Today I signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a new book, tentatively entitled We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: The Philosophy and Practice of Civic Renewal.* The manuscript still needs some revision but should, I think, reach the bookstores in 2012.

The overall argument is that citizens must combine direct work with talking and listening if we are to address our most serious public problems. Better government will not suffice. Through civic engagement (collaboration plus deliberation), we can address even our worst crises. But civic engagement is blocked or frustrated by the policies, priorities, and structures of large-scale institutions. To expand its scope and power will require changes in institutions, in the way we organize ourselves in civil society, and even in how we define and think about politics. Fortunately, those changes are within reach if individuals and small groups of citizens direct their political activism in the right ways. I try to draw a line from what you and I can do as individuals all the way through to how society can solve major problems.

Chapter 1: Overview: The Public and Our Problems

I argue that problems like the incarceration epidemic and our inability to adjust to fundamental economic change cannot be solved by policy reforms, even though existing policies are damaging. I use examples to show that these crises can be addressed by civic engagement, properly understood.

Chapter 2: How to Think About Politics: Values, Facts, and Strategies

This relatively short chapter is really a justification of the book’s method and a call for people to think differently about politics. I claim that mainstream academic thought divides facts from values, and both facts and values from strategies, in ways that block the solutions of serious problems. Scholarship also deprecates deliberate human action and agency. The rest of the book is supposed to illustrate an alternative, which my colleagues and I have called “civic studies.”

Chapter 3: Values: What Makes a Good Democracy

This is the philosophical chapter. It is an argument for collaboration and deliberation. In part, the argument is epistemological (although I never use that word, because I aim for a non-technical style throughout). I claim, in other words, that we can only know what to do if we combine working with talking and listening in a particular, open-ended way. This position contrasts with various forms of elitism, technocratic and scientific approaches to politics, and ideology. Thus much of the chapter consists of an argument against these alternatives. (It is too long and I am looking for ways of compressing it.)

Chapter 4: Facts: The State of American Democracy

This chapter (which all peer reviewers have considered the strongest part of the book) has two parts. The first is an argument that our politics and civil society have been profoundly corrupted, not only by money–although I gave money sustained attention–but also by the demise of institutions committed to engaging citizens and deliberating the common good. The second part summarizes the development of new and highly promising alternatives, almost all of which remain fairly small. A coda considers the 2008 Obama Campaign as a case study of our current situation. Both Obamas were deeply schooled in exactly the alternative civic culture that I praise. But once they obtained national power, they could not implement what they had learned at the community level, precisely because of the deep corruption of our public institutions.

Chapter 5: Strategies: How to Accomplish Civic Renewal

This is the chapter in which I try to draw a line all the way from the intentional work of small groups (like you and me) to the solution of large-scale public problems. One key step is to argue that a nascent community of at least one million Americans are already experienced in, and committed to, the combination of deliberation and collaboration that we need. We must turn that significant minority into an organized political force that expands the role of civic engagement.

*I am ambivalent about my tentative title. It seems descriptive of the content of the book. The phrase, which I find moving, does not belong to Barack Obama but can be traced back to the Civil Rights Era (as he fully acknowledges). I am not endorsing but respectfully criticizing the president’s approach to civic renewal. After a few years, I doubt that “We are the ones …” will evoke the 2008 Obama Campaign as narrowly as it does now. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to use the phrase if it suggests that the book is about Obama or simply endorses him. I am open to suggestions …