CRAIG CALHOUN
Democracy is a project, not simply a condition. It is not switched on like a light and then safely ignored. Democracy is always a work in process, being built, being deepened, or being renewed. It requires a commitment to extend it into the future, to keep making democracy—not, for example, to try to use temporary advantage to foreclose opportunities for future democracy. When renewal and advancement stall, democracy degenerates.
This is so first and foremost because democracy is what Charles Taylor calls a telic concept. It is defined by ideals that can never be fully and finally realized. Liberty, equality, and solidarity are never perfected, for example, nor is the balance among them ever entirely stable. Yet they motivate as well as orient forward movement. Moreover, democracy is pursued not just for itself but for the public good, the well-being of citizens at large and their relations with each other, which self-rule is held to advance.
Second, democracies are not designed in utopian abstraction but built in specific historical contexts. They are durably shaped by their prehistories, by specific choices and compromises in their creation, and by generations of efforts to resolve or mitigate problems that sometimes create new ones. The United States has not yet transcended compromises over radical racial inequality, nor has Britain gotten past the legacies of monarchy, aristocracy, and empire. Canadian democracy has struggled with a divided colonial legacy, France with the ferocity of its commitment to laïcité, Germany with the terms of unification. Democracies must not only pursue their constitutive ideals but recurrently reform and improve their institutions and address contradictions in their constitutional structures.
Third, and crucially, democracy depends on social foundations. Citizens must be not only free and equal but well-connected to each other. Their capacity to participate effectively in politics, to organize themselves to pursue shared goods, and to exercise individual freedoms all depend on social resources and relations. Citizens are empowered by local communities, larger institutions, voluntary organizations, social movements, and communications media. These help a scattered or divided population cohere as a body politic—a demos—with an inclusive identity, social ties, and a sense of being in the same community of fate. They are both unified and divided by culture. Scale, complexity, and a powerful but contradictory relationship with capitalism are all challenges for modern democracies.
This chapter explores how democracy is shaped and reshaped in wrestling with these challenges. It begins by emphasizing the importance of republican ideas and ideals to the institutionalization of democracy—a theme crucial to the United States but important to democracy more widely. Advancement of democracy came within the republican framework, not without struggle, and often with advances for some and simultaneous setbacks for others. The ideas of the public and public good were crucial, but not to the exclusion of other dimensions of “peoplehood.” These questions about the form and ideals of democracy played out in relation to expanding scale, new communications technologies, and shifting relations of local to metropolitan society. Transformations recurrently brought what the economic historian Karl Polanyi called the “disembedding” of citizens from older support systems, as well as “double movements” in which disruption occasioned reactions—including efforts to renew social institutions but also sharp contention.
In the founding of the United States, democracy was a secondary but important theme. The stress fell on creating a republic. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” says the Constitution. Democracy is not mentioned.
Constitutions are the most basic formulation of the rule of law, which is in turn the primary limit on unbridled individual power. Power is also “checked and balanced” by government bureaucracies with their established procedures. Republican constitutions also provide for public debate informed by public knowledge—notably through mechanisms such as a free press, public education, and transparency in government. This is crucial to ensuring that laws are indeed followed and that government is well-organized for the public good. Last and perhaps hardest to ensure is the virtue of citizens: republican government depends on honesty, refusal of corruption, and commitment to the public good.
Most countries we call democracies are formally constituted as republics.1 France is officially the French Republic (in fact, it is today the Fifth Republic since every revolution or major structural change legally inaugurated a new state). We can add the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of India, the Federal Republic of Germany, and so on. American schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the country’s “flag and to the republic for which is stands.”2
From the time of Aristotle, a republic (politeia) meant “mixed government.” Instead of the cycle of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy succeeding each other in more or less traumatic transitions, republicanism promised to combine elements of each. The Roman Republic offered the preeminent example, lasting five hundred years from the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom to the establishment of the Roman Empire.
The US founders were steeped in this morality tale.3 Among its themes were problems with achieving peace or power at the expense of liberty, the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury, and how destabilizing a thirst for power could be.4 The founders sought to prevent any president from behaving as a dictator, king, or emperor. They balanced the power of the presidency with that of Congress, including its more aristocratic Senate and more democratic House of Representatives. They made it subject to review by an independent but powerful judiciary. The difference from France’s more integral state power was clear even to contemporaries.5
But while the Constitution spoke to the design of laws and political institutions for the new republic, it had less to say about the social conditions also basic to the success and survival of a republic. The nearly contemporary French Revolution put these more clearly on the agenda. One of its great slogans was “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Not only was equality on a plane with liberty, but in the French formulation solidarity (or as the original had it, fraternité) was seen as a necessary complement.6 By this we can understand both mutuality as a dimension of interpersonal relations and cohesion as a feature of society as a whole. Solidarity is a crucial consideration for both republicanism and democracy. It evokes the importance for citizens of feeling that we are really joined to each other and “in it together.”
Liberty is sometimes imagined as freedom from all interference. This idea of freedom is especially popular in the United States. It is a product of experience as well as intellectual traditions. Life as a small farmer, shop owner, or independent craft producer meant having an intuitive understanding of freedom as noninterference, which in turn informed thinking about political rights.7
The contemporary republican philosopher Philip Pettit has suggested that noninterference is too extreme a standard, and we should understand republican liberty as freedom from domination.8 This makes sense. Indeed, the notion that no one dominates is important to ideals of community as well as individualism (though to be sure many people have accepted patriarchal domination as normal to family). And the notion of freedom as noninterference is deeply implausible given the necessary interdependence of modern social relations. But Pettit’s proposal is still more negative than positive, and misses the extent to which republican thought seeks to harness liberty to virtue, civic participation, and pursuit of the public good. The republican idea of liberty was not just about freedom, indeed, because it was embedded in norms for being a good elite.
Citizen empowerment is not just a matter of freedom from interference or even domination; it is more a matter of the capacity to pursue freely chosen goods.9 These are not just objects of utilitarian desire, as though democratic freedom inhered only in greater choices of consumer goods. Free citizens also pursue higher goods such as justice, beauty, or a sustainable future, which help to orient their judgments of what is really worthy. Their freedom lies partly in the opportunity to discern these higher goods by their own lights.10 The radical unfreedom of enslavement is a sharp contrast; it is “social death,” in the phrase Orlando Patterson adapted from Franz Fanon. Freedom is the opposite—a positive fullness of life choices.11
The US Constitution accepted slavery, failed to give women the right to vote, and allowed property restrictions on the rights of men. This was sharply at odds with the ringing pronouncements of the earlier Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Even the more freedom-oriented Declaration left women out and failed to address the issue of slavery.12 But it did evoke ideals more strongly. The later Constitution was, perhaps necessarily, shaped more by instrumental compromises and in any case focused more on tangible mechanisms of government than on aspirations. It made history by embracing democracy, but was at least as clear about limiting it.
Still, partly because it provided for its own revision, the same Constitution paved the way for the United States to become more and more democratic. Revision started almost immediately with the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These protected basic liberties, notably of religion, press, assembly, and petitioning government. Yet these protected the liberty of some at the expense of others. The Second Amendment, protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms, is a case in point. It was passed in part to ensure that white property owners had the capacity to quell any rebellions of those they enslaved. It coexisted with prohibitions on Black ownership of weapons.13
Enslavement was a more radical exclusion than denying women or men with little property the vote. It meant not just domination rather than liberty, but complete exclusion from the polity and the very right to have rights.14 When the United States was founded, Black Americans, including those freed from slavery, were not fully included in contemporary understandings of “the people.” In 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott case, the US Supreme Court affirmed this with brutal clarity:
The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen? …
We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizen” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.15
The Court ruled that even in states that made slave-owning illegal—as a result of democratic action—the formerly enslaved and their descendants could not be citizens.
Change was not just hard; it took a devastating Civil War. But the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution abolished slavery and guaranteed citizenship to all born or naturalized in the United States. Trying to implement this citizenship was a central theme of postwar Reconstruction; trying to limit it was at the heart of the Jim Crow era that followed that. And so it has been since, steps toward greater democracy and steps back, emphatically up to the present moment (discussed further in Chapter 7).
The contradictions between slavery’s reality and the country’s professed ideals shaped perhaps the biggest challenge American democracy would face. Enslavement could not exist without racism, and racism remained a force after the slave system was abolished. Bias is still built into laws and institutions. Racism still motivates actions that undermine democracy.16 And racism is not the only contradiction embedded in American democracy.
Yet contradictions are not “fatal flaws” and do not mean that there can be no improvements in the quality and extent of democracy. They do mean that such improvements seldom follow a straight path of incremental progress. Contradictions are fundamental oppositions between different elements of a social formation—such as enslavement and freedom, or racism and equality. Changing them requires transformation of the whole structure of relationships of which they are a part. A contradiction cannot be eliminated with everything else untouched. It is good, thus, for individuals to try to be less racist at a personal level. And individual changes can add up. But overcoming contradictions requires deeper structural change, creating a social order no longer shaped by antagonism among its defining internal features.
In the US case, the country’s republican Constitution has been paradoxically both crucial and a problem. It embodied and helped reproduce fundamental contradictions. Yet it also aided the struggle to overcome those contradictions, providing levers for fundamental change. So too around the world. The importance of republican constitutions is paradoxically both to stabilize democracy—which entails constraining it—and to provide mechanisms to recognize needed basic changes.
In the United States, removing restrictions on full citizenship has been a long story and is sadly not finished. A movement for women’s rights grew throughout the early nineteenth century, though it was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed American women the right to vote. By the 1820s and 1830s, property qualifications were removed for nearly all white male voters; the country’s first major populist movement was a result, bringing Andrew Jackson to power in 1828. Of course, workers’ organizations were violently suppressed for another century after this; formal political enfranchisement was not enough to guarantee full citizenship rights. Not only laws but administrative procedures, cultural norms, and social capacities may all differentiate among citizens—even on so basic a matter as voting. Ending slavery took a civil war, and bringing effective voting rights to Black Americans is an ongoing struggle.
The United States is not the only republic to have excluded many people resident in and contributing to the country from the status of citizens. Nor is it the only one to have made formally equal citizenship unequal in practice. Just take the right to vote. In France, the Revolution of 1789 made radical steps toward democracy. Universal male suffrage between 1792 and 1795 put it ahead of the United States. But France degenerated into empire under Napoleon. A succession of nineteenth-century revolutions brought experiments with democracy only to have the gains repeatedly reversed—all the way into the twentieth century. French women only gained the right to vote in 1944–1945 as France regained its independence from Germany near the end of WWII. In the UK, the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 brought voting rights to only two million of England’s seven million men. Property restrictions were not abolished until 1918, when women over 30 also gained the right to vote; rights for younger women had to wait another ten years. Switzerland did not allow women the right to vote until 1971.
Between the founding of the country and its devastating Civil War there were multiple instances of democracy advancing for some and being withheld from others. The same populist Andrew Jackson who helped increase electoral participation of white Americans signed the infamous Indian Removal Act that brutally forced the relocation of Eastern American tribes from their traditional homes to reservations in the West.
The US Civil War itself resulted both from problems built into the Constitution and from social changes that exacerbated divisions. Economic transformation and religious revival, westward expansion and immigration all posed challenges to the constitutional order and practical political problem solving. Democracy sometimes degenerated by failing to move forward toward greater citizen empowerment and a more inclusive polity. Sometimes partisanship degenerated into unbridgeable enmity. In the 1850s, a South Carolina congressman beat the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate Chamber.17
The Civil War killed a million and a half Americans—and expanded American democracy. After the Civil War, greater democracy was imposed on the South by the victorious Union. Dubbed “Reconstruction,” this period brought voting rights and other protections to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. One of its peaks was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the last legislation advancing civil rights—for African Americans or others—until the Civil Rights Act of 1957.18
Late in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln offered one of the most enduring renderings of the idea of democracy. The war itself had followed from the most severe degeneration American democracy has ever seen. Yet, said Lincoln, its successful conclusion meant that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people … shall not perish from the earth.”19
The line is embedded in Lincoln’s brilliant speech at the dedication of the national cemetery after the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. At 272 words, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was short enough that inspired citizens or diligent schoolchildren could commit it to memory—as I did at age eleven or so. That generations of schoolchildren did the same was long part of the recurrent renewal of the American polis—and perhaps still is, though I think it is less common. Faith in American democracy—and indeed a sense of American identity—was kept alive by continual reweaving in which such threads of rhetorical continuity joined with new inspirations, historical commemorations, cultural contexts, material achievements, and memories.20
This was not simply the happy history of settled democracy, though sometimes commemorations verged into self-congratulation. Nor was progress toward more democracy always assured. Civil war made a mockery of that. So did later reversals of gains for Black Americans. So did the defeat of the great American populist movement in the 1890s, which elites partly coopted and partly undermined by fomenting racist divisions. So did government collusion in employers’ violent suppression of labor unions. Still, temptations to see history as linear and progressive often overrode remembrance of degeneration and disruption.
Lincoln’s phrase was recurrently quoted, sometimes as an aspirational ideal, sometimes as though it could mask the tensions and limits of actual democracy. I memorized the address around 1963, in the midst of the vaunted “postwar boom,” or what the French call les trente glorieuses. The United States, like Europe, made enormous forward strides in the middle of the twentieth century. Equality grew, education was expanded, the economy provided new opportunities. A range of institutions and policies provided support and security to an unprecedented part of the population. Some of these had roots as far back as the Progressive Era; more were grounded in the New Deal of the 1930s; and some built on wartime experiences.
But not all was glorious. America was both divided and inspired by the Civil Rights movement. Nineteen sixty-three was the year of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. It was also the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The deeply divisive Vietnam War was getting underway. So was the American Indian Movement, which attempted to reverse the violation of treaties and theft of lands that was not just old history but active government policy during the postwar boom. The high ideals of Lincoln’s phrase were not met then and have never been fully met since.21
Yet democracy demands ideals; even conceptualizing what might be an advance requires an evaluative framework. Lincoln’s speech harked back to ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In 1863, it was not necessary to stress failures to live up to them as much as it was to look to hopes for a better future. Still, we also need clear-eyed examination of the reality that limits or sometimes contradicts our ideals.
Struggles to realize the ideals of Lincoln or the American founders, of liberty, equality, and solidarity, or of Martin Luther King’s dream have had to contend from the start with the limits and contradictions built into the US Constitution. But advances in democracy have also depended on the very same republican constitution with its procedures for interpretation and amendment. Not least, the rights the Constitution protected empowered citizens. Equally, though, empowerment comes from the ways social and economic life is organized, the extent to which citizens can depend on each other, and the institutions created to support both their individual and their collective lives.22
Large and rapidly growing, the United States could depend less than any previous republic on face-to-face relationships and an established sense of belonging to the whole. It had to build new forms of social organization and indeed new infrastructures of transportation and communication to be a cohesive country. It has struggled to link personal relationships and place-based communities with larger scales, with institutions and bureaucratic organizations, with far-flung connections through markets or media.23 From the outset, immigration added challenges. The country became increasingly diverse geographically—and economically—as it expanded.
Democracies constantly narrate their forward and backward steps. The narratives can be contentious, fraught with condemnations, and bitter. They can be excessively celebratory—as many invocations of Lincoln and the end of slavery have been. Like Northern and Southern narratives of the Civil War (or for some in the South, “the War of Yankee Aggression”), they can keep oppositions alive. In that case, the Northern narrative has collapsed into half-memory and mere celebration. The more bitter Southern narrative remains alive in contemporary discussion. But both are also altered by new themes—by the World Wars in which the United States fought “for democracy,” or the decline of the rust belt and rise of the sun belt. It is in such narratives that citizens both claim pasts and try to work out what counts as advance, defeat, or frustration.
Forward steps come largely through struggle in social movements. But they come also through lonelier struggles of individuals trying to “do the right thing” in their lives, through members of communities trying to achieve local fairness and solidarity, through legal cases, through incremental improvements in government policies, and through cultural shifts pushed forward by artists, entertainers, conversations around dinner tables, and sharper arguments about what is fair.
Often, two steps forward are followed by at least step one backward. Gains on one dimension are matched by losses on another. More basically, the very mechanisms of progress on some dimensions often block progress or even bring regressions on others. This pattern of contradictions echoes throughout American history, from long before the Civil War to the present day. It is embedded in the Constitution, but it is also embedded in social change and how we respond to it.
The GI Bill after World War II is a case in point.24 Government funding for veterans facilitated a dramatic transformation in who could attend universities and aspire to middle-class jobs linked to graduation. It brought extraordinary new opportunities, and it contributed to the country’s postwar economic growth. It stands along with other New Deal and postwar policies as dramatic evidence of the positive effect government social programs can have.
As it was implemented, however, most of the GI Bill’s opportunities were denied to Black veterans. Had the law been applied fairly as written, at least a million more Black Americans would have had a chance to attend college.25 Likewise, because of the gender structure of who had been in the military, the GI Bill favored men. It actually increased the gap between men and women in higher education.26
In other ways, too, policies that helped white men after the war did less for women and minorities. During the war, women had moved successfully into a variety of jobs—Rosie the Riveter is the pop culture example. After the war they were mostly removed from jobs they had done well. The late 1940s and 1950s did not just return to the ideology that jobs should go to male breadwinners and women should take care of the home; they intensified it. Women were laid off from the auto industry and other sectors regardless of seniority and often without much defense from their unions.27
Black veterans returned from military service to segregated communities and discriminatory hiring practices. Only a few men found jobs that paid “living wages” that could fully support their families.28 Black women were more likely than white women to work outside the home—that is, outside their own homes, since many took care of the homes and children of white women. The sexist ideology that women should be home to take care of their families was racist in application. It took the Civil Rights movement to start a process of change. Alas, progress stalled, and the earnings gap between Black and white workers remains as great today as it was in 1968.29 When deindustrialization and globalization eliminated working-class jobs starting in the 1970s, whites more often had other opportunities, and fewer Blacks had the chance to go to college.
These social and economic factors all have implications for democracy—and its degenerations. For many Americans the social programs and new institutions of the postwar era were empowering. For others they were less so or not at all. Biases limited the inclusion of all citizens in the democratic polity. And while, overall, the United States proved itself open to change in the direction of wider empowerment and inclusion, this was not without resistance. Beneficiaries of existing arrangements sought to make their dominance permanent—be it racial, male, Christian, or all of these. And new arrangements had their own beneficiaries—owners of investible assets, highly educated meritocrats, and cosmopolitan elites best prepared to benefit from globalization.
The American Declaration of Independence does not refer simply to the thirteen colonies or potentially independent states, or to the action of a majority. It does refer to the “United Colonies,” but crucially it also refers to a “people.”30 When Lincoln emphasized government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he echoed the declaration. This is not some people, nor all the people as individuals. The reference is to the people as a body.
There are many dimensions to how any “people” is cohesive. Common culture, ethnicity, and ways of life, cohesion in social networks and institutions, or subjection to external domination may all be important.31 But republicanism emphasizes one additional dimension: mutual engagement in public reason and will formation.32 Engagement in public is not just a way to make decisions. It is a way to achieve cohesion, to make something new, not simply find it or inherit it. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and eventually made her way to the United States, famously celebrated this image of citizens forming a new society together, literally constituting it, as part of the American Revolution.33
When the Declaration of Independence declared that all people have certain self-evident and unalienable rights, including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” it began to articulate a notion of the public good. It did not simply assert that people were alive, free, and engaged in the pursuit of their own happiness. It suggested that the new country would be organized to secure those rights for all. This was the goal of government design—constitution-writing and legislation. It was also an obligation for each citizen—a demand for public virtue.
It is easy to say “public good” without stopping to think what it really means. Individualism and preoccupations with material gains and losses encourage us to think the public good must be what a majority wants or the immediate material benefit of as many individuals as possible (the utilitarian “greatest good of the greatest number”). But the public good is more. Consider four distinctions: The public good can be long-term, such as the sustainability of society in the face of war or climate change. It can include not just aggregate goods—the gross national product—but also fair and equitable distribution of these goods. The public for which it is good is not necessarily a community or category of essentially similar people; it is a public because it includes members of multiple communities and different categories—such as different religions. Not least, the public good can include moral standards such as rejection of corruption.
A key republican ideal is for public reason to identify the public good and shape the will to achieve it. This suggests we can consciously choose how to knit our lives together. But solidarity can never be achieved by reason or rational-critical debate alone. Even when they are not democracies, republics also depend on other dimensions of solidarity among their citizens, though republican theory is less articulate about these.34
Communicative engagement in public life includes poetry and stories as well as debate, entertainment TV as well as news, music as well as words. Citizens are knit together in private as well as public relationships, in communities, voluntary societies, businesses, and market transactions. All these go into making a people. Not least of all, the constitution of a people depends on shared identity, the distinction of this people from others.
Bringing democracy into the constitution of a republic places an especially strong demand on common peoplehood. This is the demos from which the word “democracy” derives. Democracies depend on citizens being able to say with confidence “We the People,” feeling and believing that they belong to the demos and thus with each other. There is tension—but not contradiction—between the communal dimensions of peoplehood and public respect for the diversity and independence of citizens.
The Declaration of Independence begins precisely by articulating the extent to which the American people has grown apart from the British: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” By implication peoplehood is more than only a matter of political bands. But for there to be “self-rule” requires some understanding of just what the self is.
The Declaration certainly does not assert that all Americans are the same. Political identity does not require cultural uniformity or even any single common denominator such as language. Nor does resolving political issues require unanimity. It may be a matter of negotiation between people who see the issue and options differently and even hold different values. Parties can help to bring divergent interests into negotiation.35 Sharing a polity does not forbid partisanship, but it does require that loyalty to the larger republic come before partisan interests.
It remains a question, whether and when the particular loyalties of family and community are, like partisan interests, in tension with the republic, and when and how much they are crucial to achieving the social integration of a people able to be either the subject of democracy or the object of republican pursuit of the public good. Democracy degenerates and republicanism fails when citizens fail to recognize each other as members of an inclusive polity.
The Declaration does not spend much time on what makes the people a cohesive body. But it is significant that near the end the representatives who signed it on behalf of their different former colonies “mutually pledge to each other” their lives, fortune, and sacred honor. Republican self-rule—including democracy—depends on explicit or implicit commitments citizens make to each other.36
Among these commitments is to prioritize the public good. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” as President John F. Kennedy put it (channeling an old republican theme). This does not mean that citizens will not act on separate, private interests in many aspects of their lives. They will legitimately have personal agendas when they choose spouses or sign business contracts. Of course, there is a public dimension to even a private contract; this is what makes it enforceable through the courts. And at least traditionally, marriage involved not only an agreement between spouses but the performance of that agreement before an assembled community or public that was enjoined to support the marriage. Being a good citizen need not mean sacrificing all these private dimensions of our lives but rather finding a good balance. It does mean making space in our lives and our attention for public, shared concerns. And it means using our public engagements to advance the public good, not just pursue private ends.
The public good is more than the sum of what citizens happen to want at any moment. It is also an aspiration and an extension into the future. While votes and majorities are valuable mechanisms for making decisions, they are not the final definition of either the public good or identity of the polity. As James Madison wrote to James Monroe (his successor as president), “There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied and which therefore needs more elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.”37
The interest of the majority is short-term and shifting. It easily neglects the public good. And it leaves out the interests of minority members of the political community. Add to this the problems of distinguishing “true”—or more basic, longer-term, and reflectively considered—interests from the immediate thoughts of the members of a temporary majority about what they want.38
Having opened the door to an unprecedented level of democracy, Madison and other US founders were acutely concerned about unbridled and immediate expressions of popular will. When they worried about democracy, it was largely direct democracy they had in mind—efforts of citizens to govern themselves without the mediating selection of representatives. They worried that this arrangement couldn’t scale up, that it was vulnerable to crowd psychology and demagoguery, and that it would be too easy for an assembled crowd to think it obviously was a majority—or even the people as such—without taking the step of actually checking the views of those not assembled. For democratic government to be effective, fair and stable demanded combining it with republican institutions—which was the task of the Constitution.39
The French Revolution offered a frightening example as temporary majorities sent not just the king but a succession of the revolution’s own leaders to the guillotine. Many founders of the United States grew increasingly concerned that their democratic experiment would be short-lived.40 Indeed, the radical republic of the French Revolution was extremely short-lived. This is a reminder that social stability has a positive value; change, even idealistic change, is not the only good. But it can be crucial, even to saving what we value when it is under pressure.
Simple majoritarianism is a degenerate form of democracy and a problem for republican ideals. And as Charles Taylor suggests in Chapter 1, it is a still bigger problem when parties try to make temporary majorities into permanent structures of domination. Yet this is what happens over and again, in large ways and small. It is, for example, central to the efforts at voter suppression that are so strong in American history, as we discuss in Chapter 7.
According to the Declaration, citizens do not just express the individual urge to personal freedom but also choose a society in which everyone is free.41 They choose to share that society. The choices of equality and solidarity are equally shared. Absent the sharing—and the limits it brings—democratic freedom can be corrosive and self-undermining.
How much we get of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” depends on both social conditions and political freedoms. These relevant rights may be “self-evident” but they are not intrinsically self-realizing. Life depends on food, obviously, and on clean rather than contaminated drinking water, health care (especially during a pandemic), and in the long run, reversing or coping with climate change. Citizens are empowered very unequally to pursue happiness. They may have more or less money and better or worse schools; they may or may not face sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination and brutal policing. And they are affected by broad social conditions, such as factory closings and the destruction of communities or, in the United States, incarceration of huge numbers of Black men.
These are matters of both “public goods” and the public good. First, some goods—such as clean air, national security, equality, or solidarity—are hard to enjoy without sharing them. No one can enjoy them without others also participating (and indeed, no one gets less of them because others get more).42 Provision and access to public goods has been under attack in the United States and most capitalist democracies in the last fifty years of neoliberalism. Strengthening provision is important to both empowerment and equality. It is also basic to facing challenges such as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and accelerating climate change (as we discuss in Chapter 7).
Second the public good—singular—is an ideal for the overall constitution of a people, not simply a class of goods. As John Adams wrote, “The public Good, the salus Populi is the professed End of all Government.”43 It is not a matter of consumer benefits—as though wanting a country free from corruption was much the same as wanting a fancier car. The public good is a higher value than such private goods. It is a matter of virtue and moral obligation in a way that personal benefits are not. There is obviously self-interest to wanting a better car, but that is not a matter of virtue. Wanting a better country—one that lives up to its highest ideals or potential—is different. One might even sacrifice personal benefits for such a higher good—as for example do soldiers.
Of course, in elections people often vote based on what they perceive to be their short-term material interests. They vote based on what they think one party or another will do for jobs, or housing prices, or old-age benefits. This is not unreasonable, though too often we are actually taught—both in schools and by experience—that selfishness is rewarded, even that “greed is good” (as the 1987 movie Wall Street put it). Adding up expressions of private interests is not the same as identifying the public good.
Still, many people do vote for one party or another because they think it will be better for their country—or even the world. Some vote for better schools even if they don’t have children, or they vote to keep the national debt down, or they vote for peace. There are still many examples of civic or public virtue (thank goodness). It has not vanished, but it does seem to have eroded.
Classical and Renaissance republican thought focused on small societies in which all citizens could be known to each other. Both concern for their reputations and ability to see the consequences of their actions would promote virtue. But this was unlikely to work as well at large scale. This meant that both the design of the republic and the project of democracy confronted different challenges from those of smaller, mostly face-to-face societies.
It is worth pausing to emphasize the transformation in scale. At its founding, the United States had nearly four million people. Ancient Athens included perhaps 250,000 at its height. Renaissance Florence peaked at perhaps 60,000 in the early fifteenth century. In 1900, the US Census made news by reporting that the population had grown 21 percent in the preceding decade to reach the total of 76,212,168. In 2000, the Census measured the population at 281,421,906. Today, just twenty years later, it exceeds 330 million, of whom 93 percent are citizens, with 250 million old enough to vote. There are on average 750,000 people in each district electing a member to the US House of Representatives. The number stipulated in the original US Constitution was one representative per thirty thousand. And the United States is small by comparison to the world’s largest, if also struggling, democracy: India. More than 600 million people voted in India’s most recent election, out of some 900 million eligible. The population exceeds 1.4 billion.
The nineteenth-century French analyst of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, sought to discern how civic virtue could be cultivated not just in a narrow elite, but among the wider range of citizens. Political associations, he argued, provided “great free schools for democracy.”44 In other words, citizens can learn to do democracy better. And they learn by doing. What they learn is not only how to manage the procedures of democracy—say, using Robert’s Rules of Order (or “Martha’s” more communitarian rules) to run a meeting or the appreciating virtues and limits of different voting procedures. They learn the spirit of democracy that encourages them to improvise as democrats in new contexts.
In a thin sense, public virtue involves a variety of kinds of “good behavior”—such as not littering or wearing masks to prevent spreading infections during a pandemic. Many of these can be taught, made into habits, or enforced by laws. They reflect good government (or good upbringing) in general. Democracy can become a way of life. But democracy also demands a stronger sense of public virtue. It insists that mere compliance is not enough, that public virtue requires conscious participation in public life and commitment to making choices for the public good. The boundary is fuzzy, because citizens may form good habits as well as reach good decisions through public debates.
Madison famously worried that large scale and complexity limited the effectiveness of civic virtue; he demanded the use of laws and policies to ensure individual and group interests also supported the public good.45 These were to address not only scale but a rapidly growing and increasingly complex market economy (which today we might call “capitalist”). The individual autonomy dear to the liberal tradition could be transformed either into a kind of naked economic egoism or, as Tocqueville hoped, into a “self-interest, rightly understood” that could complement civic virtue and religious morality.46 What the political theorist Michael Sandel has called “the formative project of Republican citizenship” helped nurture good citizens.47 This was not all prior preparation; it included “on-the-job learning.” Participation was itself a school for better participation.
Seeking balance among liberty, equality, and solidarity, Tocqueville stressed the importance of associations.48 Churches, fraternal societies, mutual benefit societies, civic organizations, both labor unions and businesses, political parties, charities, social movements, and clubs were all basic to American society. These knit society together at levels between individuals and the centralized state. Americans, he said, were by character and culture “joiners,” and this was a good thing. Social affiliations were an antidote to excesses of individualism, which among other things could paradoxically lead to overdependence on the central government and degeneration of democracy into calls for government to remedy citizens’ deficiencies. It is precisely this rich web of voluntary, intermediate associations that Robert Putnam, the analyst of social capital, argued America was losing at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. The seemingly mundane example he made famous was the decline of bowling leagues.49 His point, like Tocqueville’s, was not that the associations were directly political but that educated citizens in the basic practices of democracy nurtured solidarity and encouraged public virtue. This, he thought, was good both for individuals and for the country.
In the early twentieth century, John Dewey influentially held that democracy must be a process of education.50 It was not enough that citizens be educated in order to participate; it was also crucial that they be educated by participating. A good election campaign was one in which citizens could learn more about issues and policies. For them to do so required both honesty and clear explanations of the views on the part of candidates. But it also depended on open, reflective debate. At the time Dewey wrote, participation and education were both being transformed—and rendered problematic—by the growing scale of society.51 The old image of a town hall holding the citizens who needed to gather for debate was superseded even in towns, let alone large cities or the whole country. Debate and the public education of citizens were transformed.
Tocqueville saw newspapers as central to informing this debate and indeed simply carrying it out at necessary scales. Newspapers not only educate citizens and enable them to express opinions (and learn the opinions of others). They also gather the dispersed citizenry into a democratic public rather than atomistic individuals. “Nothing but a newspaper,” he wrote, “can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same time.”52 Of course, he didn’t live to hear radio, see TV, or become addicted to social media.
In the late eighteenth century, newspapers were commonly the projects of individuals, often printers writing articles even as they set type. But newspapers grew with democracy. By Tocqueville’s time, they had come to be closely linked to associations. In his words: “newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers.”53 But through the nineteenth century newspapers grew as businesses, commonly local. By the mid-twentieth century, they became large organizations (supported by others such as Reuters, United Press International, the Associated Press, and other “wire services” for long-distance information-sharing). Newspapers persisted as broadcast media grew, though profits came under pressure. A wave of consolidation followed as chains bought up the previously local papers and organized them into national structures.54 Of course broadcast media provided for journalism as well as entertainment. And journalism became a profession with strong (though variable) norms of objective and fair reporting, reproduced in part by professional education.
Educative, informative public debate depends not only on media, but also on transparent governance. Citizens need to be able to know what laws or policies are under consideration, what information politicians have about them, and what data guide government implementation. Progress in this came with measures such as publishing congressional debates—or now, putting them on TV. There are requirements that many governance meetings must be open to all citizens. But in fact national government seems distant and relatively opaque to most citizens. This is partly an effect of its scale and complexity; it has relatively little to do with trying to keep secrets except in a few key areas.
Participating in public life can give citizens an enlarged view of what is possible and preferable; it can change our standards of evaluation. Better understanding of the public good may even be linked to better understanding of ourselves. Tocqueville and the range of republican thinkers after him saw public virtue not just as self-sacrifice but as a way to benefit from the many goods that were available only when shared. So both the actual sharing and seeing the public benefit were important.
Of course, some participants in public life may seek only power or gratification of their immediate desires. We do not rely simply on moral exhortations to try to limit this. One traditional republican notion was that citizens would be concerned about their reputations. They would want to be seen as virtuous when observed by others. When governance was undertaken by a small elite or in a small polity, observation could be fairly direct. In larger countries, publicity about politicians plays something of the same role. Within communities some people may be praised as public spirited or criticized for shirking obligations.
Direct observation among citizens works less well in very large-scale societies. Indirect mechanisms of observation and evaluation have become ubiquitous. States monitor social media to prevent terrorism or repress dissent. Companies monitor credit card usage to manage risks and target advertising. Applicants for loans are not assessed by a local banker with awareness of their personal circumstances or an ability to look them in the eye or shake hands; they are assessed by algorithms. And media audiences are also active participants, generating their own messages or reposting and commenting on those of others. This interactivity is crucial to how social media have transformed older print and broadcast media, but it has the effect of generating far more data about each individual.
More and more data are collected about each of us, not just by intentional surveillance but as a byproduct of all the routine transactions that are recorded—from making purchases to browsing websites to watching TV. Take a seemingly innocent survey on Facebook—about health, say, or where it is good to live—and you provide data to a vast marketing operation. Both real and artificially constructed “news” stories about a particular disease will start popping up. Search “healthy weight” on Google, and you will start receiving ads for diet programs. The ad companies and the social media platforms make money by competing for consumers’ attention.55 These vast amounts of personal data are explored by artificial intelligence programs designed to construct profiles, identify patterns, and make predictions. This process tracks much with remarkable accuracy, but also introduces a variety of errors, including racial bias.56
In addition, we are lured into a ubiquitous ratings culture, for consumer goods, yes, but also for political speech. Ratings are yet another source of data about each individual’s views and preferences and are used to sell not just cars or cosmetics but politicians and policies. In the West this is mostly operationalized through business enterprises.57 China has recently introduced computerized monitoring systems aided by artificial intelligence to produce “social credit” ratings.58
Ubiquitous surveillance, whether capitalist or statist, has all but eliminated privacy. This is frustrating for individuals and linked to material risks such as identity theft. But it is also a challenge to democracy, which is rooted in the notion that both individuals and groups can engage in “interior” reflections and debates that are not completely subject to external gaze or control. A citizen can have an interior dialog about how to weigh different interests and values, how to estimate the risks of different actions—including expressions of political opinion. But privacy also allows, crucially, for apolitical engagements—for love, friendship, family, music, sports, dance, and literary pleasures. Subjecting everything to political control or judgment is as basic a feature of totalitarianism as repressing political dissent. Both are fatal enemies of democracy, which requires both public and private empowerment of citizens and webs of social relationships that connect the two.
Neither capitalist nor statist surveillance is a matter of citizens’ direct observation of each other. It is an asymmetrical monitoring. It takes place in ways we cannot even see, let alone control. Even more than privacy is at stake. Opaque or covert technologies are used to shape our identities, allegiances, and preferences. This introduces a tension with the core republican idea that individuals free from domination should choose the conditions of their lives together through reasoned discussion. It is a challenge to the idea of democratic will-formation.
It is also simply a shock and disorientation. New technologies have transformed infrastructure and communications for centuries. Printing presses were once new and basic to the rise of modern democracy. Telegraphs joined with railroads to knit together whole countries. Telephones allowed maintenance of interpersonal linkages across distance. First radio then television allowed broadcast messages to reach “masses.” Such media rewove the fabric of life. They both contributed to the rise of an urban society and helped to connect even the remotest rural areas into large-scale information flows. The recent wave of new technologies have (including but not limited to social media) continued some trends and transformed others, notably by enabling many more people to be “senders” of messages potentially received at long distance and by large populations but also by fragmenting publics.
The new media technologies have come as part of a package with ubiquitous monitoring, such as with watches tracking heart rates. They bring economic transformation alongside workplace automation and the rise of computer-enabled logistics businesses such as Amazon and Uber. The ways they could transform warfare are alarming. The frequency of actual cyberattacks and system failures makes for a pervasive anxiety.
The very fact of the new technologies creates a sense of risk at least equal to any sense of new empowerment, and sometimes greater. It has upset routines and expectations. But the response cannot be to eliminate the computer-based technologies. Rather, we must find good institutional structures to help us use them well, regulate them where necessary, and provide new replacements for the support old media gave to democracy.
The American founders rebelled against imperial Britain, and they did not choose to create another empire. They created a republic. They saw its citizens as “a” people (even if, at the outset, most had loyalties to their states at least as strong as their loyalties to the new country).
Indeed, the founders were in many ways localists. Despite his happy years in France, Thomas Jefferson recurrently retreated to his farm at Monticello. He imagined American democracy rooted in small towns and farming villages. He thought these would nurture greater virtue among citizens and restrain tendencies to reinstate aristocracy. This was a matter of principle as well as taste, for like others in the classical republican tradition, he worried that large scale and especially empire was intrinsically an enemy of virtue, encouraging excessive luxury and pomp, intrigue and conspiracy, arrogance among leaders and servility among the rest. He worried about expensive government and a standing army.
Yet Jefferson also presided over the Louisiana Purchase. This doubled the territory of the country. It also made the United States de facto an imperial power as it contended for control of the new territory with a range of American Indian nations.59
Despite the tension with the republican ideas of the founders, the United States kept growing. It expanded westward and eventually annexed Hawaii and Alaska. In all these territories it ruled over Native peoples as subject populations. The expansion was achieved not just by purchases or by accession of states formed by settlers. It was a product of conquest and war with Spain and Mexico as well as American Indian nations. And in the world wars, the United States acquired overseas territories such as the Philippines. It occupied Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Panama Canal Zone. Cherishing the idea that it was a republic, the United States became an imperial power without using the word “empire.” This remains an unresolved issue—notably with regard to Puerto Rico, with the American Indian nations, and with the District of Columbia which is a majority-Black territory ruled by the US federal government without the rights of a state.
Growth also meant immigration and, especially, cities. Today less than 20 percent of the US population lives in even somewhat rural areas, and less than a tenth of those more or less rural Americans are actually farmers. There is vastly more wealth and luxury in the United States today than at its founding. The American democratic project has been transformed by industrialization, urbanization, expansion of the country itself, and development of an infrastructure to integrate it. Versions of this story have played out around the world. The “internal colonialism” of England against Scotland, Wales, and Ireland is one example—and again, still fraught today. European countries sought to be republics (and nation-states) at home, even while being empires abroad. They live with complex consequences.60
In the United States, farmers formed the backbone of the great Populist movement of the late nineteenth century.61 They struggled not least against the burden of debt; they borrowed for equipment and seed; deflationary national fiscal policies made it harder to pay even when the harvest was good. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan gave one of the most famous speeches in American political history, culminating in the cry “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” The issue was whether more silver coins might be minted, increasing the money supply (much as the Federal Reserve might lower interest rates to counter recession today). This would help farmers, but not banks. Government sided with the bankers. Many family farms were lost.
At the same time as the great farmers’ movements of the late nineteenth century, the United States saw a major increase in immigration. The population of the United States more than doubled between 1860 and 1900 despite the loss of life in the Civil War. Sadly, there was never an effective political alliance between the Populist farmers and the largely immigrant industrial and mine workers. Along with Black Americans, immigrants became scapegoats attacked by politicians seeking to mobilize the votes of farmers and other rural producers. Then as now, immigration is a vital force for economic growth. But divide and conquer is a recurrent strategy for political elites seeking power against the threat of more unified democracy.
The late nineteenth century anticipated our own era in many ways. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed it “the Gilded Age,” lampooning the greed and corruption that were rampant.62 This was the era when “robber barons” amassed great fortunes from investments in railroads, oil, and, indeed, debt. Inequality was extreme. Eventually efforts were made to try to control it. With legislation such as the Sherman Act of 1880, the government tried to restrict cartels and other collusion in restraint of trade. This became the basis for antitrust law and efforts to break up monopolies. There were also new efforts to provide for shared welfare, which recognized that many Americans lived in precarious economic circumstances and without much community support. The formation of unions was an effort by workers to provide for collective security and build new community institutions to sustain life in cities and factory towns. Industrial relations were fraught and often violent as owners and managers tried to stop workers from forming unions. Pensions were first established for the widows and children of Civil War veterans, later for workers in some companies. Settlement houses tried to help immigrants. Support was modest until another shock, the Great Depression of the 1930s, generated enough pressure for major government action.
Yet the consolidation of farms continued, soon under corporate control. Farmers loved the land and tried to keep their farms going despite the economic pressures. In 1985, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert to raise money to help farm families manage debt and stay on the land. The project continues, though farmers have dwindled to just a little over 1 percent of the American population from 40 percent in 1900. Agriculture has not ceased, of course; it has just been taken over by large corporations.
Rural and small-town life still has an outsize grip on American self-understanding. It is particularly the felt past and wished-for present of white Americans. It is not entirely foreign to Black Americans but much more problematic. The myth and desire have less purchase among more recent immigrant populations who have known the country mainly through its cities. Still, immigrants—from Latin America, especially—sometimes bring sensibilities that connect to the social vision if not the specific history of the rural United States.
That social vision is one of individual self-reliance and autonomy coupled with strong family ties and a sense of security. It is largely mythical but not less powerful for that. It is no more mythical than the notion that urbanites are all cosmopolitan devotees of diversity, attending the theater rather than watching TV, or engaged in political discussion at cafés. These are not accurate descriptions, but they are meaningful myths.
The decline of rural districts and the rise of industrial cities are both part of transformation in the very scale of social life. And both are echoed around the developed world. Few modern states tried as hard to protect rural life as France did. Yet, a French version of this story made headlines in 2019 thanks to protestors wearing yellow vests. The vests simultaneously referenced a fuel tax that nonurbanites thought fell unfairly on them, a claim to widely shared French identity, since every car owner is required to have a vest, and a sense of urgency, since the vests are designed precisely to attract attention in emergencies. Their protests were classically “populist,” challenging a technocratic prime minister for an out-of-touch style and policies serving the rich more than the masses. Claimed both by the right-wing National Front and by the Left Party, the Yellow Vest protests were at least as much about the fate of communities and livelihoods in nonmetropolitan France as about any specific political ideology.63
All through the twentieth century, France sought to avoid so complete a transition in livelihoods as the United States experienced. It adopted a range of price subsidies and other policies to try to protect both the rural villages thought central to la France profonde and the foods thought integral to a proper French way of life. Industry still developed, and overall France enjoyed a high standard of living. It built one of the strongest welfare state systems in the world. And, for a long time, it sustained agricultural prosperity, with at least 350 distinct types of cheeses and fresh bread produced daily.
Nonetheless, by the 2020s, French rural livelihoods have been deeply and painfully disrupted. What France achieved was to slow—but not altogether stop—the decline of rural areas and small towns. Slower can mean less disruptive and more humane. But now, partly because of government policy shifting in a neoliberal direction, France is facing rural decline and deindustrialization at the same time. In the 1950s and 1960s, demographic shifts accompanied growing employment in industry. New jobs were relatively well paid, and workers were empowered by high rates of unionization. Now those industrial jobs are being disrupted or destroyed.
Today, jobs are most plentiful in the service sector, but generally not for former farmers or former industrial workers. This is partly because of gender biases—not only against men in traditionally female occupations, but also among men against those occupations. And not all of the service sector is thriving. Bakeries and cheese shops are closing in the face of convenient supermarkets and two-career families. Moreover, the costs of the French welfare state are facing resistance from middle- and upper-class taxpayers. This transformation has become integral to both political challenges from the populist Right and protests that unite parts of the Left and Right in opposition to technocratic liberal reforms designed to advance French economic competitiveness as a whole in the context of European integration and globalization.
Transformations of rural and nonmetropolitan life do not mean that either Jefferson’s vision of a village and small-town United States or the prioritization of la France profonde was wrong. It does mean that without amendment neither is adequate to contemporary conditions. That low-density areas voted for populist politicians reveals important facts about how people in those areas feel and how they believe they have been treated. It does not indicate that populist demagogues had actual solutions to their problems or ways of reconciling local futures with growth of a large-scale economy.
This is not just an agricultural story. It is a story of sharp disruption to the social conditions for democracy. It has been equally important in England’s industrial Midlands.64 This region was central to the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution and to a mining and factory economy—and way of life—that thrived after. But, by the late twentieth century, most of that was gone. While Birmingham remained a major city, small towns throughout the region declined. The East Midlands airport is symbolic: it is an all-cargo facility because warehousing and shipping for the new logistical economy have replaced older modes of production. It brought jobs, though, in a familiar pattern: not unionized and not as well-paid as those lost. Though the region remains the geographical heart of England, it is ironically peripheral to the newer economic circuits of global commerce and technology.65
The growth of large-scale integration has undermined place-based, local communities. It has enabled employers to weaken unions by increasing competition among workers, escaping from localities where workers organize, and sometimes simply moving whole sites of employment to places where workers have less power. Early in twentieth-century in the United States this meant relocating textile factories from New England to the South. But from the 1970s the relocations became increasingly international. Long supply chains made the logistical economy intrinsically nonlocal.
The very systems that connected nation-states into the global economy pulled nation-states apart internally. Blows could be as dramatic as the closing of a factory that had been the mainstay of a town’s economy. They could come in increments, such as the incursion of big-box stores and mail-order shopping, which undermined a downtown business district. Centralization of services could exacerbate the loss; consolidation of school districts undermined the identity and cohesion of towns; local hospitals and doctors’ offices closed in favor of larger regional centers. An early symptom was often the loss of young people when the town couldn’t provide strong economic opportunities.
While unionized industry flourished, leaving home could bring attractive working-class careers elsewhere, as for example teenagers from Kentucky looked to Michigan, Ohio, and the auto industry for opportunities or, more ambitiously, to California and aerospace.66 But even after the good factory jobs disappeared, they kept leaving the small towns of Kentucky—and West Virginia, and Eastern Ohio—because there was no viable future there. Steadily rising average ages and often shrinking school enrollments measured the loss.67
The economist, historian, and anthropologist Karl Polanyi saw a similar tension between locality and large-scale organization in the Industrial Revolution. He described it as a process of “disembedding.” In prior social formations, market actors were bound to each other in a host of different ways including traditional obligations of the prosperous to the poor.
The Industrial Revolution disrupted both such reciprocity and local community. Over time, new social support systems were developed; community was rebuilt in new forms. People went to an overlapping range of churches, their children went to the same schools, their customers were neighbors, their creditors were local. But local community could not provide all the support needed in a large-scale and volatile society. Schools and churches connected the local to the larger scale. Social support also came from larger institutions. The state institutions built after World War II were crucial, but so were other institutions from agricultural extension programs to trade unions.
For elites and the upwardly mobile, disembedding commonly came with opportunities. Moving to an urban area could bring higher education, jobs, access to museums and performing arts. Cities might be less “communal” but relative anonymity brought advantages.68 An urbanite could move more easily among contexts, experiencing greater freedom because these overlapped less. Women could live free from paternalistic families; lifestyles could vary more fluidly. There is a reason gay culture flourished in San Francisco and New York before most smaller, nonmetropolitan towns.
It has seemed through much of modernity that the individually ambitious were always moving out. They went away to university if they could. They joined the military and didn’t return. They took off for the bright lights of the big city. These efforts didn’t always work out. Sometimes the formerly ambitious returned chagrined (a common theme of country music songs). But the dominant story was seeking opportunity elsewhere. This made it easy to think of those still embedded in smaller, place-based communities as somehow backward. It also obscured the possibility of moving up without moving out, by strengthening local communities and developing their economic and other potentials.
Disembedding was not just a lifestyle choice for elites. It was a necessity for millions of workers who faced declining opportunities in older agricultural economies and craft production. More than 70 percent of Americans worked in agriculture in the 1840s; less than 2 percent do today. Four million farms disappeared between the end of World War II and 2015. The demography of the United States was reorganized in favor of cities and suburbs. But if mobility opened opportunities, it also made it harder to have close-knit community. It wasn’t just that cities were less communal, it was that moving itself was disembedding. This was a trade-off many were prepared to accept, but it could be a loss even for those who chose it consciously.
The great Black migration from the rural South to cities such as Detroit and Chicago in the industrial north was a great disembedding. So was international migration from the Irish, Italian, and indeed Mexican countryside, Jewish shtetls in Russia, and rural regions of China, albeit by way of coastal cities. Those who migrated often did find economic opportunity. But their success depended significantly on “re-embedding.” They built new communities and organizations to replace those they lost. Trade unions were important to make the most of hard economic conditions. Synagogues and churches helped rebuild community as well as sustain faith. Recovery was possible, but disembedding was a cost. And it was one thing for those whose economic or professional fortunes did improve, another for those who never found the promised opportunities.
Polanyi’s account of disembedding incorporates three distinct ideas. Easily confused, all are useful for understanding what has happened to Western democracies—and what is to be done.69
First, Polanyi sees a one-way historical process leading through most of modernity to ever-more disembedded markets. Agricultural produce is a prime example, marketed to ever more distant consumers, with an ever more complex chain of intermediaries. But consider also capital markets. The capital to start a new business can be raised locally, from friends, family, and already successful local businesspeople. Bill Gates and Donald Trump both got the money to launch their business careers from their fathers; having rich parents helps. Such local support is crucial to many entrepreneurs, including immigrants setting up street corner groceries or nail salons. But through the course of modern economic development this local support has mattered less and less because larger-scale capital markets have evolved. Sometimes religious and kinship networks helped at long distances. But today young entrepreneurs also pitch their ideas to venture capitalists to whom they have no personal connection. They borrow money from banks rather than their parents-in-law. Depersonalization has some attractions, but it is still a transformation. And the pattern applies long after entrepreneurial founding of new businesses, as firms raise capital in equity and financial markets.
Second, Polanyi rightly points out but does not emphasize equally that there are continual processes of re-embedding markets in new and different webs of social relations. For most of modernity those who migrated from rural areas and small towns to industrial cities built new webs of social relations into which markets were incorporated. Whether the new cities were better or worse than the older small towns could be debated, but throughout modern history the social fabric surrounding and supporting markets has been rewoven. This involved a mixture of multipurpose relationships similar to those that characterized smaller, more traditional market towns and new, often bureaucratic structures. It meant creating consumer protection agencies, for example, and web-based ratings, which present the gossip of strangers as an impersonal information about what are good restaurants, or cars, or even universities. In principle, there can be new supports not only for large-scale consumer markets, but for workers. Unions are the preeminent example. During the last forty to fifty years, however, the reweaving of social embeddedness has lagged severely behind disruption. This is central to the current moment.
Third, Polanyi points out that markets are never as disembedded as they may seem. Leaving behind roots in a local town doesn’t mean going nowhere; it means entering a wider set of organizational relations. Markets that have lost ties to localities and even traditional flows of goods have become “metatopical”—they operate across specific spaces. But it is not true that these are anchored in no webs of social relations at all, only that the relations look radically different. They are typically indirect relations, not directly interpersonal. They situate the market in relation to corporations and other formal organizations including governments and in relation to abstract categories of people such as investors and customers.70 It is important that we see that these are still social relations, even though not directly interpersonal. And of course, directly interpersonal relations still matter in some contexts, even if they don’t organize as much as they once did. Business leaders may come together in person for Wednesday prayer breakfasts. When Warren Buffet calls, a CEO answers the phone personally.
Still, when we inhabit a town, we inhabit a landscape, buildings, and indeed located memories as well as webs of social relationships. Systemic threats such as climate change become compelling in relation to place: it is this river that floods; it is that farm that may fail. We value familiar locales—say, a New York City street—even when our social contacts are with strangers or those with whom we share only limited relationships.71 We also inhabit places at different scales—not only a town but also a country, for example, not only a neighborhood but a city. And on the other side of the contrast, locality confronts not just one system but a multiplicity of systems. Large organizations such as business corporations and government that are central to that systemic world.72 These disrupt the potentially level playing field of equivalent and comparably empowered citizens. In both markets and politics, corporations are actors of a fundamentally different kind, with asymmetric powers.
Corporations play a huge role in large-scale social integration both nationally and globally. They are central to capital accumulation, of course, but they are also central to connectivity. It is not just that they have market power; it is that they expand markets. Communication, for example, has been transformed by computers, cell phones, the internet, social media, and a range of other technologies grounded in microelectronics. The underlying research and development were largely funded by the government, but deployment at scale has come through for-profit corporations.73 Many employ tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of countries. This at once extends certain connections to the large scale and undermines the dense and multiplex connections of local community. Firms may create some level of community among their employees, though the trend has been toward contingency and volatility rather than stable long-term careers.
Further, the indirect relations that knit together large-scale societies are at least partially automated. I mean this not only in the sense of technologies working with little or no human participation. There are also standard procedures and workflows that reduce choice even where humans remain involved. And not least there are complex adaptive systems the organize activity and generate effects through feedback mechanisms of cause and effect rather than choice. There may be choice in their design, but at large scale they seldom have a single moment of design but rather emerge from millions of separate actions—such as the buying and selling that constitute markets. They can only be observed and managed with the aid of statistics about their operations, not direct observation. The notion that systems are “objective” disconnects them from deliberation over the public good. Markets are imagined, for example, to provide material outputs in response to economic supply and demand. Government comes too easily to be a matter of caring for such systems—markets, infrastructures, bureaucracies—rather than demanding that they provide for the welfare of citizens.
Markets once had been particular places open on particular days of the week. As Adam Smith recognized in the late eighteenth century, they were becoming systems; they worked as though by “an invisible hand.” They were (or could be) at least in part self-organizing and self-regulating. They became national and then extended to, and by, global relations of supply and demand, buyers and sellers, and complex, increasingly electronic record-keeping. Logistical systems of increasing sophistication now fulfill orders from almost everywhere with products from almost anywhere (but especially Asia). Yet, though they may have become despatialized and opaque, markets are still a basic dimension of human connection.
Much economic ideology, including neoliberalism, obscures this. It focuses on individuals, their property, and their decisions in relation to scarcity and opportunity. Even otherwise strong academic economics emphasizes the choices of individual actors aggregated into relationships among more or less abstract variables—say, supply and demand. At best, this describes the systemic operation of “the economy.” But it does not make clear that the economy is also a web of connections among human beings. Moreover, it commonly exaggerates the extent to which all such relationships are shaped not just by natural scarcity or spontaneous aggregation of individual choices. In fact, these basic economic relations are organized importantly by power. Power may be wielded directly in the way corporations work. It may be wielded indirectly as businesses lobby legislators (and fund their campaigns) to that ensure laws and regulations are written in ways they find acceptable. It appears internationally as countries support domestically based firms and block others. It is basic to when tax evasion is prosecuted as a crime or not.
Of course, inequality is also basic. But what makes markets disempowering for citizens, as distinct from consumers, is not only lack of money. It is inability to change their organization—to steer investment to make diseases of women as high a priority as those of men, to end profiteering on life-saving vaccines, to stop the destruction of local community, or to respond effectively to climate change.
Citizens can use market mechanisms to assert leverage. They can organize campaigns against corporations that market the products of sweatshops or against universities that invest their endowments in fossil fuel companies. But overall, citizens tend to confront markets as systems that operate by autonomous relations of cause and effect over which they have little control. Their primary recourse is demanding that state policy regulate or even reshape markets. This is discouraged by economic ideology that exaggerates the autonomy of markets and the extent to which they should be judged only by internal “efficiency.”
Ideology presents markets and government as sharply separate, at least ideally, rather than interdependent and mutually shaping. It encourages the view that markets should be left untouched and treated as autonomous constraints in pursuit of the public good. This narrows the scope of democratic decision-making. While markets do provide a realm of partial freedom, they operate only within severe constraints of inequality and powerful organizational structures. Neither buying consumer goods nor selling labor to employers is really analogous to voting for the best approach to the public good.
None of this means that markets are bad or that states should attempt control so complete that it blocks market mechanisms. Markets have contributed enormously to both the generation and the distribution of wealth in modern societies. But they are not just neutral aggregators of individual decisions. Markets are socially organized systems, shaped not only by inequality but by the exercise of power, not least by large corporations, hedge funds, and venture capitalists. They are facilitated and shaped by government actions: issuing currency and guaranteeing credit, insuring bank deposits and making massive purchases for defense or health care, providing police to defend private property and courts to adjudicate contract disputes, and entering into international agreements to manage infrastructure such as air travel, shipping, and the internet. So government engagement in the economy is not some illegitimate innovation, but a normal and constitutive feature of capitalist markets. However, government itself can feel as distant and almost as abstract as markets.
The growth of distant, systemic organization of social life helps to explain why citizens feel a lack of efficacy. It’s not just that their political clout may seem puny by comparison with the money and power wielded by a corporation. It’s that distant systemic factors keep impinging on local life: providing or eliminating jobs; polluting, perhaps cleaning up but often not; opening or closing stores; selling products that may be dangerous; advertising medical treatments that are expensive and mysteriously may or may not be covered by insurance and then may or may not help; creating a sense of insecurity. And indeed, when systems don’t work well—as, for example during the coronavirus pandemic, it is not only the poor who suffer. Many relatively well-off citizens may feel disempowered.74
The “state” has become more impersonal and distant. Legislation and regulation are enormously complex. Policy is administered by bureaucracies full of trained specialists—and specialized technical knowledge is necessary. In most of the developed democracies there has been a process of centralization. Political choices and power struggles shape this. But centralization is also a product of the growth of large-scale sociotechnical systems. Air transport involves local facilities, for example, but it depends on nationally and internationally organized management of air traffic. National defense is a matter of global logistics not just militias keeping guns handy. Businesses depend on the ability to procure and sell goods across long distances and in different local jurisdictions. Long histories of cumulative changes add up to a level of centralization and distance that no one precisely chose. This cannot be reversed without a radical transformation of human life, but it can be counterbalanced with stronger local relations and intermediate associations.
Societies of millions of people necessarily depend on indirect linkages among citizens, often mediated by technology as well as government bureaucracy and private companies. In modern democracies, citizens do not know each other directly except in pockets or as images in media. Keeping millions of citizens connected to each other is a basic challenge for both democracy and republicanism. And, as Abraham Lincoln said, so is maintaining “the attachment of the People” to their government and its laws.75
Scale not only makes political and economic power structures less transparent and government institutions more distant; it makes the importance of civic virtue more obscure. Reliance on technical experts is necessary but makes it harder for citizens to feel well-informed about crucial decisions. It is also harder for citizens to see the positive results of their public-spirited actions.
But when large-scale systems don’t work for the well-off, they have opportunities not available to others. They can use their money to buy other kinds of support. They can send their children to private schools. They can buy houses behind gates and pay for private security services. They can bypass public health care and use private doctors and hospitals. They can shop at different stores. Material resources enable the middle and upper class to escape problems that plague provision of support to their fellow citizens. Most citizens depend much more than the well-off on some combination of local, community support and public institutions. It’s not that they are not mobile. They migrate, permanently or shorter term for jobs. They join the Navy. They drive trucks. But their mobility is less cushioned.
Elite mobility helps to underwrite a global ideology and self-understanding that I have dubbed “the class consciousness of frequent flyers.”76 Typical especially of those who fly business class and frequent members-only clubs and lounges, this includes the illusion that one can embrace the world as a whole without embracing particular places in it.77 One result is an uncritical cosmopolitanism that among other things neglects how much the easy mobility of the frequent flyers depends on passports from certain countries, credit cards, and often white skin. Forgetting the material foundations of their own relationship to the world, such cosmopolitans imagine that those who do not share their views just have bad attitudes or need education. It is easy for them to conflate a moral stance on the unity and value of the world as a whole with a style based on well-heeled consumption of consumer goods sourced from all over.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, frequent travelers have been annoyed at being grounded. Their frustrations are real, but they are mostly those of people confined in large and attractive homes, working online with no disruption to their income, easily able to order in what they need, but nostalgic for cafés. Others, of course, have either lost jobs or had to bear high risks to work.
Cosmopolitans commonly think of the local as backward, limited by cultural particularity. They think of themselves as escaping this into a world of reason, competent and informed analysis, and universalism. It does not occur to them that the culture of those who read the Financial Times and knowledgeably discuss the politics of a dozen countries is still culture and still has blind spots. The notion of “flyover country” points to one.78 Cosmopolitans and the global cities in which they live are much better connected to each other than to the rest of their own countries. Such cosmopolitan frequent travelers figure prominently among the “liberal elites” that so annoy today’s populist rebels against globalization.
Covid-19 and restrictions imposed to protect public health are of course massive disruptions to contemporary life. Wars, floods and droughts, famines and forest fires are all disruptions. Climate change may be increasing their frequency and severity. But the most relentless driver of disruption remains capitalism, with its imperative of growth and innovation and its tendency to crises. To those likely to benefit, innovations all look good. But it is important to remember that for most citizens security is a paramount value and hard to achieve.
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”79 Or in a phrase popular in Silicon Valley, it’s good to “move fast and break things.”80
Without becoming Marxists, more recent fans of entrepreneurial capitalism have become enthusiasts for disruption. From the point of view of those making money from economic transformations, disruption could look good, like rapid progress. Out with the old and in with the new. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School famously urged his readers to “catch the wave” of “disruptive technologies.”81 Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs trying to identify and profit from the next big technological disruption.
The TED talks of business gurus reveal an attitude as old as the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, capitalism disrupted—quite radically—older ways of life centered on local communities, crafts, churches, and reciprocity between property owners and those who labored. There was human suffering, but a great deal of money was made.82
Perhaps the most famous case of disruption and displacement involved the “Luddites,” who smashed machines in England in 1811, at the dawn of the industrial age. They have been mocked as simply backward-looking and are often cited today by those who argue that resisting technological transformations is futile. But they were not opponents of all technology. They were workers who grew relatively prosperous using one generation of new technology (framework knitting) and then were displaced by another—more completely mechanized and eventually power-driven looms.83 The Luddites were angry, but not just about new technology. They were angry that it was introduced by capitalists in ways they considered deceitful and manipulative, to get around previously standard and mutually agreed practices of labor and payment. They were angry because they were offered no good opportunities in the new industrial production process. They were angry that the government protected the capital businessmen invested in machines but not the human capital craft workers had invested in acquiring skills. They were not even allowed to form unions to make their case together, to bargain for retraining or other opportunities.
Framework knitting was not one of the great old crafts with long artisanal traditions like those of the goldsmiths, wheelwrights, or printers. The prosperity of handloom weavers was relatively recent. A niche was created by a temporary bottleneck in technological development. Spinning mechanized ahead of weaving. We can see in retrospect that it was a transitional occupation, not unlike becoming a driver for Uber or Lyft. Computerized communications could take over dispatch of cars, and the new car services have themselves displaced or undermined older taxis. But this is not an industry for the long-term. Human drivers will be dispatched by computer only until driverless cars make them obsolete. In the meantime, oversupply of drivers (and corporate domination) drives down earnings.
During the Industrial Revolution, defenders of progress insisted that in the long run the British economy would be larger, the whole country richer. Indeed, this happened. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said, “In the long run we shall all be dead.”84 Keynes was not saying that the future doesn’t matter. He was saying that neglect of current suffering is not justified by eventual economic recovery or even improvement.85
It was a hundred years before the descendants of the Luddites could expect to earn factory wages comparable to what their artisan ancestors had lost—and then largely because they had finally won the right to organize unions.86 Even when incomes recovered, this didn’t restore local communities and the networks on which they depended for security and solidarity. Whole communities—like those of the framework knitters—saw their ways of life destroyed.87
The factory and the assembly line were disruptive technologies in their day, bringing first steps on the path toward industrial automation. Railroads were disruptive, changing, for example, the way farm products were brought to market and in the process making possible a once-disruptive technology of consumerism, the supermarket.88 Rail systems brought huge benefits to cities and towns with stations—and left others to languish. So simple an apparent progress as replacing coal fuel with diesel meant not just that trains could go longer distances without refueling, but also “death by dieselization” when trains no longer stopped in once-thriving communities.89 This was not just a matter of self-regulating markets or technological progress. Railroad lines came with railroad companies—powerful corporate structures—and new forms of finance with their own robber barons.90
It was not just new technologies that produced unemployment. So did relocations of industry—whether within countries or internationally. So did every economic downturn. During the Industrial Revolution, England was beset by liberal economic theorists who joined with industrialists to argue against more than the minimal help for those who suffered. They were afraid more support would undermine workers’ desire to take the jobs on offer or encourage them to seek higher pay.91 The same arguments were repeated by neoliberals during late twentieth-century deindustrialization. They helped drive “welfare reform” under President Clinton. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Republican senators have argued on similar bases against extension of unemployment benefits.
Disruption is not just market opportunity. It is derailment of life-plans, stressed marriages, parents struggling to support their children. It is upheaval in social relations as people relocate to find work, damage to important institutions as schools and hospitals close. The costs of disruption include loss of the implicit social security systems offered by local communities. And as Polanyi showed in his classic The Great Transformation, it is not just the scale of social change that matters but the speed.
Friedrich Engels pointed to the long time lag between the destruction of old ways of life and attaining prosperity in new ones. The economic historian Robert Allen calls it Engels’s “pause.”92 Engels’s point was that this was a good time for revolution. In fact, political revolution didn’t come in the way Marx and Engels had anticipated, but Engels’s pause is still significant. During the long period between the destructive phase of early industrial capitalism and the achievement of more “mature” industrial societies in the postwar boom, workers built the movements that made possible both the development of welfare states and the achievement of industrial relations compromises that provided workers with significant benefits. Instead of making revolutions, workers in rich and relatively liberal societies demanded social democracy.
Writing in the wake of the Great Depression and in the midst of war, Polanyi described this as part of a “double movement.”93 Disruption was the first movement. Response was the second. This was inevitable—action and reaction—but response could take different forms. Without organization or care, it was likely to bring riots, crime, or support for fascism. Populism, whether of the Left or the Right, has been among the most common political responses. Liberals often touted frugality and self-reliance, but this could succeed only for better-off workers and not those whose whole communities were devastated.
Too often, workers were literally displaced—whether from agriculture, craft work, or smaller-scale industry. These displacements swelled both international and internal migration. Eventually, new jobs replaced old, but eventually is a long time. Commonly the disappearing old jobs took with them support systems that at best took a long time to rebuild.
Faced with new economic challenges and the loss of old support systems, workers relied on family, community members, and churches. They bartered in informal economies when few had cash. They also organized for mutual aid. Many major insurance companies still have “mutual” in their name because they grew out of subscription-based shared-benefit societies. Communities could be rebuilt. But the pattern was—and almost always is—for each displacement to encourage expansion of cities rather than full recovery of old localities. Formal institutions help, but do not replace the webs of interpersonal relations.
Perhaps most importantly, workers founded unions, which were organizations for mutual support as well as bargaining. These new solidarities were often marked by old patterns of exclusion. In the United States lines of race and hostility to immigrants were the basic division. For a time, there were similar issues about Irish workers in England. This made it easier for powerful interests to divide and dominate.
Still, it was possible to build social movements. The labor and socialist movements were forged as part of this “second movement” response. So were movements of Christian reform. So were campaigns of local community-building. As “Engels’s pause” suggests, it took a long time to form unions, to form the Labor Party and its cousins in other countries, to press adequately for the transformation of working conditions and wages. All involved a huge amount of institutional development—regulation of occupational safety and health, for example, of industrial production of food to prevent its contamination. Beyond regulation, governments had to develop new capacities: for unemployment insurance, for pensions, for health care.
Reactions to disruption were chaotic and open-ended. Possibilities ranged from the terrible—fascism, say—to the promising—social democracy, for one. The struggle for democracy was integrated with struggles to build new kinds of societies. The double movement took too long and too many people suffered enormous losses before governments built successful programs to address unemployment, retirement, health care, schooling, housing, and more. It took two world wars before there was relatively stable resolution.94 The welfare states built after the Second World War were not perfect. Still, les trente glorieuses showed that democracy could flourish in a compromise with capitalism and that governments could build new institutions to meet changing social needs.
This underpinned an era of prosperity and relative equality, though not a permanent escape from upheaval. After the disastrous Great Depression and Second World War, society was reorganized and stabilized on the basis of new institutions. Citizens benefited enormously from large-scale government structures—old-age pensions, health care, education—though citizen well-being still relied on mutual support in communities and associations.
The relative stability of the postwar era—les trente glorieuses—confronted its own disruption from the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Transformation in industry and infrastructure was again rapid. Steel mills and factories closed. Once-great cities in the US “rust belt,” Britain North and Midlands, and “peripheral France” went into decline. The manifest culprits were globalization, new technologies, and overinvestment in older lines of production that lost out either to business cycles or to changing consumer demand. A new wave of giant corporations emerged to capitalize on and shape new computational and communications technologies.
In short, there was not just one great transformation and double movement. We can recognize double movements throughout the modern era. The transformation of societies by capitalism, technology, and growing scale has continued throughout the modern era. In part it has been built into patterns of gradual growth. But capitalism recurrently brings disruption. This often includes sharp dispossession as workers secure under older conditions lose livelihoods and institutions of mutual support. Response can be populist anger from the Right or the Left, often stronger in voicing grievances than finding solutions. Commonly it is an effort to defend the ways of life being destroyed. Sometimes there is an agenda for building new ones. Democracy can degenerate; it can be renewed.