We’ll be in Upstate New York until August 24th, and I’m going offline to rest and recharge. No posts here until the 27th.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
the British shift to participation
While on our side of the Atlantic we struggle to promote themes of public participation (see the November Fifth Coalition for some ideas), in Britain, the new Government has fully embraced civic engagement. As Polly Toynbee writes in the Guardian:
Ministers keep saying it – the key to success in social programmes is through breathing new life into communities. Research into what works in urban renewal finds engaging the people is the only answer. On Monday the new “neighbourhood renewal action plan” is launched, designed to reach down into the heart of the poorest places, promising to rebuild communities from the bottom upwards. The word is local “empowerment”.
The vision of the celestial city looks something like this: parents are involved daily with schools. Churches and local groups run after-school clubs, tenants on estates control their own budgets. All local departments pool their budgets, working together to offer whatever local people want most. Mentors guide and support young offenders, aspirant businesses, struggling readers, prisoners or depressed young mothers, connecting the disconnected. Thus local government is re born as people use the rusty levers of power in their communities.
This is exactly the vision that inspires me and my colleagues. But Toynbee puts her finger on two problems. First, encouraging public participation runs exactly against the hallmark of “New Labour,” which has been efficient, accountable public administration. New Labour doesn’t throw money at problems or bury people in regulations. Instead, “every social programme comes with rigorous targets to be monitored ruthlessly. Every penny of public money is tied up in a public service agreement, where departments deliver or die on their Treasury contracts.” There were reasons for this style of government, and it’s not obvious that Labour can deliver both efficiency and participation.
Second, “there is no clamour for community involvement. It is a top-down prescription in a time when people have deserted the churches, the Rotary Club, the WI, political parties and trade unions. They don’t tell the pollsters they hanker after committees, minutes and points of order.”
What Oscar Wilde said about socialism is also true of civic empowerment: the problem is all those meetings. We will release a survey on October that measures Americans’ appetite for public participation. I’m not going to reveal any results until then, but suffice it to say that the question of demand is important.
Toynbee suggests investing money in public facilities so that they are comfortable, attractive, and welcoming. She notes that in the early 1900s, British public buildings were much nicer and more dignified than average British private homes. Now public and nonprofit institutions are decrepit and depressing, but homes are more comfortable than ever before. No wonder people prefer to watch the telly than hang out at the community center.
Toynbee argues that financial investment in the public sector is a precondition of civic engagement. She sees this as a principle that distinguishes the left from the right (notwithstanding Gordon Brown’s post-partisan rhetoric.) But interestingly, Toynbee (who stuck with Labour and refused to join the Liberal Democrats) cites Joseph Chamberlain in a favorable way. Chamberlain was a Liberal politician, not a socialist or a trade unionist. Perhaps a strategy of public investment, decentralization, civic mobilization, and state cooperation with civil society is the authentic heritage of British Liberalism; and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party ought to head in that direction. In the US, we have similar traditions to draw on.
(Most Americans who visit England see medieval and renaissance sites or stay in London, so they don’t understand the tremendous civic infrastructure of British provincial industrial cities in the Victorian era. Cities like Birmingham and Liverpool had public and nonprofit institutions, local pride, and social networks to rival or surpass Tocquevillian America. These institutions arose in the great age of the Liberal Party.)
Susanna Clarke’s industrial revolution
I think this is a fairly obvious point, but I can’t find it elaborated anywhere in the web: It seems to me that Susanna Clarke’s very entertaining novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an allegory of the Industrial Revolution. (Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin sort of says so, but very briefly.)
In real life, steam-driven mass manufacturing was born in the North of England. The financial, human, and social capital came in part from old Northern cities like York. But York did not become a major manufacturing center–that was the fate of cities like Manchester and Sheffield, which basically sprang up in the early 1800s.
The Industrial Revolution began during the Napoleonic Wars when, for example, pulley blocks for British ships were mass produced. But new manufacturing techniques did not seem to alter the war profoundly. Meanwhile, the new techniques were being used to create specialized luxury goods, such as Wedgwood pottery. The use of steam power and interchangeable parts was still a gentleman’s pastime and an interesting sideshow.
But these innovations expanded beyond anyone’s control or expectations. Suddenly, factories that burned fossil fuels and used interchangeable parts were producing most of England’s ordinary products (such as clothes); were employing a large proportion of the population; were threatening to enable mass human slaughter through deadly armaments and chemicals; and were changing the landscape itself–driving iron railroads across it and tearing the mountains open for coal.
[Spoiler warning: I reveal the conclusion of this very suspenseful novel below the fold.]
service interruption
This is our cable box, outside our bedroom window. It was flattened by a large truck while I was on a conference call a few minutes ago. Our high-speed Internet access goes through there. I’m now online though my cell phone. It’s slow, so I’m getting off. Happy weekend.principles of a discipline of citizenship
I’ve written before about the lack of an academic discipline relevant to civics or citizenship. If there were such a discipline, it might adopt the following principles:
The ultimate purpose of studying politics is to decide what should be done. That requires understanding ethics, strategy, and empirical facts and their causes.
Human beings have political agency that is worth studying, despite the power of big institutions. What human beings should do is an important question, not just how institutions should be organized.
Notwithstanding the previous point, it is crucial to understand how institutions reward or discourage ethical participation. It is not helpful to exhort people to be good citizens if they face barriers or collective-action problems.
Politics is not just the interaction of people or organizations that have different interests. It is also the process by which opinions, values, interests, and identities are formed. In other words, values are not exogenous to politics; they emerge from politics.
Politics is not zero-sum. There is an important aspect of politics that is creative, that expands the store of public goods.
People begin as powerless and voiceless infants and develop into active citizens. Human beings are agents in their own development, but they also need appropriate opportunities to develop political skills and identities. The opportunities must come in an appropriate sequence.
To understand politics often requires direct experience and real-world experimentation, not just data and laboratory-type experiments.
Politics is not merely a cost; it can be an intrinsic good.