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how conversations between people rely on unspoken assumptions. We all mean much more than we can say. Not only do we take for granted that we don’t have to lay out every detail of the substance of what we want to communicate, we assume people already know a lot of what we want to tell them, including the definitions of the words we use. There is also quite a bit communicated that we can’t say. Take the example of trying to teach someone else to knit. How much of it can you say in words? Quite a bit, but suppose that you didn’t have yarn and needles handy and you couldn’t illustrate with hand gestures. (Maybe the two of you are talking on the phone.) Do you think you could explain it well enough so the other person could actually learn to knit just by what you said? Or, to put it another way, do you think that everything you know about knitting can be put into words? (Those who don’t knit can substitute throwing a baseball, fixing a faucet, or playing a musical instrument.)Yet somehow people pass on knowledge that can’t be spoken aloud. Could we do this, as we routinely do, unless we were already connected to one another? At this point, sociology links itself to Heidegger’s views on the nature of reality. As Ralph Hummel explains, “We already understand each other before language comes along.” Speech does not create the possibility of mutual understanding, “Rather, it is because we already fundamentally understand each other to be fellow human beings that speech is possible.”15 Could we construct reality, as these sociologists have argued we do, if this fundamental understanding did not underlie our life with others? The idea that reality is socially constructed calls attention to the existence of community not as a thing, like a building or a machine, but as a process. Buried within the forms of knowledge and the views of the state we inherited from Descartes and Hobbes (among others) is the assumption that societies, communities, and other social phenomena are objects somehow disconnected, or at least distinguishable, from the people who comprise them. A famous sociologist in this tradition once said, “Consider social facts as things.”16 But what if we consider them as processes rather than objects? Mary Parker Follett, one of the most creative writers on organizations, suggested we do this. In the early twentieth century, Follett proposed The Social Reality of Public Space 97 a view of reality that gave equal weight to the individual and the social. She saw individual selves not as fixed but as constantly being formed and re-formed from their immersion in social interactions. Individuals are individuals, she argued, but what sustains them is relation , “the ceaseless interplay of the One and the Many by which both are constantly making each other.”17 The fact that the individual and the social are interwoven, said Follett, makes ideas of political representation or the division of power completely off the mark.To see governments and organizations formed around declared purposes is a mistake. Community process creates common purpose and is constantly evolving it. (More about a process understanding of governance in the next chapter.) Publc Lfe How do we bring this philosophy and this sociology into our understanding of public life? Perhaps the first step is to remind ourselves of the view of politics we have taken so thoroughly for granted. It is easy to find supporting evidence by just watching TV or reading the newspaper —politics built on the assumption that human beings are by nature separated, isolated, competitive, and violent. Ordinary politics leaps from this assumption to the conclusion that the only way to live together is to construct a system of external controls that rely on individual blame and punishment. We turn our freedom over to Leviathan—to a government in which the vast majority of us have no say over what happens , other than pulling a lever or touching a screen in the voting booth. We turn the power over to our leaders and tell them to keep us all in line and punish anyone who transgresses.The state’s job is to referee the competition for spoils. As I suggested earlier, however, this view, labeled “realism” in order to tar any alternative view with the brush of fantasy, is no more real than any other way of looking at public...

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