habermas as a proponent of rational, civil discourse. (See “Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas,” 2018). I suspect that more Americans have read Iris Marion Young’s critique of Habermas (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, 2011) than have read Habermas itself. The late and lamented Iris Young caricatured him in that article. If Habermas wanted everyone to talk calmly all the time, then why did he conclude his two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, with a celebration of disruptive social movements?

Habermas lived so long and became famous so early that his public role is itself an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, Ronald Dworkin remarked that even Habermas’ fame is famous, and it is worth asking why someone who wrote such thorny theory occupied the position of (arguably) the most influential German thinker for half a century.

I took a whole semester course on Habermas–in English, on the other side of the Atlantic–when he still had 38 years ahead of him. That is an indication of his stature. But it does not mean that he shaped the course of history, or even of scholarship.

In Postwar, Tony Judt discusses “the demise of the continental intellectual.” On May 31, 2003, Habermas plus Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading thinkers published coordinated essays against the Iraq War in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came” (pp. 785-7).

I am not quoting Judt today to cast aspersions on Habermas, whose work was deep and broad. I suspect that changes in media and communications have reduced the influence of serious intellectuals. Besides, Habermas may never have wanted to be the new Jean-Paul Sartre. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Michel Foucault (born just three years before Habermas) deliberately shunned the role of the “universal intellectual”; and perhaps we are better off without such people. By all accounts, Habermas welcomed criticism and learned from a wide range of responses. He modeled what he advocated: listening and learning from others. I think his work will long outlive him.