The Civil Society Reader

21. from Making Democracy Work

21 Robert D. Putnam from Making Democracy Work The Civic Community: Some Theoretical Speculations In sixteenth-century Florence, reflecting on the unstable history of republican institutions in ancient times as well as in Renaissance Italy, Nicolò Machiavelli and several of his contemporaries concluded that whether free institutions succeeded or failed depended on the character of the citizens, or their “civic virtue.”1 According to a long-standing interpretation of Anglo-American political thought, this “republican” school of civic humanists was subsequently vanquished by Hobbes, Locke, and their liberal successors. Whereas the republicans had emphasized community and the obligations of citizenship, liberals stressed individualism and individual rights.2 Far from presupposing a virtuous, public-spirited citizenry, it was said, the U.S. Constitution, with its checks and balances, was designed by Madison and his liberal colleagues precisely to make democracy safe for the unvirtuous. As a guide to understanding modern democracy, civic republicans were passé. In recent years, however, a revisionist wave has swept across Anglo-American political philosophy “The most dramatic revision [of the history of political thought] of the last 25 years or so,” reports a not-uncritical Don Herzog, is the “the discovery—and celebration—of civic humanism.”3 The revisionists argue that an important republican or communitarian tradition descended from the Greeks and Machiavelli through seventeenth-century England to the American Founders.4 Far from exalting individualism, the new republicans recall John 1. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 2. Of course, neither “republican” nor “liberal” has the same meaning in this historical dialogue as in contemporary American partisan politics. For the classic liberal interpretation of Anglo-American political thought, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 3. Don Herzog, “Some Questions for Republicans,” Political Theory 14 (1986): 473. 4. In this wide-ranging debate, see (among many others) Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Winthrop’s eloquent, communitarian admonition to the citizens of his “city set upon a hill”: “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoyce together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.”5 The new republican theorists have not gone unchallenged. The defenders of classical liberal individualism argue that the notion of community lauded by the new republicans is a “dangerous and anachronistic ideal.”6 Remarkably, this wideranging philosophical debate has so far taken place almost entirely without reference to systematic empirical research, whether within the Anglo-American world or elsewhere. Nevertheless, it contains the seeds for a theory of effective democratic governance: “As the proportion of nonvirtuous citizens increases significantly , the ability of liberal societies to function successfully will progressively diminish.”7 We want to explore empirically whether the success of a democratic government depends on the degree to which its surroundings approximate the ideal of a “civic community.”8 But what might this “civic community” mean in practical terms? Reflecting upon the work of republican theorists, we can begin by sorting out some of the central themes in the philosophical debate. Civic Engagement Citizenship in a civic community is marked, first of all, by active participation in public affairs. “Interest in public issues and devotion to public causes are the key signs of civic virtue,” suggests Michael Walzer.9 To be sure, not all political activity Putnam: Making Democracy Work 323 • Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Isaac Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (June 1982): 629–664; Alasdair MacIntyre , After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981); Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Dorothy Ross, “The Liberal Tradition Revisited and the Republican Tradition Addressed,” in John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 81–96; Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History, eds. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind , and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Michael Walzer, “Civility and Civic Virtue in Contemporary America,” in his Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 5. Cited in Bellah...