Constructive politics as public work: Organizing the literature

Political Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 630-660

  Boyte, Harry C ^a  

^a AUGSBURG COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Agency; Citizenship; Commonwealth; Politics; Public work

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052587900     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591711413747     Document Type: Article

References (153)

1. "Polder," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder (accessed June 28, 2010). Jos Leenhouts, a Dutch educational leader, uses "poldering" to counter marketizing trends. Boyte interview with Leenhouts, May 16, 2010, Amsterdam.
2. Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973), 101.
3. Alaine Touraine, Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Abacus, 2007 edition), 316.
4. Jeffrey D. Hilmer, "The State of Participatory Democratic Theory," New Political Science 32 (March 2010): 43-63, at 43.
5. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970);
6. Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980);
7. Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
8. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961);
9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1977);
10. Stephen Biko, I Write What I Like (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
11. Benjamin Barber, Jihad versus McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Random House, 1995).
12. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
13. The Il Manifesto included the need to democratize the left as well as the society
14. Douglas Johnson, "Althusser's Fate," London Review of Books 3, no. 7 (1981):13-15.
15. Archon Fung, "Deliberation before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World," Political Theory, 33. no. 3 (2005): 397-419.
16. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 324.
17. Ibid., 298.
18. Hilmer A, "State of Participatory Democratic Theory," 55-63.
19. Harry C. Boyte, Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (Dayton: Kettering Foundation Press, 2009).
20. John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2009).
21. Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, "What Is Agency," American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962-1023
22. Theoretical neglect of agency, described in their essay, finds counterparts in amnesia about popular agency in crucial histories. For a kindred politics of agency.
23. Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) See footnotes 16, 61, 77-115.
24. Xavier de Sousa Briggs, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities around the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); On new public management, 36-37; on accountability, 306-307.
25. John S. Dryzek, "Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies: Alternatives to Agonism and nalgesia," Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 218-242.
26. Habermas A, Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 52.
27. Ibid., 25-26.
28. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 47.
29. Ian Budge, "Deliberative democracy versus direct democracy-plus political parties!," in Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, representation and association, ed. Michael Saward (London: Routledge, 2000), 200.
30. Aviezer Tucker, "Pre-emptive Democracy: Oligarchic Tendencies in Deliberative Democracy," Political Studies 56 (2008): 127-47, at 127.
31. Habermas A, Between Facts and Norms, 297.
32. Ibid., 359, 362, 363-371, 300.
33. David Mathews, Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Public Voice (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999);
34. John Dedrick, Laura Grattan, and Harold Dientsfrey, Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education: Innovations for the Classroom, the Campus, and the Community (Dayton: Kettering Foundation Press, 2008).
35. Nöelle McAfee, "Three Models of Democratic Deliberation," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2004): 44-59.
36. John Forester, Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 203-4.
37. John Forester, "Exploring Urban Practice in a Democratising Society: Opportunities, Techniques, and Challenges," Development Southern Africa 23, no. 5 (2006): 569-586, at 572.
38. Forester A, Deliberative Practitioner, 6.
39. Ibid., 129-130.
40. Ibid., 130.
41. Ibid., 130, 133, 137, 138, 139, 143.
42. Ibid., 207.
43. Ibid., 108-109.
44. Ibid., 37.
45. Ibid., 111.
46. Ibid., 115, 116, 123.
47. Here are several communal labor terms: in South Africa in Sesotho, letsema; in isiZulu, ilimo; in Afrikaans, gemeenskapswerk; in Xhosa, dibanisani; in the Sudan, naffir; along the East African coast, in Swahili, kidole kimoja chawa; in Europe, meitheal (Ireland), dugnad (Norway), talkoot (Finland); in Asia, huan gong (China), ture (Korea), gotong-royoung (Indonesia and Malaysia); in North America ga-du-gi (Cherokee); barn-raising (English); Stephanie Conduff, policy advisor to Chief Smith of the Cherokee, argued that Ga-du-gi has been a powerful symbol of pride and self-sufficiency, email correspondence, July 16, 2010; Peter Vale argues that communal labors may be the experiential ground of the widely used African term ubuntu, meaning common humanity. Boyte interview with Vale, Grahamstown, S.A., July 19, 2010.
48. Leif O. Manger, ed., Communal Labor in the Sudan (Bergen: University of Bergen, 1987), 1.
49. Ibid., 2-3.
50. Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 168.
51. Paul Dekker and Loek Halman, eds., The Values of Volunteering: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Springer, 2003)
52. Harry C. Boyte, "Civic Populism," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (2003): 737-742.
53. "Voluntarism" substitutes for what once was "work." Thus Francis Willard, leader of the largest nineteenth-century U.S. association of women, subtitled her book Woman and Temperance, The Work and Workers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1883) to convey unpaid civic labours and to challenge their devaluation.
54. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (Boston: MIT Press, 2006), 3.
55. Garret Hardin, "Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248, at 1244.
56. Hess A., and Ostrom A, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, 10-11;
57. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
58. Elinor Ostrom, "Polycentricity, Complexity, and the Commons," The Good Society 9, no. 2 (1999): 37-41, at 39, 40.
59. Peter Levine, "Collective Action, Civic Engagement, and the Knowledge Commons," in Hess and Ostrom, Knowledge as a Commons, 247.
60. Hess A., and Ostrom A, Knowledge as a Commons, 12.
61. Jewish A., and Phillip L. Hammack, "Narrative and the Cultural Psychology of Identity," Personality and Social Psychological Review 12 (May 2008): 222-247;
62. Amartya Sen, "How Does Culture Matter," in Culture and Public Action, ed. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37-58;
63. Nick Bromell, "Freedom Reigns," Boston Review, March/April 2006;
64. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
65. Mary G. Dietz, "The Slow Boring of Hard Boards": Methodical Thinking and the Work of Politics," The American Political Science Review 88, no. 4 (1994): 873-886, at 875.
66. John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1998);
67. Ibid., 23-24.
68. Ibid., 219-220.
69. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958);
70. Harry C. Boyte, "A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the 21st Century," The Good Society 12, no. 2 (2003): 1-15.
71. James C. Scott, December 17, 2009, http://voidmanufacturing.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/interview-with-james-c-scott/(accessed July 2, 2010).
72. Tad Mutersbaugh, "Migration, Common Property, and Communal Labor: Cultural Politics and Agency in a Mexican Village," Political Geography 21 (2002): 473-494, at 475.
73. Ibid., 481.
74. Tanya Korovkin, "Reinventing the Communal Tradition: Indigenous People's, Civil Society, and Democratization in Andean Ecuador," Latin American Research Review 36, no. 3 (2001): 37-67, at 42.
75. Ibid., 49, 54.
76. Mark Becker, June 21, "Reencounter of the Original Peoples," http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2554-reencounter-of-the-originalpeoples-and-nationalities-of-abya-yala-in-ecuador (accessed July 2, 2010).
77. "Umuganda Has Earned Country International Acclaim," http://sigriirwanda.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/umuganda-community-service/ (accessed July 2, 2010).
78. Omano Edigheji, The Emerging South African Democratic Developmental State and the People's Contract (Johannesburg: Centre for Policy Studies, 2007), 47;
79. "Lessons from the Field," Special Supplement, Mail and Guardian, November 26, 2004.
80. These resurfaced the movement in the 1980s, the United Democratic Front, which large ly brought the end to apartheid, nowneglected in official public renderings of the anti-apartheid movement which emphasize formal party and state negotiations, and also in Dryzek's account in "Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies." On this history.
81. Allan Boesak, Running with Horses: Reflections of an Accidental Politician (Cape Town: Joho Press, 2009).
82. Boyte interview with Jacqualine Nzisabira, in Pretoria, June 30.
83. In 1969, the Wall Street Journal labelled as voluntarism "Nixon's program to enlist the help of private groups in solving social problems";
84. Harry Boyte, "Off the Playground of Civil Society," The Good Society 9, no. 2 (1999): 1-7, at 6.
85. Bush, Harry C. Boyte, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2004), chap. 1;
86. Cameron Nicholas Watt, "David Cameron Reveals 'Big Society' Vision-and Denies It Is Just Cost Cutting," Guardian.co.uk, July 19, 2010.
87. Ostrom A, Governing the Commons, 91-102.
88. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999), 39, 23, 599.
89. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 82, 14, 6.
90. Ibid., 21.
91. Ibid., 40, 39.
92. Ibid., 46.
93. Ibid., 43.
94. Sara M. Evans and Barbara Nelson, Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989).
95. David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, "Rewriting Government's DNA," The New Democrat 9, no. 2 (1997): 8-12.
96. Benjamin R. Barber, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
97. Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
98. Craig Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press), 55;
99. Harry C. Boyte, "Reframing Democracy: Governance, Civic Agency, and Politics," Public Administration Review 68, no. 5 (2005): 536-46.
100. Steve Fraser, "The Labor Question," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989), 55-84;
101. Thomas Spragens, Getting the Left Right: The Transformation, Decline, and Reformation of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009)
102. Details how popular agency, animating the New Dealpopular movements, has been replaced in political theory by an emphasis on redistributive justice. Public histories like the iconic Roosevelt Memorial in Washington illustrate the pattern, substituting pity for the poor for respect for work and working people.
103. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontents: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 225.
104. Boyte A, Everyday Politics, chap. 2.
105. Mark Penn, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).
106. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambride: Harvard University Press, 1991), 68.
107. John Dewey, The Teacher and Society (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937);
108. Weil A, Oppression and Liberty; Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
109. Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14.
110. Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989);
111. Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086-1348 (London: Longman, 1978), 105, 106, 108-109.
112. Shklar A, American Citizenship, 65;
113. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
114. Sandel A, Democracy's Discontents, 244. On Humphrey's views of the Preamble. "Hubert H. Humphrey: The Art of the Possible," by Mick Caouette, Twin Cities Public Television November 18, 2010.
115. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997);
116. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
117. Scott Peters, Higher Education and Democracy (East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2010).
118. Margaret Canovan, "The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Hannah Arendt's 'Populism,'" Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 403-422, at 418.
119. Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community-Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
120. Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
121. Boyte A, Interview with Gerald Taylor, Chapel Hill, NC, April 26, 2002.
122. Boyte A, Common Wealth, chap. 8.
123. Arendt A, Human Condition, 200.
124. Harry C. Boyte, "A Commonwealth of Freedom: Response to Beltran," Political Theory 38, no. 6 (2010), 870-76.
125. Dietz A "Slow Boring," 89.
126. Edward T. D. Chambers and Michael A. Cowan, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum, 2003).
127. Boyte A, Civic Agency, 22.
128. Rom Coles, "Of Tensions and Tricksters: Grassroots Democracy Between Theory and Practice," Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 3 (Fall, 2006): 547-561, at 550.
129. Piotr Perczynski, "Active Citizenship and Associative Democracy," in Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, Representation and Association, ed. Michael Saward (London: Routledge, 2000), 162.
130. Ibid., 167, 162.
131. Saul Alinsky, "Is There Life after Birth?" June 7, 1967 (Chicago: I.A.F. reprint), 12-13.
132. Boyte A, Everyday Politics, chap. 3.
133. Albert W. Dzur, "Four Theses on Participatory Democracy: Toward the Rational Disorganization of Government Institutions," Constellations (forthcoming), msp. 14-16.
134. Carmen Sirianni, Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2009).
135. John McDermott, The Philosophy of John Dewey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 334.
136. William Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 28.
137. Albert W. Dzur, Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
138. William J. Doherty, Tai J. Mendenhall, and Jerica M. Berge, "The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project," Journal of Marital & Family Therapy (October, 2010), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3658/is_201010/ai_n56230125/?tagcontent;col1 (accessed December 8, 2010).
139. John Saltmarsh and Matt Hartley, eds., To Serve a Larger Purpose: Engagement for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, forthcoming).
140. St. Catherine, Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, Jason Stephens, Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2003); on Public Achievement, Boyte, Everyday Politics, chap. 5.
141. On international civic agency trends, Boyte, Civic Agency;
142. Robert L. Milstein, Hygeia's Constellation (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Controland Prevention, 2007); in Africa, the East African Citizen Agency Initiative Twaweza, www.twaweza.org.
143. Boyte A, Common Wealth, chapter two explores the debate stirred by Sombart over the twentieth century;
144. Tony Judt, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009.
145. Harry C. Boyte, "Populism and John Dewey: Convergencies and Contradictions," Dewey Lecture, March 31, 2007, University of Michigan, http://ginsberg.umich.edu/downloads/Boyte_Dewey_Lecture2007.doc.
146. Boyte A, Civic Agency.
147. Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs, "Introduction," in Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown and Polarized Politics in Obama's First Two Years, ed. Skocpol and Jacobs (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010), 1-72 (accessed online December 9, 2010).
148. George Packer, "The New Liberalism," The New Yorker, November 17, 2010 (accessed online, August 16, 2010).
149. Mark Lilla "The Tea Party Jacobins," New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010 pp. 53.
150. William Schambra, "Obama and the Policy Approach," National Affairs 1 (Fall 2009), http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/obama-and-the-policy-approach;
151. David Brooks, "The Technocracy Boom," New York Times, July 19, 2010;
152. E. J. Dionne and Robert Jones, "Emerging Religious Issues Promise to Shape 2012 Election," Public Religious Research Institute, November 17, 2010.
153. Arthur C. Brooks, "America's New Culture War: Free Enterprise versus Government Control," Washington Post, May 23, 2010.