The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a survey by Jeffrey C. Isaac covering important new books on democracy and community building. His report features “Making a Place for Community” by Gar Alperovitz.

The State of Civil Society

Jeffery C. Isaac
Published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2003

In recent years, an eclectic group of American scholars, policy analysts, journalists, and activists from across the political spectrum has turned toward "civil society" as the answer to today's social problems. Refusing to cede political power to market forces, most advocates of civil society argue that serious social problems -- economic dislocation, social instability, environmental degradation, political alienation -- continue to plague American society, and that meaningful forms of collective response to such problems are both necessary and possible. Such responses, they maintain, are best encouraged in the voluntary, private domain between government and economic institutions and outside the arenas of conventional politics and public-policy formation. Some civil-society advocates, with roots in conservative and neoconservative critiques of the welfare state and its "therapeutic" culture, focus on promoting such supposedly "moral" institutions as the nuclear family, religious congregations, and "faith-based initiatives." Others, closer to the left, are concerned primarily with the injustices of capitalist markets and focus on a broader range of voluntary associations, including nonprofit organizations, community-development corporations, trade unions, and social movements.

Two new books highlight some of the innovative civil-society solutions being applied to a complex range of social ills, and emphasize the importance of political economy in crafting such measures. But the books' tonal clash with post-9/11 political rhetoric also suggests how wide a gap has developed between grass-roots idealism and the sweeping concerns of a state and a society obsessed with "homeland security."

As their proponents argue, civil-society programs have much to recommend them:

They work on the principle of "subsidiarity," typically proposing to solve problems at the simplest level possible (e.g., community-based development of affordable housing). That local orientation appeals to all those, right and left, who are wary of the centralized, bureaucratic state and who seek to promote greater civic engagement through citizen participation.

They seek to promote individual and civic responsibility, requiring citizens to work together to achieve common goods. In that regard, civil-society initiatives can be seen as allowing citizens to exert their rightful political power rather than becoming clients of, or dependent on, the state. Moreover, the initiatives typically encourage citizens to exert that power through deliberation rather than zero-sum strategic bargaining, and through community-oriented rather than predatory practices that would unduly benefit particular interests.

Relying on self-organization and volunteerism, civil-society projects don't necessarily require large amounts of money from government or other sources. Thus they appear to combine, at least ideally, the virtues of entrepreneurial effort, efficiency, voluntarism, and civic-mindedness. For that reason they are often presented as being practical and effective in a way that welfare-state regulations and allocations are not. Further, they are often seen as sources of "social capital" that build confidence in social and political institutions. As Benjamin R. Barber sums up this general understanding of civil society in his book A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (Hill and Wang, 1998), it "posits a third domain of civic engagement which is neither governmental nor strictly private yet shares the virtues of both. It offers a space for public work, civic business, and other common activities that are focused neither on profit nor on a welfare bureaucracy's client services. It is also a communicative domain of civility, where political discourse is grounded in mutual respect and the search for common understanding even as it expresses differences and identity conflicts. It extols voluntarism but insists that voluntarism is the first step to citizenship, not just an exercise in private character building, philanthropy, or noblesse oblige."

The emergent public discourse on civil society has been accompanied by a proliferation of practical experiments shaped by an extensive and increasingly dense network of philanthropic foundations, academic institutions, and other organizations. Those include the Kettering Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Bradley Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the National Civic League, the Hubert Humphrey Center at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the Walt Whitman Center at the Douglass Campus of Rutgers University.

In their book Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal (University of California Press, 2001), Carmen Sirianni, a sociology professor at Brandeis University, and Lewis Friedland, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, call such initiatives a genuine "movement for civic renewal ... with common language, shared practices, and networked relationships across a variety of arenas." Sirianni and Friedland catalog a range of recent efforts in four domains -- community development, environmentalism, health policy, and public journalism. Their chapter on civic environmentalism discusses new forms of deliberation and negotiation over hazardous-waste disposal and appropriate risk that include business, local government, environmental activists, and civic associations; public-information campaigns about toxic substances, such as the Right-to-Know Network and Citizen's Clearinghouse on Toxic Waste; civic monitoring of pollution and waste disposal; local green-space ordinances; community land trusts; and environmental stewardship and good-neighbor agreements. Those arrangements are partly a response to the declining federal ability and inclination to impose environmental solutions. But they've also come about because many environmental activists have learned that there are no cost-free ways to make environmental decisions, and that bureaucratic regulation is often inferior to consensus-building and civic responsibility.

In their chapter on community organizing and development, the authors describe a range of experimental efforts to deal with urban problems:

Local nonprofit social-service agencies that offer child care, support for the victims of domestic abuse, temporary shelter, and job training.

Community-development corporations that seek to leverage public, private, and philanthropic funds to revitalize neighborhoods through the construction of low-cost housing, the establishment of neighborhood-based health clinics and cooperatives, and the promotion of neighborhood-based retail outlets, banks, shopping centers, and other businesses.

Community-development financial institutions that bridge major financial institutions and inner-city communities to counter the effects of redlining (illegally denying loans in certain areas of a community).

Community organizations facilitated by the Industrial Areas Foundation, such as East Brooklyn Congregations, which pioneered the Nehemiah Project to build low-cost housing, and Communities Organized for Public Service, which supports a range of redevelopment efforts in San Antonio. (On the latter, see Mark R. Warren's superb study Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy [Princeton University Press, 2001].)

Innovative, locally oriented "third sector" programs outside government and corporate agencies that build human and social capital, such as YouthBuild USA and the National Community Development Initiative. Sirianni and Friedland's encyclopedic account makes clear that, as Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, put it in Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Temple University Press, 1996): "For all our problems and fears as a nation, civic energy abounds. Americans are not uncaring or apathetic about public affairs. In fact, a rich array of civic work in many diverse settings is evident across the country."

Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz's book, Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (Routledge, 2002) is an excellent complement to Civic Innovation in America, and to the literature of "civic renewal" generally. While much of this literature has focused on political and sociological themes, Making a Place for Community emphasizes economics. The authors show that social dislocation and civic atrophy are generated and reinforced by the tendencies toward free trade and financial globalization, capital mobility, and urban sprawl that are integral to contemporary global capitalism. While they discuss the economic criticisms that have been leveled against those phenomena, the principal focus of the book is on their political consequences in undermining the neighborhoods and place-based social networks that are necessary to the flourishing of democracy. Further, they make it clear that those tendencies are not simply market-driven; they are in part the products of governmental tax policies, trade policies, and other forms of public subsidization.

The authors' point: The political economy must be addressed and reformed if efforts to promote "civil society" and "civic renewal" are to succeed. "The issue is not whether the federal government will continue to have a role in the economy and in shaping markets. Rather, the issue is whether such intervention will continue to take place in a scattershot, inconsistent manner largely driven by special interests, or whether the federal role in the economy might instead serve a coherent objective ... the reconstruction of community -- and local democracy -- in America in the new century."

The strongest part of the book is its discussion of how such a reconstruction might be accomplished. It outlines a range of federal policies that are already in place, and whose expansion could foster civil society and democracy. Programs worthy of expansion, the authors say, include:

Trade Adjustment Assistance and the Job Training and Workforce Investment Act, both designed to aid workers whose jobs are displaced by new imports.

Community Development Block Grants, urban Empowerment Zones, and Enterprise Communities administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the HUBZone Program, which promotes federal contracts administered by the Small Business Administration in high-unemployment areas; and the job-generating Economic Development Administration.

Regional development projects, such as the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Mississippi Delta Regional Authority. Efforts to convert obsolete military bases to commercial, residential, or environmental-conservation projects.

Rural-development programs administered by the Department of Agriculture.

And the Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Initiative to clean up polluted properties and put them to new uses. Also discussed are state and local ownership of utilities and other public resources; community-development corporations, community-development financial institutions, and community land trusts; local efforts to support small-business development and "import substitution" strategies to promote local buying and selling; experiments in metropolitan tax-base sharing of the sort pioneered by Sen. Myron Orfield in the Twin Cities region; state and municipal "claw back" mechanisms designed to make the recipients of tax advantages accountable to their communities; employee stock-ownership plans; and economically targeted investments in public programs by public-employee pension funds. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans have been called to sacrifice in the name of freedom. While in my view the threat posed by Al Qaeda-linked terrorism is very real, requiring an equally real political and military response, the current invocations of freedom ring hollow. While attention has been fixed on the question of "homeland security," broader questions of social and economic vulnerability and risk have been substantially ignored by political leaders, policy makers, and the news media. Books such as Civic Innovation in America and Making a Place for Community are all the more welcome, for they take seriously the project of civic engagement and civic renewal, and offer a vision of a more robustly democratic society that is also safer and more civil.

At the same time, I'm struck by the discrepancy between the hopefulness articulated by Sirianni and Friedland, and by Williamson, Imbroscio, and Alperovitz, and the cynicism of the broader public culture. Even before 9/11, the voices of progressive liberalism had been muted and marginalized by enthusiasm for "third wave" technologies, the "opportunity society," and a "third way" that had largely abandoned any serious commitment to an ambitious and remedial public-policy agenda. The core constituencies of organized liberalism have long experienced deterioration, division, and demoralization. That political weakening is traceable to the racial, Vietnam, and fiscal crises of the 1960s and '70s. It was shown in the ascendancy of Reaganism, in the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, in the repudiation of liberalism by Clinton's "progressive" agenda; and in the victory of George W. Bush in 2000. The fact that Bush lacked an electoral majority and came to the presidency as a result of a questionable Supreme Court ruling only underscored the weakness of a liberal alternative that could mobilize a decisive majority or offer the political confidence to press the constitutional questions at stake in the electoral deadlock. The rightward shift of public discourse in 9/11's wake has simply exacerbated the trend.

In such a context, even so pragmatically grounded a project as "civic renewal" or "the revival of civil society" has a utopian ring. The tone of Making a Place for Community is resolutely hypothetical: "If local and state-level initiatives can ultimately be married to higher-order activism and policy making on the federal and international levels, we believe there is a real not chimerical chance of making serious headway in reconstructing community in America over the coming decade"; "We have little doubt that if this fundamental goal were to gain wide acceptance, creative minds, committed activists, and courageous policy makers would find countless ways to further the goal"; "the developmental work of the past three decades has generated enough experience ... that a new framework of explicit policy support could permit a major advance in the coming period" (emphasis added). The authors lay out a modestly visionary program, estimating that for $75-billion -- less than 4 percent of projected federal spending for the 2003 fiscal year -- existing programs could be bolstered, without any substantial new legislation, in a way that would "dramatically expand support for community economic stability." But the likelihood of even that relatively small shift in public discourse, much less of the government making such commitments, must be judged minuscule in the current political climate.

Williamson, Imbroscio, and Alperovitz quote the University of California at Santa Barbara historian Alice O'Connor: "Having encouraged the trends that impoverish communities in the first place, the federal government steps in with modest and inadequate interventions to deal with the consequences ... and then wonders why community development so often fails." O'Connor describes such policy efforts as "swimming against the tide." If anything, current tides are even more powerful than the 1990s tides of which O'Connor wrote. That's no reason to stop swimming and embrace the prospect of drowning. On the contrary. It is more important than ever that writers and activists think creatively about the best ways of leveraging limited financial and political resources to achieve a modicum of civic empowerment and social justice. Books such as Civic Innovation in America and Making a Place for Community are important contributions to such thinking. The ideas and projects they describe are not likely to remake our political landscape, yet they can serve as sources of political inspiration and instruction. They demonstrate that even at a time of liberal decline the wells of pragmatic reform have not run dry, and that conscientious and committed citizens and activists can make a difference, even if in small ways, in working to make the United States a more democratic place to live.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is a professor of political science and the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at Indiana University at Bloomington. He writes regularly for Dissent magazine and is the author of the newly released The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline (Rowman & Littlefield).

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