The Civil Society Reader

17. from Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America

17 Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte from Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America In 1849, one of Herman Melville’s characters in his novel Mardi presented to the people of Vivenza—the United States—a document that reminded them “freedom is more social than political,” meant to suggest that democracy depended upon the virtue and intelligence of the citizens themselves. In outrage, the Vivenzans shredded the document. The book’s dismal sales in the mid-nineteenth century seemed to Melville a disgusting confirmation of his warning. Today, the same idea sounds to some a distant echo from the past.1 “Democracy” is a term used frequently and with little content. American Presidents like Ronald Reagan, who, shortly after his election, declared to the British Parliament his intention to launch a program to spread “democracy throughout the world,” invoke it to separate the “free world” from “communist totalitarianism.” The idea of citizenship, however, was entirely missing from the President’s discussion of democracy. Yet, as Sheldon Wolin has observed, “the silence on the subject is not peculiar to conservatives or reactionaries. . . . Most Marxists are interested in the ‘masses’ or the workers, but they dismiss citizenship as a bourgeois conceit, formal and empty.” The problem has a simple source. Notions of active citizenship and the common good have all but disappeared from our modern vocabulary because we have come to define the arenas in which active citizenship is nourished and given meaning as entirely outside of “politics” and “public life.”2 More than thirty years ago, Baker Brownell, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who had been involved in a number of community development projects, wrote a book entitled The Human Community. It polemicized 1. The story of Melville is from Larzer Ziff, “Landlessness: Melville and the Democratic Hero,” democracy 1 (July 1981): 130–31. 2. Sheldon Wolin, “What Revolutionary Action Means Today,” democracy 2 (Fall 1982): 18. angrily against the academic world from which he came. “Truth is more than a report ,” said Brownell. “It is an organization of values. Efficiency is more than a machine; it is a human consequence.” Captivated by technique, procedure, method, and specialization, Brownell argued, the educated middle class had lost sight of actual face-to-face relations—the actual life of communities themselves —which create the most important criteria for judging any innovation or change. “It is the persistent assumption of those who are influential . . . that largescale organization and contemporary urban culture can somehow provide suitable substitutes for the values of the human communities that they destroy,” he declared . “For want of a better word I call these persons ‘the educated’ professionals , professors, businessmen, generals, scientists, bureaucrats, publicists, politicians , etc. They may be capitalist or they may be Communist in their affiliations, Christian or Jew, American, English, German, Russian or French. But below these relatively superficial variations among the ‘educated’ there is a deeper affiliation. They are affiliated in the abstract, anonymous, vastly expensive culture of the modern city.”3 Brownell stated the case starkly. He largely neglected motivations other than a narrowly individualist search for power and achievement that leads people away from settled communities.4 And he paid little attention to the enormous complexity of community life. Ties of place, gender, memory, kinship, work, ethnicity, value and religious belief, and many other bonds may in different contexts be sources of communal solidarity or of fragmentation. Communities can be open, evolving, and changing—or static, parochial, defensive, and rigid. They can 256 The Civil Society Reader • 3. Baker Brownell, The Human Community (New York: Harper, 1953), pp. 135, 19–20. 4. In particular, Brownell neglected what Robert Bellah and others have termed the “expressive individualist” strain in American culture that is embodied in much therapeutic language—notions that the basic commitments and purposes of one’s life come through the search for self-realization and self expression. The focus on expressive individualism in American culture, especially as it has melded with consumerism and high rates of mobility and the like, may have contributed to the weakening of what Bellah and his associates call “communities of memory and hope,” more stable, continuous sets of relationships characteristic of working-class (and, interestingly in different terms, upper-class) life. But at times it is also the source of creative intellectual and artistic energy—much of the protean American spirit that is so attractive to other peoples in the world. And the fusion of expressive...