Frontiers of Democracy 2025: Listening and Leading

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Please hold the dates (June 19-21, 2025) and consider proposing one or more sessions for this conference by April 18. Be sure to register and take advantage of the “early bird” discounted rate, available until March 29.

Tisch College is launching an initiative on Generous Listening and Dialogue (GLADi), led by Jonathan Tirrell. As part of this effort, the special theme of Frontiers in 2025 is “Listening and Leading,” focused on how to characterize, navigate, and overcome challenges associated with division and polarization in our world. Join us for robust conversations (and constructive disagreements) about the role of and approaches to listening and dialogue (perhaps especially across difference) for a thriving democracy.?

This theme is not exclusive; we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star:” building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. As always, we are eager to continue past conversations, such as about violence and nonviolence, and religious pluralism and democracy. We welcome proposals in these areas, regardless of whether they relate to listening and dialogue.

Although we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we generally prefer proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats.

Learn more and register here.

radical change needs institutional innovation

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In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”

A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.

In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:

The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).

Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.

Source: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False necessity: anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy: from Politics, a work in constructive social theory. London: Verso, 2004. See also: the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments

Victorians warn us about AI

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In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct:

Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill had not forecast such a future as explicitly as Eliot would do, but he used it as a thought-experiment to demonstrate that the point of life is to develop one’s own capacities, not to accomplish any practical ends. A life in which important matters are handled by other minds–or by machines–is a life devoid of value:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

The possibility that AI will render us extinct remains speculative, 150 years after Eliot posited it. But there is an urgent, present threat that AI tools will “guide” us along “some good path” and thereby block “the free development of individuality,” which “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”

See also: the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; artificial intelligence and problems of collective action; what I would advise students about ChatGPT; the human coordination involved in AI; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human etc. I owe the reference to Eliot to Harry Law.

strategies, policies, and skills

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I’m thinking about the differences among strategies, policies, and skills, mainly because the Tufts Civic Studies Major, which I direct, aims to teach all three. I assume that definitions of these concepts have been extensively discussed, but without consulting any literature, I’m inclined to categorize them as follows:

  • Skill: The ability to do something useful. A skill can be quite concrete (e.g., conducting an interview) or more abstract (leading a team). Developing a skill often involves imitation, practice, and perhaps a dose of theory. Typically, we attribute skills to individuals, although I suppose that a group can be skillful.
  • Policy: A choice that an institution makes that affects people and/or nature. Such a choice need not be conscious and deliberate. However, if something happens by necessity, I wouldn’t call it a policy. A policy is something that the institution could change by choosing otherwise. Therefore, policy-analysis is about identifying the choices available to institutions, predicting their consequences, and assessing which one is preferable.
  • Strategy: A planned sequence of actions by an individual or group that aims to accomplish some goal. A strategy that’s worthy of that name considers the opportunities, constraints, risks, and threats, including the possible reactions of other people and groups. A strategy can leave room for revision and improvisation, but it needs enough detail to inform action. Therefore, learning about strategy involves identifying possible courses of action and their likely impact and assessing which course is preferable.

These categories relate and overlap in many ways. Policy analysis and strategic planning are skills. Good strategy involves the application of available skills. (For instance, the first part of a strategy might be to deploy skilled people to recruit members.) A strategy can aim to affect policy. A policy can be part of a larger strategy. Institutions may enact and implement policies to develop skills. And so on.

Nevertheless, these concepts are sufficiently distinct that I hope that we offer each to our students.

I would also note that skills, strategies, and policies can be good or bad. The difference depends on their ethics and their outcomes–both their means and ends. Therefore, normative analysis and argumentation must complement any education about skills, policy, and strategy.