A commonwealth of freedom: Response to Beltrán

Political Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 6, 2010, Pages 870-876

  Boyte, Harry C ^a  

^a AUGSBURG COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Agency; Arendt; Commonwealth; Organizing; Work

Indexed keywords

EID: 78649798791     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591710378595     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Stirrings of agency are visible in many settings in addition to the broad-based organizing. In 2007 the journal PEGS Journal: A Good Society organized a "civic field" meeting focused on agency and the group held an Institute of Civic Studies in the summer of 2009. The statement "The New Civic Politics" and the curriculum are at http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/?pid=710
2. Harry C. Boyte describes these developments in Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (Dayton, OH: Kettering, 2009).
3. Cristina Beltrán, "Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance," Political Theory 37, no. 5 (2009): 597, 598, 604.
4. See for instance Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989)
5. Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community-Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)
6. Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
7. Organizing-and the politics of the commonwealth-can be sharply contrasted with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), which affirms mobilizing in its most disruptive forms-they endorse piracy, for instance-and imagines a world in common that comes into being through revolution.
8. Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California/Berkeley)
9. The mobilizing of the town hall disruptions is described in Michael Tomasky, "Something New on the Mall," New York Review of Books, October 22, 2009, pp. 4-8
10. canvass is described in Dana Fisher, Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
11. Rom Coles, "Moving Democracy: IAF Social Movements and the Political Arts of Listening, Traveling, and Tabling in a Heterogeneous World," paper for APSA, August 19-September 2, 2002, Boston, 5
12. Beltrán, "Going Public," 601, 604.
13. Beltrán, "Going Public," 597, 609, 616, 617.
14. Mary Dietz, "'The Slow Boring of Hard Boards': Methodical Thinking and the Work of Politics," American Political Science Review 88, no. 4 (1994): 873-886 quotes from 874, 876.
15. Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
16. On the contrast between the prophetic stance and outside critic see Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
17. On the way churches and other groups functioned as free spaces in the African American freedom tradition see Frederick Harris, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? The Erosion and Transformation of African American Civic Life," Report for the National Commission on Civic Renewal (College Park, MD: Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, 1999).
18. On organizing, see Edward Chambers and Michael A. Cowan, Roots of Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action and Justice (New York: Cowan Books, 2004)
19. On public work, see Harry C. Boyte and Nan Kari, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996)
20. Langston Hughes, "Freedoms Plow," in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Random House, 1990, p. 293
21. Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Viking Press, 2004).