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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question

I assume that you are a citizen, in the sense of someone who belongs to one or
more communities that you hope to improve. Your communities may range
from a city block or a religious congregation to the whole earth. As a citizen of
these communities, you seek to address their problems and influence their dir-
ections; but more than that, you want to make them through your thought, your
work, and your passion. You want to be a co-​creator of the human world.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

As a good person, you ask, “What should I do?” But as a good citizen, you must
ask, “What should we do?” The question becomes plural for two reasons: no one
can accomplish much alone, and we must reason together to improve our opin-
ions and to check biases and self-​interest. Reasoning together is an indispensable
way to think well about matters of public concern. To be sure, the individual per-
spective never vanishes, because people should reflect on which groups they be-
long to (membership is not always explicit, obvious, or voluntary), which ones
they should seek to join, and which ones they should exit. Those are matters of
individual ethics. But to be a citizen, one must also adopt the plural “we.”1
The citizen’s question—​“What should we do?”—​ends with an action verb be-
cause it is not enough to form and express opinions; citizens must actually affect
the world. They must decide under conditions of uncertainty and limited time,
and then act. (Refraining from action is a form of action for which members of a
group are responsible.) Acting and then reflecting on the results is an important
way to a make a group’s discussions and learning serious.
Importantly, the question is not “What should be done?” or “How should
things be?” These are the predominant questions in political theory, political phi-
losophy, and the study of public policy. They are often far too easy. For instance,
what should be done about the threat to the global climate? Carbon should be
taxed everywhere to reduce production, and the proceeds should be used to mit-
igate the harm of rising temperatures, with most of the funds going to the world’s
poor. The carbon tax might not even have to be very high, and other tax cuts
could offset it.2 I think this proposal is correct, but it is also empty. I cannot actu-
ally tax the world’s carbon; neither can you. We are not influential in any group
that has that power. Our responsibility and accountability vanish if we ask what
Copyright 2022. Oxford University Press.

1 Portions of c­ hapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in Levine 2019 and are reprinted here with permission.
2 Metcalf 2019.

What Should We Do?. Peter Levine, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197570494.003.0001

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AN: 3279159 ; Peter Levine.; What Should We Do? : A Theory of Civic Life
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2 What Should We Do?

should be done instead of what we should do, where “we” refers to a group in
which we have tangible agency.
The opposite pitfall is to be satisfied with individual actions or shared volun-
tary decisions by small groups. A family or a few friends can agree to turn off
their lights and stop eating beef to save carbon, but 7.5 billion other human be-
ings will go on as before. The hard question is how any group in which I have
genuine agency can affect large problems. A good citizen does not shy away from
that question because it is difficult.
The “should” in “What should we do?” is also essential. Good citizenship is
not about doing what we want, or what our biases or interests or norms tell us
to do. It is about struggling to pursue the best ends with the right means. We
are responsible for altering our wants, biases, and interests to make them better.
Since good ends and means cannot simply be looked up, the pursuit of moral im-
provement is intellectually difficult. We know that we can be wrong about right
and wrong, for all the people who have sincerely believed in slavery, patriarchy,
and violence have been badly misguided—​and we share the limitations of those
fellow human beings. But although we can be wrong, we must try to be right. The
good citizen does not shy away from the question “what should we do?” because
the answers are contested.
Finally, the word “what” in this question matters, because the good citizen
must be concerned about the options: their costs, risks, and probable outcomes.
Empirical information is essential in this analysis. When time is scarce, addi-
tional empirical investigation can be too costly or time-​consuming, but the good
citizen is not afraid to face the implications of the available evidence.
By putting the emphasis on what we should do, I am not suggesting that eve-
ryone bears primary responsibility for addressing every issue. You may be the
victim of a social injustice that someone else has created or has the best oppor-
tunity to remedy. In such cases, it is most important for them to decide what they
are obliged to do to improve your situation. Not every problem is your problem.
Nevertheless, “What should we do?” remains an important question for vir-
tually all of us. Even if the main moral responsibility lies with someone else, the
only thing we can control is what we do. We may decide that we should demand
justice from another person or group, but making a demand is also a form of
action that we choose to take. In fact, making demands on “target authorities”
is the characteristic activity of social movements;3 and social movements are
composed of people who ask, “What should we do?” It’s just that their goal is to
compel other people to take more responsibility.
Furthermore, acting is not merely a price we must pay in order to improve
the world. It can also be a benefit that we reap, since exercising agency can be

3 Tilly 2004, 7.

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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 3

an aspect of a good life. Although we should encourage—​and sometimes even


compel—​other people to ask what they should do (the focus of ­chapter 6), it is also
worth asking that question on our own behalf, regardless of our circumstances.
One important demand that social movements make on target authorities—​
usually, national governments—​is to change who counts as a citizen in the legal
sense. Two leaders and thinkers whom I will consider at length in this book are
famous for making such demands. Mohandas K. Gandhi wanted the people of
India to leave the British Empire and become citizens of a free India. Martin
Luther King Jr. wanted African Americans to become full citizens of the United
States; he endorsed a “revolution to ‘get in.’ ”4 Their demands remind us—​if a
reminder were necessary—​that the question of who holds which kinds of mem-
bership in which political entities is a serious matter. The modern state has a
profound influence on most aspects of society. In particular, its laws and policies
regarding associations may determine which other groups, apart from the state
itself, we may join or leave. And it offers a kind of membership—​legal citizen-
ship—​that is often not under our control. Whereas we may decide to form a vol-
untary association with like-​minded peers to address a common concern, a state
may tell us that we are in or out, whether we like it or not.5
Therefore, the question of legal citizenship in states has generated a substan-
tial and valuable literature. These are some of the empirical questions it ad-
dresses: Who has which forms of legal citizenship in which states? (Note that de
facto citizenship may differ from rights on paper.) And why, in various contexts,
is legal citizenship defined in particular ways and protected for some while being
denied to others? For example, why were the founding documents of the United
States so reticent about the definition of citizenship?6 The ethical questions in-
clude: Who ought to have which rights in each polity? Who is responsible for
remedying any unjust citizenship laws and policies?7
These issues are germane to this book and arise periodically in my analysis.
Nevertheless, my focus is different, for two reasons. First, I adopt and defend a
“polycentric” view of politics, in which the state is not a monolith that exercises

4 M. L. King 1966/​1991, 58. Also discussed in Mantena 2018, 91.


5 Cf. E. Cohen 2009, 21: “Democratic theory that suggests that citizens make citizenship through
their actions [a fair description of this book] exhibits a particularly influential and yet problematic
normative presumption. This line of inquiry is premised on the notion that it is citizens themselves
who determine the content of their membership through specific forms of voluntary political beha-
vior. But engaging in acts of citizenship does not automatically impart citizenship, let alone recogni-
tion of that citizenship by peers or political institutions.” On p. 29, she adds, “some political authority
must identify which acts will be privileged as acts of citizenship, and whose performance of these acts
will be regarded as citizenly.”
6 Smith 1999 (118) explains that reticence as a result of unresolved disagreements between “cen-

tralists and decentralists, large and small states, and opponents and advocates of slavery.”
7 An example of an influential principle is Robert A. Dahl’s: “Every adult subject to a government

and its laws must be presumed to be qualified as, and has an unqualified right to be, a member of the
demos.” Dahl 1989, 127.

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4 What Should We Do?

ultimate sovereignty. Rather, it is a name for a whole array of offices and bureaus,
officials, rules, norms, and laws that may be in mutual tension and that inevitably
shade into other institutions that are not strictly governmental. Many non-​state
groups and institutions exercise power over governmental bodies. The state is
in the midst of associations of all kinds, not the fundamental basis of all other
associations.
Second, even when we decide that a government’s policies about who should
have which rights are the most pressing issues, the main question for us re-
mains: what should we do about it? Although it is worth analyzing citizenship
rights in a given state and arguing that they should be defined or enforced differ-
ently, we cannot stop with such analysis. If the status quo is unjust, we should try
to change who has legal citizenship. To do that will probably require joining or
forming groups other than the state that can advocate change, whether they are
lobbies, social movements, or guerrilla armies. So my focus is on membership in
a wide range of groups, in a world in which membership is not always voluntary,
and in which people are often included or excluded against their will.8
To take this stance is to be “republican” in one ancient sense of that word.
Etymologically, a republic is the “public thing” (or “public good”). In this book,
I assume that a very wide range of goods belong to their associated publics: the
safety of a street belongs to the neighborhood; a country’s laws belong to its citi-
zenry; and the global climate belongs to us all. These publics have both the right
and the responsibility to exercise ownership of their respective goods—​with the
question of who collectively owns which goods constantly arising. Collective
goods are compatible with (and often essential for) private goods. For instance,
the safety of a street is a public good even if all the buildings have private owners.
To own a public good is to ask what we should do about it. It means resisting the
passive question, “What should be done?” Classical republics were born when
the public wrested responsibility from a monarch, a clique, a clergy, or a foreign
power, thereby adopting an active voice.9
To do a good job of collectively governing any good requires appropriate vir-
tues and institutions. Some of these virtues are discursive: good speaking, rea-
soning, and listening. But discursive virtues will not suffice; people must also
work, sacrifice, and sometimes fight to defend their common goods. It is natural
to use the word “civic” for the skills, habits, virtues, and institutional forms that
enable us to govern common goods well; thus we speak of “civic discourse,” “civic

8
In the terms of Tully 2008 (8), this is a “civic,” not a “civil/​national,” notion of citizenship.
9
Cf. Constant 1819: “the liberty of the ancients . . . consists of exercising collectively, but directly,
many parts of absolute sovereignty, [and the right] to deliberate, in a public space, about war and
peace, to ratify treaties of alliance with foreigners, to vote laws, pronounce decisions, examine the
accounts, actions, and management of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to
accuse them, to condemn or acquit them.”

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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 5

engagement,” “civic associations,” “civic forums,” and “civic courage.” This book
is a contribution to civic republican theory, although I dissent from some uses of
that phrase.
It can also be seen as a contribution to democratic theory. “Democracy” is
defined in many ways, but I find it most useful as the name of a system in which
voting plays an important role and in which everyone who is a full member gets
an equitable share of the vote. To make voting legitimate and valuable may re-
quire additional features, from freedom of speech and rule of law to some degree
of social equality. These features buttress the central architectural element of a
democracy, the vote, whose purpose is to equalize power.10 It seems likely that
democracy, so defined, is the best system for governing the public goods that are
the laws of most (perhaps all) sovereign states. Therefore, states should generally
be civic republican democracies. It is a more complex question whether other
important entities—​such as religious denominations, professions, academic dis-
ciplines, computer networks, extended family and kinship groups, markets, and
the earth as a whole—​should be democracies. It is possible for people to own and
govern these things without ever voting. Still, all should be civic and republican,
because in each case, a group must define and govern itself and its goods wisely.

From Ethics to Politics

This book’s question, “What should we do?,” has a plural verb because politics
exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associ-
ations to nation-​states. The plural question raises a new set of issues that are not
directly addressed in individual ethics.
To start, problems of complicity arise once you belong to a group. Consider
a case like the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II,
which probably caused 35,000 civilian deaths on one night and did nothing to
advance the Allied victory over Nazism. The firestorm sucked oxygen out of the
air and caused civilians in shelters to die of asphyxiation. It was started by bombs
from one thousand airplanes. Eight thousand crewmen flew in those planes,
and “many thousands further were involved in planning and support.” Exactly
the same number of deaths would have occurred if 999 bombers had flown in-
stead of one thousand. Thus, as Christopher Kutz observes, each crewman or

10 Robert Dahl defines democracy as “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl 1989, 109–​11).

I find this narrow definition useful for analytic purpose; it allows us to investigate what is needed to
make democracy work well and what outcomes democracies accomplish. If we load other features
into the definition, the resulting system (e.g., voting plus deliberation, or voting plus social equality)
may be more attractive, but it’s harder to analyze whether voting equality is necessary or sufficient.

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6 What Should We Do?

ground-​support person could rightly say, “I made no difference, and I had no


control over the outcome.”11
Indeed, because these people did not separately cause the firestorm, no one
should accuse them of homicide. But they do have a deep and permanent moral
connection to the Dresden firestorm, unlike someone who was home in Iowa at
the time. This moral connection requires actions and attitudes on their part: for
instance, regret, memory, confession, self-​scrutiny, and perhaps active support
for peace with postwar Germany. We should consider as morally defective an-
yone who says, “I was part of a group that killed 35,000 civilians for no mil-
itary purpose, but I had no effect on the numbers killed, so I don’t care what
happened.”
Kutz argues for two principles: (1) “I am accountable for what others do when
I intentionally participate in the wrong they do or the harm they cause”; and
(2) “I am accountable for the harm or wrong we do together, independently of
the actual difference I make.” Kutz explores difficulties that arise when it’s not
clear whether a person is an intentional participant in a group. If you buy a stock,
you are complicit in what the company does even if your investment made no
difference, but what if you buy a tube of toothpaste from a company or walk
through its building?
Complicity means involvement in the harmful or unethical activities of a
group. The mirror image is one’s positive obligation to be loyal to groups under
appropriate circumstances. A group can accomplish more than an individual
can—​whether for good or evil—​as long as it holds together. To form and main-
tain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate
their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have poten-
tial and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-​than-​ideal behavior in order
to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen em-
phasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the amount and type of
sacrifice is usually unequal.12 Long before her, W. E. B. Du Bois had written this
three-​word sentence: “Organization is sacrifice.” He elaborated:

You cannot have absolutely your own way—​you cannot be a free lance; you
cannot be strongly and fiercely individual if you belong to an organization. For
this reason some folk hunt and work alone. It is their nature. But the world’s
greatest work must be done by team work. This demands organization, and that
is the sacrifice of some individual will and wish to the good of all.13

11 See Kutz 2000, 115–​21.


12 D. Allen 2004, c­ hapter 3 (“Sacrifice, a Democratic Fact”), 25–​36.
13 Du Bois 1920, 8.

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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 7

For someone as fiercely principled and intellectually independent as Du Bois,


this realization that “Organization is sacrifice” must have come hard; but he saw
a truth. To be able to ask the question, “What should we do?” implies that all have
given—​and some may have given much more than others—​to create the “we”
that acts together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too un-
equal to sustain (Du Bois later quit the NAACP over a matter of principle), but
some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.
In groups, we decide what we should do together—​not necessarily dem-
ocratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each
of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a
group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own.
A group offers multiple perspectives, which ought to challenge individual views
of what is right to do. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s
decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellec-
tual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decisions. However,
this is the wrong choice if the group is misguided. You retain the option of exit if
you don’t believe voice will work and loyalty is misplaced.14
Three prevalent ways of addressing the individual’s ethical question—​“What
should I do?”—​are: (1) to universalize, asking what you would want anyone to
do who was similarly situated; (2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most
good for the most people, given your resources and options; or (3) to exhibit
and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness.15 Although
philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers,
in everyday life, they typically generate different reasons for the same moral con-
clusions.16 Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical ques-
tions can also be applied in groups, but with important modulations.
First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual
covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to
do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must eve-
ryone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties
for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from eth-
ical ideals, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-​ideal behavior
in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if
the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from
the logic of hypotheticals.
Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can max-
imize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we

14Hirschman 1970.
15See, e.g., Baron, Philip & Slote 1997.
16 The famous trolley problem (Thomson 1985) offers a fictional scenario that poses a conflict be-

tween maximizing and universalizing.

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8 What Should We Do?

must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group
that tried to do the most possible good for the whole world would dissolve, be-
cause the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they
would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated
action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price
to pay.
Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—​virtues understood, in an
Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions.
In other words, virtues are habits that are durable but can be deliberately shaped.
Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magna-
nimity, etc. To cite an example developed by Donald Beggs, the individual mem-
bers of a knitting club may not be concerned enough about people with HIV/​
AIDS that they would take action on their own. But the group (possibly under
external influence) can develop a strong tradition of knitting for AIDS patients.
Then the group has durable dispositions or virtues, such as empathy and inclu-
siveness.17 Groups also have “epistemic” virtues or vices that make them good or
bad at understanding the world, for example, an ethnocentric group is bad at un-
derstanding outsiders.18 Developing and maintaining virtues requires different
strategies when a group (instead of an individual) is the thing that has character
traits.
We will revisit these issues of loyalty and complicity in ­chapter 7, equipped
with a more robust theoretical structure for thinking about collective action.

The “I” and the “We”

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That
scheme must be complicated in three ways.
First, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a lan-
guage is already part of a linguistic community. People who ask, “What should
we do as a city?” were probably influenced by the history, norms, and prevailing
values of that city, which had existed before they did. Even if they react critically
to the dominant opinions of the city, the city still influenced them by causing
their reaction. These are examples of the dependence of individuals on groups
that we never chose to join.
Second, groups are not merely accumulations of individuals. Consider these
statements: “A group just is the people who make it up.” “If a group can be said
to have intentions at all, its intentions must somehow be the intentions of its

17 Beggs 2003, 468.


18 Anderson 2012.

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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 9

members.” Brian Epstein criticizes an assumption that is implicit in these state-


ments: namely, that social phenomena can be fully explained by talking about
people.19 After all, is Starbucks composed of the people who work for it? Clearly
not, because the coffee beans and water, the physical buildings, the company’s
stock value, the customers and vendors, its iconic logo, the rival coffee shops in
the same markets, and many other factors make it the company that we know, just
as much as its employees do. Indeed, its personnel could all turn over through an
orderly process, and it would still be Starbucks.20
Likewise, when the Supreme Court decided to end de jure racial segregation
in schools, was its intention a function of the preferences of the nine individual
justices? No, because in order for them to intend to overturn the ban, they had to
be legitimate Supreme Court justices within a legal system that presented them
with this decision at a given moment. I can form an opinion of Brown v Board of
Education, but I cannot rule on that case, or seriously intend to rule on it, because
I was not a Supreme Court justice in 1954. Nine men were justices at the moment
when the Brown case came before the court because of a whole series of deci-
sions by other people: presidents who nominated them, senators who confirmed
them, eighteenth-​century founders who wrote those rules, state legislators who
chose those founders, and so on back into history.
In general, Epstein writes, “facts about a group are not determined just by facts
about its members.”21 And it’s not just other human beings who matter; non-​
human phenomena can be implicated in complicated ways. For instance, the
Supreme Court is in session on certain days, and on all other days, a “vote” by a
justice would not really be a vote. What makes us say that a certain day has ar-
rived is the movement of the earth around the sun. So the motion of a heavenly
body is implicated in the existence and the intentions of the Supreme Court. The
sun isn’t a cause of the Supreme Court’s decisions, but it is a ground of it. Human
beings can intentionally ground facts about groups in circumstances beyond the
control of their members, or indeed in facts that are under no human being’s
control (such as the motion of the earth). It can be wise to limit the power of
group members in just these ways. Epstein writes, “Our ability to anchor social
facts to have nearly arbitrary grounds . . . makes the social world so flexible and
powerful.”22
Third, when two or more groups interact with each other, both individual
human beings and larger institutions may interrelate. For instance, when the for-
eign ministers of the world’s most powerful countries meet in a room, we could
simplify the situation and say that these “states” are negotiating. But the meeting

19 Epstein 2015.
20 Epstein 2015, 47–​49.
21 Epstein 2015, 272.
22 Epstein 2015, 168.

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10 What Should We Do?

actually involves a limited number of people who stand in complex relationships


with many other people, from the other diplomats in the room, to their own re-
spective heads of state back home, to the ordinary citizens whose support (tacit
or active) is essential even in dictatorships. One of many factors that may deter-
mine the outcome of the meeting is whether the foreign minister of, say, France,
identifies more with her own interests, her ministry, her party, her nation, the
club of foreign ministers, the European Union, and/​or the world. If we zero in
on her ministry, we find that it is both an accumulation of people with whom
she relates and—​just as I noted earlier of Starbucks—​a configuration of durable
assets, traditions, and rules, all influenced by people outside its headquarters on
the Quai d’Orsay.
In short, it is impossible to distinguish sharply between the individual and the
group, the “I” and the “we.” Which pronoun is most appropriate is often a choice
that requires judgment. The focus of this book is on the “we,” with an understanding
that the “I” always remains as well.

Three Categories of Problems for Groups

At all scales, citizens confront myriad concrete issues: poverty, tyranny, crime, racial
injustice, environmental degradation, and many more. These issues are too various
and contextual to be addressed by any single theory. However, beneath such specific
challenges lie three general categories of problems. Political theory that is useful to
citizens must address these three categories.
First, we often struggle to coordinate our separate interests and choices to ac-
complish valuable ends. Here I refer to problems of collective action. When these
problems defeat us, we fail to achieve goals that everyone would agree are worthy.
For example, even the many nations that agree that carbon emissions threaten the
earth’s environment have so far failed to enact agreements that would restrict their
respective use of carbon sufficiently. Most lament this failure; it nevertheless persists
as a collective-​action problem.
Second, we often disagree about what outcomes we should value or what
means are ethical and appropriate. Some people hold extremely bad opinions of
those questions. Their values pose a threat, and the fact that they hold them re-
minds us that we, too, could be wrong. We may try to identify the right values by
discussing contested issues with other people, but such discussions can go badly
for a set of reasons that I will call problems of discourse. In 2015, the US Senate,
frequently called the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” defeated an amend-
ment that would have expressed the body’s opinion that “climate change is real;

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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 11

and human activity significantly contributes to climate change.”23 Considering


the overwhelming evidence in favor of those clauses, this would seem to be a
failure of discourse.
The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas writes that any group of
people who communicate about what they should do (my gloss of his phrase
“communicative action”) must “seek to avoid two risks: the risk of not coming
to understanding, that is, of disagreement or misunderstanding, and the risk of
a plan of action miscarrying, that is, of failure.”24 Those risks name the two cat-
egories of problem mentioned so far, and they often interrelate. For example,
perhaps the US Senate failed to reach an understanding about the facts of cli-
mate change (a discourse failure) because reaching an agreement about the truth
would have pressured the body to enact regulations, which many senators op-
posed for reasons of collective action—​because they preferred other people in
other nations to pay the price for environmental protection.
In any case, there is a third category as well. People may not see themselves as
participants in a group that should decide anything together in the first place.
They may not recognize a “we,” but rather an “us” versus a “them,” separated in
fundamental ways, such as by differences in identity. The line between us and
them can run through a group in which some dominate others. Or people may
be treated as members of a group yet deny their identity as part of it. Gandhi’s
movement essentially wanted to leave the British Empire; King’s movement de-
manded full inclusion in the democracy of the United States. Both leaders faced
problems of identity-​based exclusion that often contribute to the difficulty of ad-
dressing shared problems.

23 Senate Amendment 58 to Senate Amendment 2, 114th Congress (2015–​2016), via Congress.gov.


24 Habermas 1987, vol. 2, 127.

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2
A Case
The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The three categories of problems introduced in ­chapter 1—​collective action,


discourse, and exclusion—​are prominent in a well-​known American example,
the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–​1956. This was a textbook case of a so-
cial movement episode that accomplished its immediate goals despite severe
obstacles. The boycott catapulted the twenty-​six-​year-​old Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. into international prominence and launched similar episodes in many
American cities across the South and then also the North. The case is now quite
old, which raises questions about whether its lessons still apply. I return to that
topic in ­chapter 8, where I discuss current social movements against white su-
premacy and ask whether the ideas explored in this chapter remain relevant. For
now, the classic example of the Montgomery bus boycott serves to illustrate the
three categories of problems that civic actors face and demonstrates that these
problems can sometimes be overcome.
Within hours of Rosa Parks’s arrest, many of the most prominent Black cit-
izens of Montgomery, Alabama—​including pastors, educators, union leaders,
and businesspeople—​had gathered in a church basement to discuss and decide
what they should do. Like other groups before and since, they had to choose
objectives, targets, tactics, rhetorical framings, and rules for making their own
decisions. The fact that they accomplished their immediate goals might suggest
that their objectives were too modest, that conditions were favorable, or that so-
lutions were obvious. In fact, these decision makers faced extraordinarily diffi-
cult choices. They could not predict the responses from other members of their
own community, their opponents, courts, or observers across the nation and
world. Under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability, they had to choose
among worthy principles and goals that seemed to conflict. Groups of civic ac-
tors across time and around the world often find themselves in similar circum-
stances. After summarizing the case, I will identify some of the generic problems
for civic actors that arose for the boycott’s organizers.
The story certainly begins before the boycott. Long before then, African
Americans—​and Black Alabamans, in particular—​had built substantial organ-
izations and networks that were resources for resistance to white supremacy.
These included Black-​led churches, schools, colleges and universities, businesses,

What Should We Do?. Peter Levine, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197570494.003.0002

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 13

associations, and at least one important labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters. Such organizations represented social capital—​a concept explored
in more detail in c­ hapter 4.
The sociologist Aldon Morris credited Black churches with creating forums
for discussion, identifying and training leaders, and offering symbols around
which individuals could cohere. In the decades before the civil rights move-
ment got going, some well-​placed and sympathetic observers had argued that
the strength of the Black church was an obstacle to social change, because it di-
verted attention away from political activism.1 But the 1950s showed that deter-
mined leaders could redeploy the assets of the Black church to create a political
movement. According to Morris, the “presence of indigenous resources” did
not guarantee success, but leaders could “re-​direct and transform” available as-
sets to “develop and sustain social protest.”2 Recent scholarship has emphasized
the importance of other forms of African American social capital in addition
to churches. Some categories of organization (e.g., Black newspapers) were al-
ready political before 1910, and some (e.g., beauty salons) were owned and led
by women.3
African American organizers had also accumulated relevant experience. As
early as 1942, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) had organized sit-​ins and
other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, African
Americans had even conducted a bus boycott similar to the Montgomery bus
boycott in 1953.
These organizations, networks, and experiments nurtured leaders. For ex-
ample, by the time she was arrested on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks had served
as a professional staff member of the Alabama NAACP and had been an active
participant in the League of Women Voters. When a young African American
woman, Mrs. Recy Taylor, was gang-​raped by White men, Parks had helped
to form the Committee for Equal Justice for her, a significant effort to combat
both white supremacy and violence against women. Parks was employed as a
domestic worker by one of the most progressive White couples in Montgomery,
Clifford and Virginia Durr, who helped her to participate in trainings in nonvi-
olent civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. One of her
mentors at Highlander was Septima Clark, often called the “Queen Mother” or
“Grandmother” of the civil rights movement.
The boycott began after Parks boarded a Montgomery bus that was racially
segregated by law, with Whites seated at the front and Blacks at the back. Black
female domestic workers predominated as passengers on Montgomery’s buses

1 Brown & Brown 2003, 634, summarizing arguments by E. Franklin Frazier and Gunnar Myrdal.
2 Morris 1986, 78, 291.
3 Ling 2006; Jones 2010.

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14 What Should We Do?

and were frequently sexually harassed as they interacted with the White male
drivers. Parks sat in the “colored” section but was ordered (with several others) to
renounce her seat to a White rider. She refused and was arrested. The charge was
refusing to give up a seat in the “colored” section.
When Parks was arrested, she called her mother, who called E. D. Nixon, the
president of both the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters and the state’s NAACP chapter. Nixon called Clifford Durr, the White
liberal lawyer. After Nixon and Durr posted bail for Parks and she agreed to con-
test her arrest, Nixon made a list of people he would call the next morning, in-
cluding two young Black pastors, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Meanwhile, someone else called Fred Grey, a Black attorney in town, who, in
turn, called Jo Ann Robinson, who was a professor at the local Black college,
Alabama State, and the president of the Women’s Political Council, an African
American women’s group. Robinson assembled some of her friends on the
Alabama State campus late on the night of Parks’s arrest and used the college
mimeograph machine to make flyers announcing a public meeting in support of
Parks. It was Grey who called Robinson, but she had also worked with Nixon and
had served as a leader in King’s church.
These connections are examples of the ties among a network of African
American leaders (plus a few supportive Whites) in Montgomery. The day
after Parks’s arrest, about fifty local Black leaders gathered in the basement of
King’s church.4 Most of them probably knew each other already. Collectively,
they controlled notable assets, from Alabama State’s mimeograph machine to
several churches and a union hall that offered reasonably safe places to meet.
Montgomery’s Black-​owned taxi companies could ferry commuters to work if
there was a bus boycott. Lawyers and people with financial assets were among
those who convened in the church. Their discussion is an exemplar of a group
deciding what they should do.
At first, their natural leader appeared to be Rev. L. Roy Bennett, who was
president of the Black ministers’ group in Montgomery. This group, the
Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, also looked like the right organization
to coordinate any activism. However, Bennett exasperated most of the other ac-
tivists by lecturing at length and refusing to share the floor. The other existing
Black organizations in Montgomery either had narrow memberships or were
vulnerable if they took a prominent role. For example, Jo Ann Robinson could
be fired from Alabama State if the Women’s Political Council, which she led,
was seen as too political. A group of activists decided to create a brand-​new as-
sociation, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They persuaded
a somewhat reluctant King to be its first president and elected Bennett as the

4 Branch 1988, 128–​133; Garrow 1986, 12–​18.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 15

vice president, managing that transition through private conversations, not a re-
corded vote.5
The Montgomery Improvement Association first met in the Alabama Negro
Baptist Center, until the Center’s White donors demanded the radicals be thrown
out; then in the Citizens Club, until the city threatened to revoke its license; then
temporarily in the First Baptist Church building; and finally, in the Bricklayers
Union Hall. “Here the white community could not force us out, since most of
the members and all of the officers of the union that owned the building were
Negroes.” In this passage, King quickly names four existing Black organizations
that were able to offer the physical capital of space because of their social capital.
Overall, King writes, “Labor, civic, and social groups were our stanch supporters,
and in many communities new organizations were founded just to support the
protest.”6
The MIA’s elected officers met regularly and made key decisions throughout
the Montgomery campaign. Thousands of individuals from Montgomery’s
African American community joined and contributed to the MIA. At mass
meetings held in churches, everyone would vote by calling out “aye” or “nay” on
such matters as whether to start (or, later, to stop) the bus boycott. However, the
board had already decided on a course of action, and the mass votes merely rati-
fied their decisions.
As the MIA considered and reconsidered the question, “What should we
do?,” they had to address the difficulty of coordinating individual acts of resist-
ance. Before Rosa Parks, other individuals had refused to give up their seats on
segregated buses (including a young woman named Claudette Colvin earlier
in Montgomery in 1955). Individuals had protested segregation in many other
ways as well. However, if one or a few people resisted at a time, they would not
make much positive difference, and they would risk violent reprisals. On the
other hand, if thousands of people resisted at the same time, they would be safer
and they could have a major impact.7 When thousands of Black Montgomerians
boycotted the city’s buses, they did so safely and defeated the bus company.
Fear and pessimism could make the challenge of coordination more difficult.
By 1955, Black Americans had experienced 336 years of slavery and then vio-
lently enforced white supremacy.8 Many people responded by exiting the state
entirely. About one third of Alabama’s African Americans had participated in
the “Great Migration” to cities in the North.9 Their exit gave Montgomery’s civil
rights movement connections to family members outside the South and probably

5 Garrow 1986, 18–​22; cf. Branch 1988, 137, for a somewhat different account.
6 M.L. King 1958/​2010, Kindle loc. 1139, 1094.
7 This is the overall topic of Chong 1991. For the Montgomery Bus Boycott, see 101–​2.
8 Thornton 2018.
9 Gregory n.d.

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16 What Should We Do?

encouraged Southern authorities to moderate their racist policies to some extent


to prevent further loss of the labor force. Isabel Wilkerson writes, “Their world—​
the former Confederacy—​was made better in part by the pressures put upon it by
those who made the sacrifice to leave it.”10 However, the immediate challenge in
1955 was to organize a collective political voice instead of individual exit.
This was a logistical challenge as well as a motivational one. Enabling almost
all Black commuters to boycott city buses meant giving 17,500 riders alternate
ways to get to work each day for months. At first, Black-​owned taxi companies
carried the workers for the price of a bus ticket, but then the city threatened to
enforce a minimum-​fare law. Next, more than 150 people volunteered to drive
boycotters to work in their own cars. These volunteers “responded immediately,”
King recalls, but “they started out simply cruising the streets of Montgomery
with no particular system.” Many commuters must have missed getting available
rides. Ministers responded by calling for new volunteers from their pulpits, and
even more drivers came out, but that meant (King writes) that “the real job was
just beginning—​that of working out some system for these three hundred-​odd
automobiles, to replace their haphazard movement around the city.”11
Committees were formed and roles were assigned. It was easy to identify
morning meeting points, because African Americans lived in dense urban
neighborhoods. But “we discovered that we were at a loss in selecting [after-
noon] pick-​up stations,” because domestic workers were employed all over the
White neighborhoods. Two Black postal workers “who knew the city from end to
end” helped design regular routes. King recalls all this organizational work with
evident pride and concludes, “Altogether the operation of the motor pool repre-
sented organization and coordination at their best. Reporters and visitors from
all over the country looked upon the system as a unique accomplishment.”12
To achieve this victory, the leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott had to dis-
cuss and then make fundamental choices. These choices were the substance of
their deliberations.
First, they had to choose objectives: what to strive for. In any movement, var-
ious members may favor different objectives, their objectives may change over
time, and the movement may not explicitly disclose all of its goals. Nevertheless,
at a given time, a movement typically strives for something, and it has the power
to choose that objective.
In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, the objective sometimes seemed
very narrow. The MIA originally wanted to prevent Black bus passengers from
having to give up their seats to White passengers when the White section of the

10 Wilkerson 2010, 527.


11 M.L. King 1958/​2010, Kindle loc. 1041.
12 M.L. King 1958/​2010, Kindle loc. 3125.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 17

bus was full. In other words, they did not originally contest segregation on city
buses, just the additional injustice of having to give up seats in the Black section
at the back. The NAACP was critical of this objective because it sought to abolish
segregation on all transportation and did not want to concede that separate but
equal buses could ever be acceptable.
However, even on the night when the MIA voted to boycott buses, King de-
picted their objective as much deeper and broader than changing who could sit
where on buses. He told the mass meeting of the MIA, “We, the disinherited of
this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the
long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom
and justice and equality.”13
A movement must also choose one or more organizations, agencies, or people
as its targets and create costs or difficulties for them. The MIA targeted the
Montgomery City Lines Inc. (the city’s bus company) by organizing a boycott
that would cost the company thousands of fares each day.
Other potential targets could have been chosen. For example, during the boy-
cott, Montgomery’s police commissioner joined the White Citizens Council, an
organization explicitly committed to preserving white supremacy. The commis-
sioner, the police department, or the White Citizens Council could have been
chosen as the main target, as could downtown stores or the Democratic Party.
The MIA chose the bus company because they saw a particular vulnerability that
they could exploit: the city’s buses depended on Black riders who could refuse to
ride and find other ways to work.
The MIA told the bus company and the City of Montgomery that Black com-
muters would go back to riding the city’s buses if: (1) Black riders did not have
to give up their seats to Whites; (2) drivers treated Black passengers courteously;
and (3) some Blacks were hired as drivers. These three points were their initial
demands. Meanwhile, Fred Grey and others involved with the MIA sued the city
and the bus lines to end all segregation in public transportation. They ultimately
won their case.14 They made different demands in court because a federal lawsuit
was a different context from a boycott. Demands are different from objectives
(often narrower and more modest), and they vary depending on the target.
The MIA also had to choose a strategy. Its main strategy was to organize and
sustain a boycott of the city’s buses for many months. Meanwhile, the MIA
sued to end segregation in federal court. When the police indicted eighty-​eight
leaders of the boycott (including King), these leaders surrendered voluntarily
and made their imprisonment into an act of nonviolent resistance that brought

13 M.L. King 1955.


14 Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956).

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18 What Should We Do?

international media attention to their cause. They also presented their case to re-
porters and raised money from supporters across the country and overseas.
These were the strategies of the MIA, but they could have taken other actions
instead or as well. Later, the civil rights movement would often violate police
or court orders against marching so that the police would arrest them and they
would fill jails with thousands of supporters. They organized sit-​ins, they regis-
tered voters, and they held large funeral ceremonies for martyrs. In Memphis in
1968, they supported a major strike. The civil rights movement could have em-
ployed violence against people or property, although it chose not to.
The movement also had to decide what to say and how to say it to various
audiences. The MIA made Martin Luther King Jr. into its main spokesperson,
and King gave speeches that are still widely read, as well as many interviews to
reporters. Soon after the movement’s success in Montgomery, he published a
book, Stride toward Freedom, that presented his early views more fully to a global
audience.
During the mass meeting that launched the boycott, King described Parks’s
recent arrest this way:

Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person. And, since it had to happen, I’m happy that it
happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless out-
reach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character. Nobody
can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teach-
ings of Jesus. And I’m happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person
that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine
Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there.
And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.15

Like any exercise in public communication, this passage reflects choices. The
MIA did not have to choose Martin Luther King as its leader. Rosa Parks could
have spoken in addition to King or instead of him. Or King could have spoken
about Parks’s experience as a militant activist and her long record of fighting
sexual violence against Black women. Instead, he chose to emphasize the invol-
untary nature of her arrest and her Christian faith. During the boycott and later,
King invoked American history, democracy, law, Christianity, and racial justice
in specific ways to influence fellow members of the Black community, relatively
sympathetic Whites, majorities of Americans, and global audiences.
The leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had to make concrete choices of
objectives, targets, demands, strategies, and rhetorical framings; and they had
to design procedures to make these decisions collectively and implement the

15 M.L. King 1955. He tells the story in a similar way in M.L. King 1958/​2010, Kindle loc. 651–​652.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 19

results successfully. They applied detailed information and insights about their
own circumstances. They also displayed an impressive understanding of more
general problems that typically confront civic actors. Here I will itemize these
problems and consider how they arose in the Montgomery case.

Collective Action Problems

In general, it is difficult for people to coordinate their individual actions to accom-


plish a common goal, even when they agree on the goal. After Reconstruction,
white supremacists in Alabama had built an effective means of coordination.
The state collected taxes (enforced, mandatory payments) and used the resulting
funds for police, prisons, segregated schools, and other governmental functions
that reinforced white supremacy, regardless of how individuals might feel about
that system. Influential state officials also belonged to private associations like
the White Citizens Council and the Klan and could use extrajudicial means to
reinforce their legal powers. Voters influenced the state through elections (which
are mechanisms for turning individual preferences into collective decisions), but
Whites outnumbered African Americans at the state level, most Black residents
were disenfranchised, and an association that was formally committed to white
supremacy, the Alabama Democratic Party, controlled electoral outcomes.
These were strategies for coordinating individual action to produce a common
end: white supremacy. To disrupt that system, Black Alabamans had to organize
their own effective collective action. That meant organizing thousands of people
to boycott, provide free rides to others, risk arrest, avoid violence, and convey
a reasonably coherent message—​all at the same time. King later came to view
moments of popular collective action as miraculous, as sudden glimpses of a
promised future intruding into the present. He saw that to delay such moments
would almost always defeat them, because they were fragile and evanescent. That
is why, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, King seeks to “remind America of the
fierce urgency of now.” He rejects “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” and ar-
gues, “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.”16
When a quarter of a million people come together on the National Mall to de-
mand change, a door opens to a better future.
Put in generic terms, these are some aspects of the problem of collective
action:

16 M.L. King 1963a. Cf. M.L. King 1963b on “the myth concerning time.” And see Luban 1989 for a

detailed study of King’s account of time in conjunction with Walter Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit, “time
of the now.”

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20 What Should We Do?

Free-​riders: It is often tempting to let other people carry the burden for a
public good, in which case the good may not be provided even if everyone wants
it. Examples range from a failure to clean the dishes in a shared house, to a deci-
sion not to vote and let others choose the government, to the refusal of nations to
limit their carbon emissions.
Although the term “free-​rider” conveys moral disapproval, that is not appro-
priate in cases like the Montgomery bus boycott. Individual African Americans
could hardly be reproached for hesitating to challenge white supremacy, because
resistance would be dangerous and futile in the absence of a powerful and effec-
tive movement. It would be reasonable for Black individuals to hope that others
might resist and then benefit from their sacrifice. Meanwhile, the system of white
supremacy had overcome its own challenges of free-​riding by paying the police
and others to enforce a racial hierarchy. Thus, free-​riding is not always a moral
failing, and solving a dilemma of free-​ridership does not always improve the
world. Nevertheless, free-​riding is a challenge to any effort to coordinate human
action, whether for good or evil.
Free-​riding bears a family resemblance to other situations that game-​theorists
model as prisoner’s dilemmas, arms races, games of “chicken,” and other types.17
Understanding the differences among these situations can be important for
selecting the best solutions. However, for the purpose of this chapter, the point
is simply that people often make individual, independent choices that are rea-
sonable for achieving their respective goals (including understandable or even
praiseworthy goals) but that produce bad outcomes for the whole group.
Path dependence: Once enslaved people were transported to the future
United States, economic and political interests arose that favored slavery. The
national economy depended on cheap Black labor and had its own inertia. The
cost of banning slavery would have been low in 1650; doing so would have put us
on a different path. Much later, in the 1870s, when formerly enslaved people were
denied a share of the land that they had worked, a new economy developed that
had a political constituency and economic inertia. In short, to change to a system
of economic and social equality is costly once it exists.
This is an illustration of path dependence, which can also be observed in many
other contexts. For example, we might all be better off if, a century ago, cars had
been developed to use electricity instead of gasoline. By the twenty-​first century,
electric cars would be fantastically fuel-​efficient and convenient.18 But the petro-
leum path was chosen, and now to shift to electricity is very expensive and diffi-
cult—​so much so that it might even be unwise.

17 It is plausible that an arms race is a prisoner’s dilemma (Plous 1993, 163).


18 Arthur 1990.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 21

The Iron Law of Oligarchy: The founders of the MIA were committed to dem-
ocratic and egalitarian values. However, from its launch, the MIA was dominated
by pastors, professors, lawyers, and other Black Montgomerians who held ad-
vanced degrees—​and, often, extensive prior experience in civil rights organi-
zations. During the remaining dozen years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, the
composition of the leadership of the national movement became a point of fre-
quent tension, with groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) chafing at the dominance of somewhat older and more seasoned leaders
like King and his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). Women were clearly underrepresented in the inner councils of the
movement, despite their enormous contributions. Ella Baker, who played central
roles in both SCLC and SNCC, observed that younger people often told her she
would have been famous and held more exalted positions if she had been male;
and she agreed that the movement had been “largely caried by women.” She op-
posed depending on strong, charismatic leaders.19 Another example of bias was
the decision to keep Bayard Rustin offstage because he was gay.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the leadership of the national
movement could have done a better job of including more and more diverse
people. However, the challenge is intrinsic and cannot be explained entirely on
the basis of biases, such as sexism or homophobia. There is a general tendency
for small subsets of people who already possess the most experience to dominate
even the most egalitarian groups.
The sociologist Robert Michels coined the phrase “Iron Law of Oligarchy”
in his eponymous 1911 book, which focused on the democratic socialist par-
ties of Europe. Even though these parties were committed in theory to internally
democratic processes, they formed bureaucracies that empowered their senior
leaders.20 Michels believed that this pattern represented an “Iron Law,” because
organizations require specialization and hierarchy, and that undermines egal-
itarian goals. Even if Michels’s supposed “law” is just a tendency, it is frequent
enough to constitute a generic problem.
Problematic decision rules: The MIA reached decisions by deliberating in-
tensively within a small leadership group, who typically reached a consensus
that they then presented to the mass membership for a vote by acclamation. This

19Baker n.d. (but before 1973), 350–​351. See also Payne 1989.
20Michels 1915, thesis first stated on p. 11. Doerr 2018 provides an insightful account of oli-
garchical tendencies among left-​wing groups in Europe and the United States today that echoes
Michels. However, Hirschman (1970, 84) offers an analysis that undermines Michels’s claim of a
universal law. For Hirschman, oligarchy within small radical parties reflects ease of exit; members
prefer to leave rather than challenge a party’s leadership, because they have choices. In systems with
a few, large parties, members will have more incentive to exercise voice, and leaders may be made
more accountable.

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22 What Should We Do?

method worked well enough because the movement had momentum and deep
support.
However, when people disagree, a rule requiring consensus may favor sup-
porters of the status quo. Majority rule is an alternative that has natural appeal.
In the case of the MIA, genuine majority rule would have required putting con-
tested choices to a vote by the whole membership. But that method is not always
wise. In a majority-​rule system, the majority can badly mistreat a minority—​as
was the case in the state of Alabama as a whole. And when a vote is close, it maxi-
mizes the number of people who are dissatisfied. In a voluntary association like
the MIA, dissatisfied people may exit, weakening the organization. The founders
of the MIA demonstrated civic skill by gently moving Rev. Bennett into second
place below Dr. King without forcing a vote on the matter, which would have
been divisive.21
In fact, it has been proven that no system for turning votes into decisions can
simultaneously meet several obvious criteria.22 In practical terms, the main im-
plication of this finding is that we must often choose between voting systems
that force a two-​sided choice (like referenda or two-​party elections) or voting
systems that allow many to win small shares of power (as in Israeli elections). The
former systems disadvantage anyone who is dissatisfied with the forced choice.
The latter can lead to stalemate or unpopular minority rule. The choice of rules is
somewhat arbitrary and yet may determine the outcome.
Boundary problems: In the 1960s, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture)
began to emphasize that Blacks actually represented a majority in many
Southern counties and Northern cities. Voting rights would therefore enable
what Carmichael called (using a term that already had a long history) “Black
Power.”23
In this instance, Carmichael focused on the fact that the boundaries of
American political jurisdictions sometimes favored African Americans, if they
could vote. However, by the same logic, the boundaries of US states favored
Whites, since they then constituted a majority of every state except Hawaii. And
the United States as a whole had a White-​majority electorate, which has posed a
consistent challenge for Black Nationalists in this country.
The generic problem is that political outcomes are relative to the boundaries
that we draw around communities. This is why the drawing of electoral districts
is so important to outcomes. Similar problems arise at larger scales as well. The
proper status of Northern Ireland would be decided differently if the decision be-
longed to residents of that province, residents of the island of Ireland, residents of

21 For a similar example with a theoretical explanation, see Mansbridge 1980, 67.
22 Arrow 1950.
23 E.g., Carmichael 1966.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 23

the United Kingdom, or residents of the European Union. The main point of de-
bate is which population should determine sovereignty. Such problems can arise
not only for political jurisdictions within which people vote on laws and leaders,
but also for other boundaries, such as school catchment zones, parishes and dio-
ceses, and even the membership bodies of private associations.
Principal/​agent conflicts: An agent is someone whom a principal employs to
take care of her interests. For instance, I employ my dentist to take care of my
teeth. But my dentist’s interests may diverge from mine; she may want me to have
expensive surgery that I do not need.
The same divergence can occur in political contexts. The state of Alabama pre-
sented itself as an agent of all its citizens, which was clearly false with respect to
Black Alabamans and plausibly untrue for many Whites as well. Perhaps cases
like this are not best understood as principal/​agent dilemmas, because the ex-
ercise of raw power is so evident. But the civil rights movement provides clearer
examples. Leaders like King sought to be agents of their community. This was
their genuine goal, but they did not always accomplish it in practice. They might,
for example, have valid reasons to try to protect their own reputations, influ-
ence, access to powerful politicians, and budgets so that they could continue to
lead, and that desire might cause their interests to diverge from the people they
tried to represent. Without naming individuals, Ella Baker criticized movement
leaders who “get so involved with playing the game of being important that they
exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually orga-
nizing people”24 As with free-​riding, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and problematic
decision rules and boundaries, this challenge is intrinsic and not reducible to bad
choices by individuals.

Discourse Problems

Under segregation, race was deeply encoded in language, even in the way people
addressed each other. In the North, too, Americans talked about race in ways
that reinforced white supremacy.25 One of goals and accomplishments of the
civil rights movement was to change how we talk and think about race. But the
movement also had certain ways of presenting its own values that can be con-
tested. I have cited King’s presentation of Parks as a tired Christian worker in-
stead of a seasoned campaigner against rape. Another example is the frequent
use of patriotic and religious language by King and other leaders of the SCLC.

24 Baker n.d., 351


25 Gates 2019 is a wide-​ranging study of anti-​Black racist ideology and the struggles against it.

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24 What Should We Do?

Although I interpret their rhetoric as authentic rather than merely strategic, and
I see powerful arguments in favor of it, it is certainly contestable.
Put more generically, civic actors confront discourse problems, many of which
we can categorize as ideology, propaganda, and polarization.
Ideology: This word can be defined in various ways, but here I mean a set of
assumptions that distort one’s other beliefs. Jason Stanley writes that everyone
has an ideology, but “flawed ideologies” are those that serve as “persistent bar-
riers to the acquisition of knowledge.”26
Racism is an ideology, in this sense. We could also cite less objectionable
examples and cases in which ideology besets people on both sides of a valuable
debate. For instance, some people believe that the United States was once a wel-
fare state with a social safety net that has been badly frayed because of neolib-
eralism. And other people believe that the United States was once a society of
free, self-​reliant entrepreneurs that is becoming socialist. They cannot both be
right, but they could both be wrong. The federal government of the United States
has controlled a fluctuating proportion of between 15 and 25 percent of Gross
National Product since 1955, with no evident long-​term trend during that pe-
riod.27 That is just a discrete fact, but it complicates narratives of decline from
right and left alike. When adherents of any given view will not adjust their posi-
tion in response to inconvenient facts, we have a problem of ideology.
Propaganda: Although it would be difficult to quantify the degree to which
segregation relied on Confederate statues, Gone with the Wind, and textbooks
that told a sanitized version of American history, such forms of communication
may well have reinforced the system. More generally, it is possible to influence
public opinion by deploying resources. One can pay for advertisements, hire
writers and artists, erect monuments or billboards, and collect data to determine
which message will be effective with which audience. Money and power can shift
what people believe and value. When money is widely deployed to persuade,
it becomes unclear what people authentically value, let alone what they should
value.28
Polarization: Most Black and White Alabamans held dramatically divergent
views of the social system. This divergence was not the problem; racism was.
Whites needed to learn how things looked to African Americans. However, di-
vergence can be an intrinsic problem. Numerous studies have found that groups
on one general side of an issue will migrate toward more radical opinions when

26Stanley 2015, 223.


27Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Federal Net Outlays as Percent of Gross Domestic Product,”
https://​fred.stl​ouis​fed.org/​ser​ies/​FYON​GDA1​88S.
28 I am defining propaganda as well-​resourced persuasive communication, regardless of quality

or purpose. Hobbs 2020 suggests that calling a communication propaganda can be subjective and
depends on context, but she emphasizes the criteria of mass scale and intersection with entertain-
ment (8–​9).

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 25

they form an enclave of like-​minded people.29 Groups that span a wide spectrum
of opinion will often polarize into relatively radical opposing subgroups. One
of several reasons for this is that individuals want to be accepted into groups of
like-​minded peers. Insofar as this problem arose in the civil rights movement, it
was most evident once the major groups began to splinter over funding, credit,
strategic choices, and issues like Vietnam.30 These disagreements were substan-
tive and valid, yet members of each component organization—​from the NAACP
to SNCC—​began to view the other groups in somewhat stereotyped terms and
intentionally chose divergent approaches.

Examples of Problems of Injustice Based on Identity

An identity is an answer to the question: “Who am I?” (Or, “Who is he/​she/​


they?”). This question relates to the civic question in at least two important ways.
First, you must consider who you are in order to figure out what “we” you are part
of that can ask, “What should we do?”
Second, the “we” can be defined badly, and that can be the civic problem.
Individuals may be excluded unjustly or included against their will. Christopher
Lebron analyzes how Frederick Douglass, in his “What, to a Slave, Is the Fourth
of July?” speech (1852), confronts his White audience with the fact that that the
nation is theirs, not his, and they are morally responsible for his exclusion from
it. Douglass pointedly uses “you” instead of “we.”31 Some Alabamans in 1955
presumably acknowledged that Whites and African Americans constituted a rel-
evant group (the people of Alabama), but they emphasized race as a basis for
inequality within that population. That meant that they spoke in bad faith when
they talked about Alabamans as “we.” Many other groups err in similar ways.
An identity is logically different from an interest or an opinion. When inter-
ests conflict, they can be negotiated, and it is sometimes possible to design and
maintain systems to manage interests fairly. When opinions conflict, they can be
discussed, and well-​structured conversations may (sometimes) convince indi-
viduals to converge on the same opinions. When identities differ, it is not clear
that individuals should negotiate, compromise, or give reasons for their differ-
ences. When people say that they are “unapologetically” members of a given
group, they are implying that they should not have to compromise or alter their
identity in response to either pressure or reasons. However, it can be controver-
sial whether a given characteristic, such as adhering to a religion, constitutes an

29 A recent contribution to this literature is Gabbay, Kelly, Reedy & Gastil 2018. These authors find

that facilitation can address the problem.


30 Barkan 1986.
31 Lebron 2017, 10–​11.

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26 What Should We Do?

interest, an opinion, an identity, or more than one of these. Disagreements about


such questions can lead to disputes about whether individuals should be open to
negotiation and responsive to arguments, or not.
It can be problematic to talk about identity in general terms, as if each of us has
a unique bundle of identities, and we are all different. Some identity differences
are vastly more significant to social justice than others. For instance, racism is the
United States is not just an example of an identity-​difference that has measurable
effects on people’s perceptions and emotional reactions (although it is that). It has
also been the basis for slavery and exploitation at a massive level, and the results
persist. Using data collected in 2020, I estimate that being African American al-
most quintuples the odds of being treated unfairly by the police, once many other
factors are accounted for.32
But without flattening the differences among identities, we can gain insights
by identifying general categories of problems that arise—​in different ways and to
different degrees—​in cases when identities conflict.33
Problems of distance: In some cases, an identity distinction emerges because
two groups of people act and think very differently and have little history of con-
tact. An independent observer could easily categorize them as different groups,
and they may demonstrate poor mutual understanding.34 Encounters between
European colonists and indigenous peoples, or between refugees and host com-
munities, provide many examples. Civic problems arise, such as inequality, due
to the differences, stereotyping, and prejudice against the out-​group; a need for
literal translation and mutual understanding; and disagreements about what
norms, rules, and institutions are legitimate for resolving disputes.
Identities that are created and reinforced to underpin injustice: In other
cases, people are quite similar, intimately connected, and liable to mix or ex-
change places. Then there can be powerful incentives to erect and insist on iden-
tity distinctions.
For example, in the early days of the Virginia colony, settlers emphasized a
distinction between heathens and Christians as their justification for slavery and
conquest. They had an incentive to differentiate themselves from people they
wanted to enslave or dispossess. The religious boundary that they first erected
no longer worked once the enslaved people became Christians. A linguistic

32 In a binomial logistic regression using a national survey conducted by the Tufts University

Priority Area Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement with Ipsos
(n =​1,267), I find that identifying as African American raises the odds of reporting that “you have
been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police” by 4.6
times when controlling for self-​reported gender, education, age, English-​language proficiency,
household income, housing type, and any mental health diagnosis, as well as Census estimates of me-
dian income at the county level.
33 Wimmer 2008, 975.
34 Barth 1969 begins his influential account with examples like this, before arguing that many

identity differences do not reflect objective differences in behavior or values.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 27

boundary would have failed for a similar reason, so Whites developed a new cat-
egory based on the convenient visual cue of skin color. The path from religion
to race went through an intermediary stage, the idea that some people could
never become full Christians—​what Rebecca Anne Goetz calls “hereditary
heathenism.”35
Today, race is deeply ingrained. Many Americans identify a photograph of a
face with a racial category and have a consequent emotional reaction within one
tenth of one second after seeing it.36 Although race is socially constructed, it does
not follow that it is easy to reconstruct or deconstruct. It is now a powerful reality.
Identity groups (groups that define who people are rather than what they do or
think) often remain durable over time, notwithstanding gradual evolution due to
births and deaths, conversions and excommunications, marriages and divorces.
But groups’ beliefs and behavior often change, as do the rationales for the bound-
aries among them. Identity boundaries may not mark dramatic differences or
gaps in communication. On the contrary, people often accentuate boundaries
when they perceive interactions and similarities across the line.37 The Black/​
White boundary in America is a perfect example: interactions have often been
intimate and pervasive, and both groups often share the same religion, language,
and many other aspects of culture, yet the color line has been profoundly impor-
tant. Boundaries reflect the incentives created by institutions (such as states and
markets), power differentials, network ties, and path-​dependence, among other
factors.38
A wide range of criteria can be used to create identity distinctions, of which
skin color is only one example. Sometimes, a third party can be hard pressed to
detect a difference that is highly salient to the people on both sides of a boundary
that structures their interactions.39 There can be disagreements about where a
line lies, about what it entails, or about both. For instance, over the course of
US history, conflict has frequently focused on whether the Black/​White binary
does, may, or should mark a disparity in status and rights. But disagreement
about where the line lies has been relatively rare. With some exceptions, African
Americans and Whites typically share the same view of who is Black or White.
That is notable because the racial boundary is defined quite differently in other
countries and did not exist until the 1600s.40
One response would be to question the very concept of identity.41 However,
that may be futile, given the pervasive use of identity boundaries to structure

35 Goetz 2012; cf. T. Allen 1994.


36 Kubota & Ito 2007.
37 Barth 1969.
38 Wimmer 2008. Cf. Bowen 1996.
39 Barth 1969.
40 Wimmer 2008, 1000.
41 See, e.g., Butler 1990, ix.

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28 What Should We Do?

human interactions. Besides, creating or redefining an identity can be an achieve-


ment, a form of human flourishing. “In this forging of identity, we connect with
others and engage in collective work.”42 A world of diversity and pluralism may
require the maintenance of distinct identities and the creation of new ones. As
Langston Hughes wrote of African Americans in his time, “they still hold their
own individuality in the face of American standardization.”43 Still, the flexibility
and variability of identities creates the possibility that they can be used for nefar-
ious purposes, as New World slavery illustrates. Civic actors must be able to dif-
ferentiate between beneficial and pernicious identity distinctions and transform
the harmful ones into something better.
Quiescence: Sometimes people who face objectively unjust and remediable
circumstances fail to take action, and the explanation can be traced to their ac-
ceptance of their own inferior position. They believe that who they are condemns
them to an inferior position or justifies it.
Countering any claim that African Americans have been quiescent is the
long history of Black resistance in churches, associations, families, and Black-​
owned businesses and the frequent appearance of those critical conversations
in the White-​dominated public sphere, whether in the time of Phillis Wheatley,
Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, or today. However, one group that was
quiescent in the same region and in the same period as the Montgomery bus
boycott was the White population of the Appalachian mining valley depicted
by John Gaventa.44 Gaventa demonstrates that although they were pervasively
exploited, these people tended to view their situation as natural and accept it.
Similarly, Gandhi told his fellow Indians, “The English have not taken India; we
have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because
we keep them.”45 And the South African founder of Black Consciousness, Steve
Biko, wrote that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the
mind of the oppressed. If one is free at heart, no man-​made chains can bind one
to servitude, but if one’s mind is so manipulated and controlled by the oppressor
as to make the oppressed believe that he is a liability to the White man, then there
will be nothing the oppressed can do to scare his powerful masters.”46

Each of these problems has a practical dimension: we need effective means to


overcome it. Given the vast range of relevant circumstances, no single strategy

42 Bickford 1997, 124.


43 Hughes 1926/​2009. Chike Jeffers hopes to see black people persist as “a cultural group” even
after the defeat of racism (Jeffers 2019).
44 Gaventa 1982.
45 Gandhi 1921, 26.
46 Biko 1973, 92.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 29

will be effective in all instances of any category of problem. The most successful
strategies will vary and will require experience and judgment to select.
Each of these problems also has a normative dimension (using the word “nor-
mative” in its philosophical sense, to mean differences between ideas or actions
that are fair, just, or good versus those that are unfair, unjust, or bad). We need
normative judgment to decide whether situations that fit the criteria I have
described in this chapter are actually problems, and what would count as solu-
tions. For instance, firms that must compete for customers face what they could
plausibly call a collective-​action problem. A cartel would solve their problem. It
would require an agreement for mutual accountability, coordination, and mon-
itoring. Yet we have good reasons to denounce cartels. We may see price-​fixing
as a threat to the public interest (since a few producers will profit at the expense
of many consumers) or as a form of cheating (since competitors should demon-
strate fair play by competing over prices), or both. One could perhaps defend
business cartels under certain circumstances. For our purposes here, the point is
that calling something a “problem” almost always requires a normative argument
as well as a technical analysis.
The three sets of problems are connected. Yet none of the three is, in my view,
reducible to another. A very ambitious game theorist might assume that all
breakdowns of human interaction are problems of collective action.47 But game
theory takes as givens the values and identities of the players. In general, identi-
ties are not fixed but are created and changed by discourse. For example, a swath
of countries across the Middle East is currently embroiled in conflicts between
Shiites and Sunnis. If one takes the existence of those two opposing groups for
granted, then game theory may be helpful for explaining certain developments,
such as the arms race between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the tit-​for-​tat sectarian
violence against civilians. But identification with these two groups is a variable,
not a constant. Adam Gaiser writes that identifying with an Islamic sect is a “dy-
namic and conscious process of adoption, maintenance, and manipulation of
certain types of narrative identities in particular places and at particular times by
particular persons or groups of persons.”48 Other identities apart from sects (e.g.,
Islam as a whole, Arab versus Persian nationality, or pan-​regional solidarity) can
be salient instead of the sectarian split. How people identify is a choice that can
be influenced by discourse.
In fact, some cultural critics may argue that all of our problems arise from
discourse, which produces our values and identities. But even if we all sin-
cerely agreed about something as important as climate change, problems of

47 An example is Tarko 2017, 7–​11, which I mention because of its subject. It is a fine book, but

I disagree with Tarko that we only have institutions because of transaction costs or that Ostrom
would have thought so.
48 Gaiser 2017, 62.

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30 What Should We Do?

collective action would still be formidable. We would not only face the mother of
all tragedies-​of-​the-​commons but also challenges of path-​dependence (e.g., our
reliance on internal combustion engines), boundary issues (the countries that
use the most carbon are separated from the big producers), and indifference to
people we view as alien.
Nor is it plausible that we would automatically reach consensus about values
and coordinate our actions if we could eliminate power imbalances based on
identities. Seeking an example of a community in which everyone shares the
same identity, I considered Mount Athos, which is now an autonomous monastic
republic within Greece and the European Union. Every resident on Mount Athos
must be an Orthodox man; even female animals (with the exceptions of insects,
cats, and birds) have been banned for centuries. Thus there are no distinctions
of religion or gender on Mount Athos. The monks do represent different nation-
alities, but that does not seem to have been the root of the problem in 1913. The
issue then was whether the Name of Jesus as God is the same as God Himself.
The monks split on this question in a 661–​517 vote (with many abstentions) that
provoked “not only verbal but physical violence.”49 Although one side was led by
a Russian noble, the tsar of Russia felt it necessary to send gunboats and troops to
support the other side, ordering the arrest, excommunication, and exile of hun-
dreds of monks. In game-​theory terms, we would say that two sets of players had
reached a destructive impasse that was settled by an outsider. The situation was
highly problematic even though issues of identity were irrelevant.
A subset of these three sets of problems will typically confront any concrete
group of human beings who aim to influence their worlds. In many circum-
stances, the various problems will closely interrelate, causing webs or cycles of
challenges.

Human Cognitive Limitations

Complicating all of these separate problems are pervasive human cognitive


limitations. As creatures who evolved to hunt and gather in small bands on an
open savanna, we are not naturally equipped with the mental tools we need to be
moral agents in complex modern societies—​or even to calculate our narrow self-​
interests under modern conditions.
Some cognitive limitations have been known for centuries. For example, in
1620, Francis Bacon published a precise and penetrating analysis of the phe-
nomenon now known as “confirmation bias.” He noticed that once a mind
holds an opinion, it naturally collects supportive evidence and “either neglects

49 Larchet 2016.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott 31

and despises” or else finds reasons to discount all evidence on their other side.
Later in the same paragraph, Bacon also recognizes what we now call positivity
or optimism bias: “it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to
be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought
properly to hold itself indifferently disposed toward both alike.”50
Although some theorists have long been interested in such cognitive limita-
tions, a model of individuals as rational utility-​maximizers was essential to clas-
sical and neoclassical economics. These disciplines made strong assumptions
about people’s ability to understand complex situations and predict the outcomes
of their private choices. Beginning in the late 1960s, Amos Tversky and Daniel
Kahneman shook that model with experiments that demonstrated that human
beings use “simplifying heuristics rather than extensive algorithmic processing”
to make decisions. Individuals err in predictable ways even when they want to
think rationally.51
Tversky and Kahneman’s program spread across the behavioral sciences and
constantly discovers new biases that are predictable enough to bear their own
names. Attribution Bias means explaining one’s failures as the results of difficult
external circumstances, while others’ failures must flow from their bad choices.
The Bandwagon Effect is a tendency to endorse ideas that many others are ex-
pressing. The Control Illusion is the tendency to overestimate how much we
control events. One could continue an alphabetical list through to the Zeigarnik
Effect (we remember interrupted tasks better than completed ones).
Two other clusters of limitations are central enough to the concerns of this
book that they deserve their own brief summaries:
Implicit bias: A large body of experiments shows that people hold implicit
negative attitudes toward various categories of human beings—​attitudes that
influence their explicit decisions even when they sincerely deny holding them.
Dozens of experiments have tested hiring managers’ reactions to fictitious
résumés that are identical except that the applicants’ names are common for ei-
ther Whites, Blacks, or Latinos. Identical résumés with White-​sounding names
have received 36 percent more callbacks than those with Black-​sounding names,
and 24 percent more than those with Latino-​sounding names, with no evident
change in these disparities since the first study in 1989.52 This is a fairly pure and
unambiguous example of bias, although an unknown proportion of it may be ex-
plicit and intentional rather than implicit. Similar forms of bias also arise when

50Bacon 1620/​1863, xlvi.


51Gilovich & Griffin 2002, 1.
52 Quillian, Pager, Hexel & Midtbøen 2017. Cf. Bertrand & Mullainathan 2004. In a similar ex-

periment with nonprofit job openings in Chicago and Boston, colleagues and I found that Latino-​
sounding names drew more callbacks than whites, followed by Blacks. Levine, Kawashima-​Ginsberg,
Benenson & Hayat 2018.

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32 What Should We Do?

human beings impose other categories on each other: gender, religion, sexual
orientation, and many others.
Motivated reasoning means that we are good at selecting and emphasizing
facts that support our predetermined ideas, and equally good at marginalizing or
debunking facts that complicate or challenge those ideas. For example, as people
obtain more education, their opinions of climate change correlate more with
their political ideology. Conservatives become less likely to believe in climate
change, and liberals more so, the more education they have.53 Well-​educated
conservatives are sophisticated enough to recognize that accepting evidence of
climate change would challenge their economic views, so they use mental tech-
niques (also exhibited by liberals on other topics54) to reject or marginalize the
evidence. Deliberate efforts to debunk myths actually reinforce the same myths
because people hear the information selectively. That “backfire effect” is a strong
illustration of the more general tendency of human beings to assimilate new in-
formation with bias.55
These phenomena are held to be deeply rooted in the cognitive limitations of
human beings.56 Not only has the burgeoning literature on cognitive biases chal-
lenged market models, but it undermines the “folk theory” of democracy taught
in civics textbooks and widely believed by citizens and pundits, which holds that
“Ordinary people have preferences about what their government should do.
They choose leaders who will do these things, or they enact their preferences
directly in referendums. In either case, what the majority wants becomes gov-
ernment policy.”57 Citing the research on human cognitive limitations as well as
other evidence, Achen and Bartels argue that this folk theory is not only false as a
description of actual politics in the United States; it is impossible.
All the problems briefly summarized here raise serious doubts about whether
citizens can reason together about what they should do and then act collabo-
ratively. However, groups of people do solve human problems. They do build
institutions and norms that improve life. They build tools—​daily newspapers,
adversarial courtrooms, secret ballots—​that mitigate the limitations of human
reason and allow us to discuss, coordinate, and form functional groups. Every
decent government, association, neighborhood, and network is a triumph of rea-
sonable hope over chastened experience. Some citizens who ask, “What should
we do?” have learned how to overcome these problems.

53 Pew Research Center 2008.


54 Bartels 2002.
55 Nyhan & Reifler 2010.
56 Aligica 2017.
57 Achen & Bartels 2016, 1.

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3
Three Traditions in Search of Solutions

No single thinker can answer the question, “What should we do?” Armchair
theorizing cannot reveal satisfactory solutions to problems as thorny as free-​
riding, motivated reasoning, or quiescence. Nor will it suffice to study the re-
cord of past and current solutions that have already been invented by practical
people such as activists and political leaders. Often, to motivate a solution,
a new idea is needed: theory must provide the inspiration. However, an idea
rarely succeeds when it is first tested. To make any social experiment work,
we must refine and improve it until the hypothesis becomes right. The original
idea combines—​at least implicitly—​empirical evidence, normative principle,
strategic insight, and design. It almost always incorporates previous theories
and experiments. But the new idea only becomes right if it leads to experimen-
tation and critical reflection that ultimately yield desirable outcomes. Because
this cycle requires the contributions of many people over decades, we should
seek guidance from relevant theory/​practice traditions, not from individual
authors alone.
An everyday example is public schooling. Nineteenth-​century reformers like
Horace Mann drew from previous thinkers—​and from successful experiences
in countries like Prussia—​to propose a new idea: every child should be educated
at the government’s expense in a state-​funded common school. Since then, not
only have educators and policymakers refined and revised most aspects of public
schooling, but scholars have critically evaluated actual schools from a wide va-
riety of perspectives. A few observers have concluded that Mann’s core idea was
misplaced,1 but most see their role as helping to make his vision become suc-
cessful. Public schools did not arise like a new species in Darwinian evolution
to survive or fail on its own. Nor did Mann propose a hypothesis that could be
tested with a single experiment (e.g., “Common schools will work”). Rather,

1 E.g., the libertarians Milton and Rose Friedman argue that a mandate is unnecessary and the

public school monopoly poorly serves children: “We believe that the growing role that government
has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only to enormous waste of taxpayers’
money but also to a far poorer educational system than would have developed had voluntary coop-
eration continued to play a larger role.” (Friedman & Friedman 1980, 187) From a very different per-
spective, Illich 1971 argues that schools exist to indoctrinate children into the assumption that they
must obey institutions.

What Should We Do?. Peter Levine, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197570494.003.0003

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34 What Should We Do?

universal public schooling originated with an argument that combined values


and empirical predictions, and it launched a process of improvement that has
combined research with practice.
Public schooling is a familiar example of an iterative theory/​practice tradi-
tion that has unfolded over more than a century (so far) and has involved many
thousands of devoted thinkers and actors. At the heart of this book are three
other theory/​practice traditions, chosen because they have respectively ad-
dressed the three clusters of problems described earlier in this chapter. Whereas
Mann and his allies sought to educate children, these three traditions aim to
address the citizen’s generic question by focusing on important categories of
questions about collective action, discourse, and power/​identity.
The first tradition is the Bloomington School, exemplified by the late
Indiana University Professor Elinor (“Lin”) Ostrom, her husband and collab-
orator Vincent Ostrom, and the many hundreds of scholars and practitioners
from many disciplines who have been involved with the Ostroms’ Workshop
in Political Theory and Policy since 1973.2 Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a lifetime of work studying how
people solve problems of collective action. Vincent was a more explicit the-
orist of constitutions, and their combined efforts yielded a robust account of
citizenship in which the citizen is fundamentally a person who helps resolve
problems of collective action. The Ostroms were indebted to certain core in-
sights of libertarianism or neoliberalism, but their conclusions elude ideolog-
ical labels.
The Ostroms were not solitary theorists but were deeply involved with lab-
oratory experiments, field experiments, and the close observation of practices
around the world. They have had particularly strong influence on environmen-
talists, because human beings’ interactions with nature supply many clear in-
stances of collective-​action problems. (Even when we agree that we should not
destroy nature, a failure to coordinate causes its destruction.) However, the im-
plications of the Bloomington School extend far beyond environmental issues.
This tradition will be the topic of c­ hapter 4.
The second tradition is the Frankfurt School, particularly as it has evolved
under the leadership of Jürgen Habermas. Originating in the 1920s with Marxist
scholars and activists who were critical of capitalist, technological, mass society,
the Frankfurt School has always offered insights about discourse problems, par-
ticularly ideology and propaganda. From the start (and in contrast to orthodox
or “scientific” Marxism), members of the School were always concerned about
the normative dimension of public problems: how can we reliably differentiate

2 For the history of the label, see Aligica 2014, xii.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 35

between good and bad systems? Compared to the Bloomington School, they
were more explicit and self-​conscious about normative questions and more in-
terested in discourse and public reasoning, although much less helpful about
problems of collective action.
In my reading, the first generation of the Frankfurt School offered scant so-
lutions to the problems they insightfully mapped. After the Second World War,
Habermas refocused the School on making distinctions between good and bad
discourse and understanding the social conditions of desirable deliberation. In
the process, he has moved even farther from Marxism, although he has retained
a critical edge. One could say that for Habermas, a good citizen is one who delib-
erates well with others and makes deliberation possible.
Habermas is certainly an academic theorist, but practitioners have attempted
many practical experiments with public deliberation in the past four decades.
The tradition that I will explore in ­chapter 5 consists of the thought of Habermas,
responses from his key critics, and this array of practical experimentation.
The third tradition involves mass social movements that are nonviolent or that
sharply limit their participants’ use of violence. A pivotal figure in this tradition
is M. K. Gandhi. He drew on theoretical works, including the late writings of
Tolstoy, the Bhagavad Gita, and Henry David Thoreau, as well as practical initia-
tives such as the civil disobedience of British suffragists. But he also innovated,
both theoretically and practically, calling his life My Experiments with Truth.3
The Gandhian tradition has radiated to many other countries, and I will focus
on its return to the United States via the civil rights movement and its echoes in a
set of self-​limiting popular uprisings since 1989 known as the Color Revolutions.
One could say that for Gandhi, the ideal citizen is the satyagrahi, the bearer of
truth-​force.
I will argue in c­ hapter 6 that the Gandhian tradition is more useful than the
other two when clashes of identity are combined with great disparities of power,
as was the case when the British ruled India and wherever Whites have domi-
nated African Americans. This tradition is about movement, while the other two
theories are more comfortable with stability. It also offers a distinctive set of nor-
mative ideals of wide application. It is less useful than the other two traditions,
however, for designing and refining durable institutions.
After discussing each of these three traditions in its own chapter, I will con-
clude with the outline of a synthesis that uses each tradition to compensate for
the weaknesses of the others.

3 Gandhi 1927.

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36 What Should We Do?

Other Starting Places

In focusing on the Bloomington School, the second generation of the Frankfurt


School, and the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, I do not mean to imply
that they are the only valuable resources for addressing the citizen’s core ques-
tion: What should we do? Each tradition has developed from a particular or-
igin and drawn its own community of thinkers and practitioners. Other clusters
of thinkers and actors could start with different intellectual origins and achieve
just as much. One might start instead with Catholic Social Thought, Buddhist
modernism, Frantz Fanon’s responses to colonial oppression, the Capabilities
Approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, or strands of feminism, to
name just a few examples. Those have and will supply material for other books.
I would, however, like to explain why I have not devoted nearly as much of
this book to three particular traditions, even though they are congenial, influen-
tial, and familiar to me. The first of these is John Dewey’s version of pragmatism.
Dewey advocates for all contexts (schools, workplaces, etc.) to become fully dem-
ocratic. Dewey rejects a definition of “democracy” as majority rule (or as any set
of processes and institutions). It is rather the whole culture that develops when
people solve problems together.4 In a true democracy, members can change any
of the rules—​including such apparently sacrosanct ones as “general suffrage,
elected representatives, majority rule, and so on”—​in response to experience.5
Dewey also rejects a narrow definition of “education” as what children get
from schools. Rather, we learn throughout our lives by interacting with our fellow
human beings and with nature, particularly as we pose and address problems
­collectively. Dewey denies that a “community” is any group of people who happen
to live in a location or interact. Instead, a true community is a group of people
who have come to understand their shared interests.6 Finally, he defines “science”
as more than experimenting on nature, instead using it to mean any organized,
­cumulative, and critical process by which people build knowledge. Participation
in a scientific, democratic learning community (in Dewey’s idiosyncratic senses of
these four words) would be a compelling description of civic agency.
That is why his view is congenial. But Dewey was far too optimistic about
the outcomes of democratic participation and learning. In 1924, he wrote that
“the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms.” Human

4 “Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of

conjoint communal experience.” Dewey 1916/​1985, 93.


5 Dewey 1927, 144.
6 “Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular

persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic
desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a com-
munity. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of
democracy.” Dewey 1927, 149.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 37

beings had drawn the “well-​attested conclusion from historic facts”—​in short,
we had learned—​that “government exists to serve its community, and that this
purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in selecting its
governors and determining their policies.”7 People had become democrats by re-
flecting on experience. Their future experiments would only deepen and enrich
democratic culture.
Even at that moment, a few wealthy and well-​armed nations that were democrat-
ically governed by their own people were holding most of the rest of the world as
exploited colonies. Within two decades, millions had perished in senseless wars and
domestic slaughters that had popular support. The democratic current was hardly
steady. Here Dewey ignores the fact that human beings can “learn” all manner of
lessons, including the evil lessons that other people are subhuman and deserve ex-
ploitation, if not extermination. As Cornel West observes, Dewey drew from his op-
timistic American forebears Jefferson and Emerson, but he “failed to seriously meet
the challenge posed by Lincoln—​namely, defining the relation of democratic ways
thought and life to a profound sense of evil.”8
Dewey’s optimism about learning and self-​government led him to reject all limi-
tations on new institutions and procedures. He decried ideas like “the Constitution,
the Supreme Court, private property, free contract, and so on,” for which “the words
‘sacred’ and ‘sanctity’ come readily to our lips.”9 Everything should be open to ex-
perimentation. But if the problems I listed earlier are dangerous, then institutional
innovations can be harmful instead of helpful, and some of the forms that we have
built so far may be precious achievements. Perhaps we should block changes by cre-
ating rigid norms and rules, including written constitutions that we hold sacrosanct.
Because pragmatism is overly sanguine about progress, it fails to give much guid-
ance in a world rife with dangers.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Dewey grappled more explicitly with evil, partly as
a result of sharp critiques from the likes of Lewis Mumford (who thought pragma-
tism had weakened Americans’ will to resist tyranny) and Reinhold Niebuhr (who
charged Dewey with naive optimism).10 Like his younger self, the septuagenarian
Dewey was commendably open to learning from the experiences of those dark
years and from his critics. Still, I do not find in the late Dewey an adequate account
of how to prevent corruption, barbarism, or social collapse.
Unlike Dewey, Hannah Arendt was fully aware of evil. Writing in the shadow
of the Holocaust, from which she had herself escaped, she predicted in 1945 that
“the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life

7 Dewey 1927, 146.


8 West 2008, 175.
9 Dewey 1927, 169–​70.
10 Westbrook 1991, 510–​36.

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38 What Should We Do?

in Europe.”11 Her thought is congenial to the spirit of this book because she un-
derstood that being an active citizen under conditions of injustice is part of living
a full life. She thought that Jefferson and other American revolutionaries had dis-
covered that “no one could be called happy without his share in public happi-
ness, that no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom,
and that no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and
having a share, in public business.”12 She saw that people who deliberate about
what to do and then act together in public are free, equal, and dignified in ways
that are impossible for those who are governed, even benignly. In common with
other civic republican thinkers, Arendt recognized that politics (the active en-
gagement of diverse people in public spaces) is a good in itself, not merely a way
of obtaining desirable outcomes, such as security and prosperity.
Arendt also contributed valuable ideas about the public domain as distinct from
the private sphere. She was especially helpful on this topic because the public/​pri-
vate distinction had often been used to deprive women of public roles, but Arendt
was a tireless fighter for women’s liberation (and an important female public figure
herself) who believed that privacy should be reconsidered and protected rather
than abandoned.
Finally, Arendt offered insights about institutional design, derived from what
she considered her discovery of the “lost treasure” of the “revolutionary tradition.”13
During revolutions, she thought, people spontaneously construct small, self-​gov-
erning units that run their own workplaces as well as their villages or neighbor-
hoods. Revolutionary leaders are threatened by these rival sources of power and
usually shut them down, but they permit dignified politics while they last.
There is, indeed, much to be learned from spontaneous revolutionary organ-
izations, but Arendt does not have enough to say about how they could be made
durable and expanded to a large scale. Although her words echo through this
book, I don’t treat her thought as a separate tradition on par with the three I that
explore more deeply.
A final tradition that deserves consideration derives from two ideas in
Aristotle. In ­chapter 6 of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses the word
phronesis (practical wisdom) to refer to a trait of character that yields wise all-​
things-​considered decisions under conditions of moral and empirical uncer-
tainty. Phronesis is not rule-​governed; there are no algorithms for it. It comes
from experience and from openness to the situation at hand. Phronesis is how we
choose the right means to pursue good ends.14

11Dews 2005, 51.


12Arendt 1963/​1977, 247.
13Arendt 1963/​1977, 207.
14 Moss 2011 argues that for Aristotle, our knowledge of the right ends does not come from

phronesis but from a kind of imagination or visualization of good outcomes.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 39

Two chapters later in the same book, Aristotle develops the idea of friendship
(philia) in a particularly political or civic way, calling it the basis of the city. For
Aristotle, friends are people who value their relationships, not only the outcomes
or activities that they accomplish together. This sounds like a utopian ideal, con-
trary to the assumption that people are basically selfish or concerned only with
getting results that they desire. But we actually observe many situations in which
groups of people show as much concern for the quality of their relationships as
for the decisions that they make together or the outcomes that result.15 In turn,
citizenship is the interaction of civic friends who exercise phronesis together.
This account is broadly consistent with the Bloomington School, the
Frankfurt School, and the Gandhian tradition. Moreover, the phronetic aspect
of Aristotelianism has recently been revived by the influential Danish planning
professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who shook up social science when he argued that the
search for general, predictive rules was a “wasteful dead end.”16 Instead, he has
argued, social scientists should display phronesis in collaboration with laypeople.
They should ask of any specific situation: (1) “Where are we going?”; (2) “Who
gains and who loses and by which mechanisms of power?”; (3) “Is it desirable?”;
and (4) “What should be done?”17 Although Flyvbjerg states the culminating
question in a passive form, he is really asking social scientists and laypeople
to decide together what they should do. And although he asks whether a phe-
nomenon is “desirable,” rather than whether it is good or just, his third question
makes room for normative analysis.
I find this tradition valuable, but I have chosen not to devote extensive space to
it because of certain limitations. For one thing, Aristotle’s discussions of phronesis
and philia occupy just a few hundred suggestive words in the Nichomachean
Ethics. Even if we decide to use these words as slogans, we need a lot more detail
about what they should mean for us in practice. For instance, civic friends will
have to overcome free-​riding; but how to do that is not explained in Aristotle.
Second, Flyvbjerg is relentlessly skeptical about general rules. “No predic-
tive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying.”18
Flyvbjerg evokes phronesis as an alternative to the vain search for general laws of
human behavior. But the Bloomington School demonstrates that we can usefully
generalize about human behavior and use the resulting principles and predic-
tions to improve our odds of success as citizens. The Ostroms avoided simplistic
generalizations, but they sought to generalize carefully as a way of improving de-
cisions. If that approach is consistent with Aristotle’s phronesis, then his position

15 Mansbridge 1980.
16 Flyvbjerg 2006b, 38.
17 Flyvbjerg 2010, 145ff; cf. Flyvbjerg 2006a, 374.
18 Flyvbjerg 2006b, 38.

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40 What Should We Do?

is moderate and unassailable, but not very challenging. By the same token,
Flyvbjerg’s more radical version seems implausible.
Finally, although Flyvbjerg is impressively attuned to imbalances of power,
I am not sure that either he or Aristotle has enough to say about large-​scale in-
justices that arise from clashes of identities. Aristotle thought of civic friends as
well-​born Greek men in small cities. Flyvbjerg’s best case is his own successful
campaign against an unjust municipal zoning campaign.19 Impressive as this ef-
fort was, it succeeded within a modest-​sized Danish city that had a free press,
independent courts, substantial social equality, and a responsive national gov-
ernment. Gandhi could count on few of those advantages.

A Focus on Means

The three traditions that I emphasize in this book share a focus on getting the
means right. They are much vaguer about their ultimate objectives or ends.
This puts them at odds with much political philosophy in the English-​speaking
world since the 1960s, which has been focused on defining justice, understood
as an end-​state, a goal. Philosophy seeks to define the objective of political ac-
tion as sharply as possible. Political ethics then involves a set of questions about
whether various means (e.g., civil disobedience, propaganda, compromise, or
violence) are acceptable—​or necessary—​when pursuing justice under various
circumstances.
A century ago, as Karuna Mantena notes, there was a more vibrant debate
about political means.20 The central question was not what constituted justice
but whether and when to use electoral campaigns, strikes, boycotts, assassin-
ations, or revolutions, among other options. Mantena reads Gandhi as a par-
ticipant in that debate who developed and defended nonviolence as a cluster of
strategies. Moreover, Gandhi explicitly argued that the best way to think about
politics was to determine the right means or strategies, not to pretend to define
justice as an end.
“Means are after all everything,” Gandhi wrote, in response to a group of
Indian political leaders who had issued an “Appeal to the Nation” in 1924. These
leaders had proposed a concrete ideal of justice: the immediate creation of a new,
independent “Federated Republic of the United States of India.” They argued that
this end justified a wide range of strategies. They wanted to “delete the words ‘by
peaceful and legitimate means’ from the Congress creed, so that men holding

19Flyvbjerg 2010, 141–​65.


20Mantena 2012b. As Moss (2011) interprets him, Aristotle anticipates this focus on getting the
means right. Aristotle does insist on having the right end (which is happiness), but our picture of that
end is vague, and our primary task is to reason about appropriate means.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 41

every shade of opinion may have no difficulty in joining” the independence


struggle. That would have expanded the range of means employed to achieve the
end of home-​rule.
Gandhi replied that these leaders had no right to define an abstract concept of
justice, such as “independence,” by themselves. The “only universal definition to
give it is ‘that status of India which her people desire at a given moment.’ If I were
asked what India desires at the present moment, I should say I do not know.”
Furthermore, for Gandhi, the means used to pursue swaraj (independence in its
deepest sense) had to be good ones. “As the means so the end. Violent means will
give violent swaraj. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.”21
Drawing on Mantena, I would suggest the following Gandhian reasons to focus
on means rather than ends. Human beings are cognitively limited and cannot see
justice far beyond our own present circumstances. That is why Gandhi empha-
sizes that what Indians “desire at a given moment” is only the justice of that time,
not of the future. Human beings are motivationally flawed and highly suscep-
tible to various distorting and destructive impulses. Therefore, we must choose
modes of politics that channel our impulses in beneficial rather than harmful
directions. Forming too sharp a definition of justice (or any of its components,
such as national sovereignty) can simply excuse bad behavior. Consequences are
always difficult to predict and control; trying to pursue elaborate ends is foolish.
We disagree, and what we decide about justice right now is contingent on how
we are organized, so it is crucial to get the organization right. Finally, how we
participate in politics helps to constitute the world. By acting, we don’t merely
bring about a result (usually an unpredictable one); we immediately create a new
reality just in virtue of our action.
After denying that he knew what the precise goal of the Indian independence
struggle should be, Gandhi specified three criteria of a good movement for in-
dependence: “truthful relations between Hindus and Mussalmans, bread for the
masses and removal of untouchability.” The movement would have to be inter-
faith, would have to address poverty immediately and directly, and would have to
unify caste and Dalit (then called “untouchable”) Hindus. Gandhi explained, “I
give that definition because I claim to be a practical man. I know that we want po-
litical independence of England. It will not be attained without the three things
mentioned by me.”22

21 Gandhi 1924/​1999, vol. 28, 307–​10 (May 22, 1924–​August 15, 1924). I owe the reference to

Mantena 2012a, 457. See also Gandhi 1921, 81: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree;
and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between
the seed and the tree.” It is ironic that Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote, “If anyone wants to know what
India wants, let him go to Gandhi.” And still later, Gandhi said, “Nehru . . . has got ability, know-
ledge, and close touch with the public here and can interpret India’s mind.” Guha 2018, 666, 985. Each
founder of India was eager to declaim knowledge of India’s goals and attribute that knowledge to his
colleague.
22 Gandhi 1924/​1999, vol. 28, 310.

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42 What Should We Do?

At an abstract level, Gandhi was arguing that it would be a mistake to iden-


tify a goal or end-​state and then choose the most effective means to achieve it.
Instead, he wanted to belong to a movement for the general ideal of swaraj that
would be characterized by interfaith cooperation, anti-​poverty work, and the in-
clusion of Dalits.
A concrete example may clarify his approach. Gandhi joined and then led
the khadi campaign: a mass effort to boycott European cloth, wear only home-
spun Indian khadi cloth, and enlist everyone—​of all classes—​in personally spin-
ning and weaving their own clothes. While Gandhi spoke to huge audiences all
across India, he typically spun. Since most people could not hear his un-​ampli-
fied words, it is likely that his act of spinning was more influential than his verbal
arguments.
The khadi campaign is widely understood as a means to one of the following
ends: political independence from Britain through economic pressure, rural ec-
onomic development, or spiritual education for those who spun.23 But Gandhi
thought of it differently. It was impossible to know whether khadi would affect
British policy, but an India full of people (Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor,
caste and Dalit) who wove their own clothes in the cause of independence would
immediately be a different place. It would be more decentralized, cooperative,
equitable, ruminative, united, and free. Even if the campaign worked and the
British went home, it would be important to keep weaving khadi in their ab-
sence.24 “The attempt to win swaraj was swaraj itself.”25 Khadi was educational,
but equally important, it represented an institution that the people had “built up
for themselves.”26 Education wasn’t an outcome of spinning, as knowledge might
be an outcome of schooling. In khadi, the learning was intrinsic to what Gandhi
called the “public work” of building a new system for textile production. Gandhi
described the political work accomplished by a committee and the public work of
weaving in the same passage, as part of the same struggle. Physical production
was an essential component because “awareness is possible only through public
work and not through talks.”27
For Gandhi, “What is justice?” was the wrong question. Our focus should be
on forming groups of people who interact in ways that bring out the best in them.
He saw a nation of home-​spinners and weavers as such a group. We could cer-
tainly debate his specific vision of a khadi campaign, but the same general ap-
proach can take many forms. For example, Habermas represents a dramatically

23Mantena 2012b, 9–​12.


24Gandhi 1921, 118.
25 Mantena 2012a, 462.
26 Gandhi interviewed by Nirmal Kumar Bose, November 9–​10, 1934, in Gandhi 1999, vol. 65,

317. I owe the reference to Mantena 2012b, 9.


27 Gandhi, personal note (1925), in Gandhi 1999, vol. 32, 262–​63. I owe this reference to Mantena

2012b, 11.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 43

different cultural context and political sensibility from Gandhi’s, but he also re-
jects instrumental, means/​ends reasoning in favor of creating groups of people
who endlessly make justice by interacting. It’s just that Habermas’s interactive
groups are highly critical, explicit, and discursive, whereas Gandhi’s weavers may
be literally silent.
Likewise, the Bloomington School focuses on how people can construct insti-
tutions for managing common resources. Paul Dragos Aligica, a major represen-
tative of the School, cites the distinction between “end state social theories” and
“process theories,” which “focus on the way ends states emerge.” He observes,
“While a large part of theorizing in political economy is more or less explicitly
‘end state’ oriented, the Ostroms’ research agenda seems to be closer to the ‘pro-
cess’ perspective.”28 Another phrase that could describe all of these schools is
“open-​ended”—​action that one undertakes with intentional uncertainty about
where it will conclude.29
Even if we know what justice is, the wisest direction is not always straight to-
ward it. For example, Christopher Winship acknowledges that improving the
justice of American education would require raising the quality of the schooling
available to the least advantaged students. However, he argues, “the best way to
approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that
decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the
more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have
achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the
world not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are at-
tractive to business as well as labor.30 Winship’s advice may or may not apply in
any given situation; the general point is that the best path to any given end is not
always direct.
In the movie Lincoln, the president tells Rep. Thaddeus Stevens:

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll—​it’ll point you True North from
where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and
chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you
plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a
swamp, what’s the use of knowing True North?

These are the words of the screenwriter Tony Kushner, not (as far as I know)
of President Lincoln himself. But they make an important point. Knowing

28 Aligica 2014, 28.


29 Levine 2013a.
30 Winship 2016, 177–​78.

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44 What Should We Do?

where we ought to end as a society tells us very little about our best next move.
Sometimes a tactical retreat or a sidestep is well advised.
I would push the point further. There is no end, no True North. As we move
through time as a community, we keep deciding where we ought to go. Moving in
the right direction is important, but so is holding ourselves together as a group so
that we can keep deciding where to go. We didn’t know a century ago that same-​
sex marriage was a human right, but we maintained a republican form of gov-
ernment long enough to learn that. Sometimes, the imperative of maintaining
our ability to govern ourselves is more important than forward motion. Stephen
Elkin introduces this metaphor:

Those who wish to constitute a republican regime are like shipbuilding sailors
on a partly uncharted sea who know the direction in which they sail, since
the kinds of ports they prefer lie that way. This much they can agree on. To at-
tempt to agree on anything more specific will defeat them, their opinions on the
matter differing significantly. They also know too little for substantive agree-
ment to be possible. . . . It is clear that the relations among the shipbuilders are
fundamental. Because they must build, rebuild, repair, and modify the vessel
as they sail and learn—​and because they must alter their course . . .—​it mat-
ters whether the shipbuilders’ modes of association are such as to facilitate this
learning and the decisions they must make. . . . These modes of association are
then at least as important as the ports toward which the shipbuilders sail.

Elkin adds: the “essential problem is one of creating a design that provides the
capabilities that are needed to keep the regime oriented in the right direction.”31
Although our focus should be broader than regimes—​we should consider all
forms of groups—​Elkin offers good advice. Our main task is to join, sustain, and
(if necessary) design and find a diverse array of organizations that encourage
diverse people to work and learn together, oriented generally toward justice but
open to exploring what justice may actually mean.
A focus on means and a reluctance to specify ends does pose a risk. Whether
intentionally or inadvertently, a person might select and defend means that de-
termine a foreseeable outcome or that foreclose an outcome that others prefer.
This could be a back-​door strategy for getting the ends that the person wanted
in the first place. To claim that you are too humble and aware of your own limits
to know the best ends is disingenuous if it’s clear where your favored means will
take you.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan, made essentially this
complaint against Gandhi. Gandhi insisted that the social movement for Indian

31 Elkin 2007, 107–​8.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 45

independence must involve close collaborations among Hindus, Muslims, and


adherents of other faiths. Immediately after saying that he did not know what
India wanted, he added that he only endorsed three values, one of which was
“truthful relations between Hindus and Mussalmans.”32 (“Truthful,” for him,
would imply a close, sincere, and interactive relationship.) For Gandhi, the means
of political action in India must incorporate interfaith dialogue and cooperation.
Although Gandhi insisted that “Congress leaves swaraj undefined,”33 Jinnah
could see that if Hindus and Muslims won independence together, they would
find a democracy with a large Hindu majority. This new country might be sec-
ular, or it might be Hindu-​dominated, but it couldn’t be an Islamic republic—​
simply because of demographics. Jinnah identified the Congress as a Hindu
organization and created the Muslim League as an alternative. He objected
when Congress tried to place its Muslim president, Maulana Azad, in the provi-
sional cabinet for British India, arguing that the Muslim League should name all
Muslim members.34 After Gandhi’s assassination, Jinnah eulogized him as “one
of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community and a leader who com-
manded their [sic] universal confidence and respect.” Jinnah regretted Gandhi’s
death “so soon after the birth of freedom for Hindustan [his term for India]
and Pakistan.”35 Thus, although Gandhi claimed that “means are after all every-
thing,” Jinnah saw that Gandhi’s means would prevent Jinnah’s goal, a sovereign
Pakistan. And he charged Gandhi with having an implicit goal of his own: the
creation of a “Hindustan.”
Similar debates could arise with the other theorists I will explore in this book.
For the Bloomington School, the means of self-​government should be partic-
ipatory, experimental, decentralized, and pluralist—​involving many partially
overlapping and nested institutions of different types. That method of self-​gov-
ernance is unlikely to produce a dominant national government, as nationalists
or state-​socialists might prefer. For the Frankfurt School, the means of politics
must involve critical and skeptical discussion of all assumptions and traditions.
That approach is unlikely to preserve a traditional culture and society, as some
conservatives and reactionaries might prefer.
In fact, all the means defended in this book will tend toward outcomes that
are generally more democratic, liberal, cosmopolitan, decentralized, peaceful,
and open to change than some alternatives. You may think this is a good con-
sequence, but the problem is methodological. Am I advocating a liberal, dem-
ocratic, cosmopolitan, polycentric, relatively pacific, and progressive order

32 Gandhi 1999, vol. 28, 310.


33 Gandhi 1999, vol. 28, 309.
34 Guha 2018, pp. 1026–​27.
35 Guha 2018, 1083.

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46 What Should We Do?

without forthrightly defending it? Do critics of those values have any reason to
accept the arguments of this book?
My response is that democracy, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, polycentricity,
peacefulness, and openness to change are vague terms, subject to many formu-
lations and degrees, and sometimes in mutual tension. (For example, the dem-
ocratic value of responsiveness to public opinion can easily conflict with the
liberal value of individual rights.) Human cognitive and motivational limitations
suggest that we should not try to define these values in advance or permanently.
Instead, we should adopt means that are decentralized (in the Ostroms’ sense),
deliberative (in Habermas’s sense), and peaceful (in Gandhi’s sense) and leave
the ends undefined. The actual outcome will predictably be somewhat demo-
cratic, liberal, and so on, but we cannot and should not know what that will mean
in detail.36

Why the Civic Perspective Is Often Missing

To call an intellectual development a “Copernican turn” is a cliché, but it hap-


pens to fit rather precisely the shift accomplished by the Bloomington School,
the second generation of the Frankfurt School, and the Gandhian tradition.
The usual questions for theory—​“How should things be?” and “What should
be done?”—​put social institutions at the center and derive guidance for active
­citizens from a proper understanding of the institutions. The three traditions of
civic theory instead put the citizen at the center, recognize that citizens must act
together to have any impact, and so begin with the question, “What should we
do?” It is from this origin that these traditions proceed to investigate govern-
ments, markets, and laws.37
Just as Ptolemaic astronomy already studied the visible heavenly objects, so
social science already notices citizens and the problems that confront them.
“Civic engagement” is a topic of mainstream empirical research. A search on
Google Scholar yields more than 77,000 books or articles on free-​riding and
9,000 citations of implicit bias (two of the citizen’s problems that I listed earlier).

36 What does this conclusion imply about the argument between Gandhi and Jinnah? I would say

that Gandhi joined and then led an interfaith party for swaraj that encouraged debates about both
means and goals. Jinnah was a member of that party, albeit mostly before Gandhi’s arrival from South
Africa. Jinnah and others had the right to quit the party and movement. Exit is a legitimate choice in
movements and party politics. As a result of Jinnah’s exit, Gandhi’s means failed: Congress ceased to
be a forum for dialogue and cooperation that included the kinds of people who preferred the Muslim
League. But Gandhi’s failure doesn’t invalidate his general advice to focus on means rather than spe-
cific ends.
37 Vincent Ostrom uses the same analogy in V. Ostrom 1997, 282. See Fotos 2015.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 47

biases uncertainty

social sciences “truth”


+
opinions, preference, and values
=
policy recommendations
+
strategic action
=
change

Fig. 3.1 A standard model of policy analysis

However, academic disciplines are often taught and practiced in ways that
marginalize the citizen’s concerns. We can begin with a standard model of how
the social sciences ought to work (fig. 3.1).38 According to this model, a social
scientist aims at truth about how the world works. The chief questions are “What
is happening?” and “why?” From the very first day of a class on social science,
any responsible teacher will note that social science is beset by biases. Also, our
understanding of the world is inevitably uncertain. Therefore, “truth” deserves
quotation marks; it is always problematic. Still, social scientists use a large array
of sophisticated tools to reduce both bias and uncertainty and cumulatively ap-
proximate truth.39
The truth about what is happening and why does not tell anyone what to do;
facts are not judgments or prescriptions. To move from description to policy ad-
vice, we need something else: opinions, preferences, or values about what should
be. Those cannot come from social science, viewed as a science.40 They may
come from public opinion, or from policymakers, or perhaps from a different
discipline, such as philosophy. Wherever they come from, they are added to facts
to produce policy recommendations.
But policy recommendations do not jump off the shelf to implement them-
selves. Someone must take strategic action to implement any recommendation.

38 Cf. what Diem, Young, Welton, Mansfield & Lee (2014) call the “traditional model” of policy

analysis.
39 Portions of this section of text appeared as Levine 2017 and are reprinted here with permission.
40 “The majority of sociologists consider it illegitimate to move from explanation to evaluation.

In their view, sociology should strive to be value-​free, objective, or at least to avoid making explicit
value-​judgements.” J. Scott & Marshall 2009, 520.

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48 What Should We Do?

That someone is usually quite separate from the social scientist who originally
studied the truth about the social world. Policy recommendations plus strategic
action equals change in this standard model, which delineates a very specific role
for the analyst as an independent and value-​neutral seeker after truth.
There are many problems with the model in fig. 3.1, and I will just sketch a few
major ones. To start with, norms or moral commitments are not mere biases.
If I say, “education is good,” I am not expressing an opinion that might bias my
analysis. I am proposing a truth, albeit one that needs more detail. (What kind
of education is good? For whom? Why?) How to ground or justify moral claims
is a complex question, but it is nihilistic to treat facts as objective and all moral
claims as subjective in the sense of arbitrary. There are better and worse moral
claims.
Meanwhile, data are—​ and should be—​ imbued with norms. When we
measure an educational system by calculating graduation rates or test scores, we
are claiming that these outcomes are valuable. A set of requirements for grad-
uation or a list of questions on an exam must reflect value judgments. There is
no such thing as a value-​neutral measurement, nor should we aim for one.41
A thoughtful, humane assessment of students is much better than a measure-
ment system meant to uphold a social injustice. Social scientists should not only
study the values held by other people, and not only disclose the values that they
happen to hold as possible sources of bias, but also strive to identify and justify
the best values and employ those values in collecting and interpreting data.
Not only must values influence empirical information, but data also rightly
and inevitably influence values. After all, why do I think that education is good?
In part because we have more than a century’s experience with near-​universal
schooling. It has not benefited every student, but it has been good enough for
enough children to support the ideal of making school available to all. Our expe-
rience influences this normative judgment.
Another reason for the norm in favor of education is that we have developed a
strategy for making schooling universal. We know how to pass laws that require
enrollment and how to fund a system of public education. “Everyone should be
educated” is not an empty slogan or a utopian ideal that might have terrible un-
anticipated consequences when put into action. It is a policy framework that
has had decent results in practice, although it needs constant review and im-
provement. In contrast, the ideal that every human being should have highly re-
warding work may be appealing in the abstract, but it is not clear what it means
for policy. In general, our norms are, and ought to be, influenced by what we
know about how to implement them.

41 Cf. Latour 2004, e.g., 98–​101.

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Three Traditions in Search of Solutions 49

And why do we have data on students’ performance and graduation, but not
on many other topics that might be equally important, such as their happiness?
Because people have organized to compel institutions to collect certain kinds of
data, but not other kinds. In that sense, strategy influences the empirical evi-
dence that we have.
In asking “What should we do?,” a citizen must consider facts, values, and
strategies in an integrated way, for they are deeply interpenetrated and practi-
cally inseparable. Ruth Anna Putnam writes, “facts and values emerge at the end
of inquiry on an equal footing: the facts are value-​laden, and the values are fact-​
laden.”42 It is consistent with her pragmatist background to add strategies as a
third term. But the division of labor within the academy—​reflecting conceptual
distinctions between values and facts and between theory and practice—​separ-
ates the different aspects of the citizen’s question in harmful ways. To be sure, no
individual is capable of putting all the aspects back together. To address values,
facts, and strategies together requires cumulative, collaborative work. That is
why I write of whole traditions, not individual authors, that unite these three
topics. Citizens need models that integrate strategy, empirical evidence, and nor-
mative argument much more thoroughly.
Not only is academic research compartmentalized, but it tends to be cynical
in a particular way. Because the social sciences focus on the explanation of so-
cial phenomena, they often conclude that intentional acts are not particularly
significant. Market outcomes and shifts in populations and technologies often
have greater causal impact than the deliberate choices made by members and
leaders of groups. A common distinction is structure versus agency, and often
structure emerges as the more significant explanation. For instance, the con-
dition of the economy in the last six months seems to affect the outcome of an
election more than any candidate’s choice of policies or strategies.43 However,
the factors that explain outcomes are not necessarily the factors that should
matter most to us as actors. For us, the important question is our own agency:
what we can accomplish by acting in various ways.44 Only if we have zero po-
tential impact should we give up, and even then, we should devote our atten-
tion to a different problem rather than ceasing to act at all. The social sciences
tend to ask, “What is happening and why?” or “What would happen if this
were done?” rather than what is best for any particular group of citizens to try
to do.45 To focus on what we should do as members of groups requires more
focused inquiry into how groups work.

42R. A. Putnam 1998, 7, summarizing a series of previous articles.


43Achen & Bartels 2016, c­ hapter 6.
44 C. Cohen 2010 analyzes how the Black youth in her study combine structure and agency in un-

derstanding their circumstances.


45 Cf. Habermas 1996, 9: “practical philosophy has taken its basic questions (‘What ought I do?’

or ‘What is good for us in the long run and on the whole?’) from everyday life in an unmediated way,

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50 What Should We Do?

If we turn from the social science to the humanistic disciplines of philos-


ophy, political theory, and theology, we find scholarship that poses normative
questions much more explicitly. The resulting discussion is useful for citizens,
but it tends to focus on what should be rather than what we should do. For in-
stance, on the first page of the first chapter of the single most influential modern
work of political philosophy written in English, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
writes, “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” He presumes that philos-
ophy ought to reveal what makes institutions just, and then individuals should
comply with the laws of just societies and strive to reform or revolutionize un-
just ones. “For us,” he writes, “the primary subject of justice is the basic structure
of society, or more exactly, the way in which major social institutions distribute
fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from
social cooperation.” Rawls acknowledges that the same principles that apply to
the basic institutions of a just society may not also work at the global level or for
“private associations” and “less comprehensive social groups” than a society as a
whole. But he carefully selects the whole society as his focus, explaining that to
define ideal legal, economic, and social institutions is necessary before we can
know how to act when institutions are not fully just: in other words, before we
can address such topics as charity for the oppressed, civil disobedience, or revo-
lution.46 Nonideal theory is an offshoot of ideal theory. Rawls later writes, “until
the ideal is identified . . . nonideal theory lacks an objective, an aim, by reference
to which its queries can be answered.”47
But no actual group to which someone like me belongs can found the fun-
damental institutions of a society or rewrite its constitution. Thus our role as
citizens recedes into the background of Rawls’s philosophy. The same is true of
many other modern doctrines. For instance, Philip Pettit is a republican rather
than a liberal in Rawls’s sense. Pettit defines republicanism as “a consequentialist
doctrine which assigns to government, in particular to governmental authori-
ties, the task of promoting freedom as non-​domination.” He explains that his
“interest in a republican conception of liberty comes of the hope that it can per-
suasively articulate what a state ought to try to achieve, and what form it ought
to assume, in the modern world.”48 Pettit acknowledges that “public life” must
have an appropriate character—​citizens must value and defend liberty. But that
implies for him that “the state should concern itself with public life in order to

treating these questions without the objectivating filter of social science.” We need a social science of
what we ought to do that objectively investigates the conditions under which groups work.

46Rawls 1971, 3, 7, 8.
47Rawls 1999, 90. Defending Rawls’s view, Swift 2008, 382, writes, “only by reference to philos-
ophy—​abstract, pure, context-​free philosophy—​can we have an adequate basis for thinking about
how to promote justice in our current, radically nonideal circumstances.”
48 Pettit 2000, 207, 129.

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