One thing I feel is missing from this analysis is that each of us is not tied to place nearly as strongly as a citizen in a new England town would be. In the latter case the personal well being of each citizen was intimately tied to the success of the town. In other words the towns' economy was much more self contained than nearly any modern municipality is. Today, most individual success is tied to multiple communities at multiple scales: e.g. most companies serve non local markets, and job skills are highly transferrable across regions. This means the incentive to participate at a local level is dramatically lower than in a historical new England town.
Andrew, you raise a great point. If I’m onto something about the need for direct involvement in government (and of course I’m not the only one), I would take your point and suggest as a next step (or as a simultaneous step) involving pre-existing associations in government that are not place based. We might look to the English Pluralist model, which would have associations (trade associations, recreational clubs, places of worship, whatever) work at the level of Jefferson’s village-states on public business. To me, something like their model would be an improvement to what I’m suggesting here. And we'd need to update the idea only by one century instead of two!
No! Where have I been? The great summary you sent me really is an update to the English Pluralists from the early twentieth century. The update makes up for their lack of concern for technology and other areas where their theory might be applied outside of Parliament and the then-existing forms of associations. Thank you for this overview. It's really helpful.
English Pluralists whom I've read include John Neville Figgis, G.D.H. Cole, and H. J. Laski. John Milibank, I think, would be sympathetic to English Pluralism (maybe he's written about it; I don't know) based on his essay in favor of what he calls complex, Gothic spaces. English Pluralism arises out of medieval structures of complex, overlapping associations that avoid the monism your article cites. I think that much of your article would find its analogue in medieval and modern political history, including the move toward absolute monarchy at the outset of modernity.
In arguing for intermediate associations, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet finds the same link between totalism and atomism that your article emphasizes. Closer to the left, Rebecca Solnit seems to argue for the same intermediate institutions.
Anyway, very exciting. Thank you for helping me get up to date. I don't know if the pluralists you cite would claim the English Pluralists among their inspirations (they're not named in the extensive footnote listing past influences), but it's wonderful to know that so many of their arguments are being advanced again along an even broader spectrum of applications than in the past.
So interesting. Have you read Citizens by Jon Alexander? He writes about the power inherent in all of us, as true citizens, in actively creating change and how we’ve been paralysed into forgetting we have this power by capitalism and consumerism. In small communities, it’s much much easier to exercise your power and create and participate in collaborative structures that truly uphold the community’s wellbeing. I wonder if village-states are truly the solution — it certainly feels exciting and a little bit uplifting even to think about 👀
Bea, I hadn’t heard of Jon Alexander’s Citizens book. Thank you for that reference: it looks great. I see that it pushes for citizen work at the level of neighborhoods, though it says the movement for that work isn’t where it should be. (Pages 209ff.) I agree.
Your suggestion inspires me to reference a few other books that flesh out more democratic notions of citizenship. These books have helped my thinking a lot. My favorite might be (1) Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. My close second is (2) Luke Bretherton’s Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life. There’s also (3) Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today; (4) Benjamin R. Barber’s Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, and (5) Richard L. Wood and Brad R. Fulton’s A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy.
You can see from the titles of three of these books that I believe minorities can lead us into local democracy because many practice it out of necessity. The titles of three of these books also suggest my interest in faith-based ways of modeling democracy locally.
Thank you, Bryce! These all look so interesting, I’ll be slowly checking them out for sure as I’m interested in learning more about citizenship, community-led organizing and democracy. I’m so glad I found this newsletter as well - your writing and work is incredible!
Bea, it is a fantastic newsletter with incredible writing, but it’s not mine! :-) I wrote only this article as a guest writer. The writing here is mostly that of Elle Griffin. I’m glad you like it as much as I do!
Oh no, forgive me! I didn’t realise at all🙈I just subscribed to yours too as I’ve enjoyed this piece a lot and look forward to reading more of your work :)
Thank you for the thoughts and ideas. You and other commenters have addressed national defense and the time needed for participation, but I also wonder how this would effect cross-jurisdiction coordination. It seems to me that village-states would have some kind of impact on how we build public infrastructure. For better or worse, I'm not sure.
Derek, thank you. I think our practice of public freedom would lead to our involvement in public infrastructure. Here’s how we might do it (only a sketch, and one that focuses on who does what). Like Ancient Athens, perhaps, we’d adopt a courtroom model (in their case, a standard but too-many-for-our-purposes 1,500 jurors per trial) as part of becoming educated in public freedom. We’d still need experts, such as civil engineers, but they would act mostly as expert witnesses. In other words, those experts wouldn’t call the shots but would “testify,” as it were, to trans-local village states, which would be formed for specific regional problems and projects.
The "permanent" village-states might select people to become the members of these trans-local village states based on the members' interests and available time. The more permanent village-states could also use sortition, election, or rotation to select these members.
I think nature teaches us something like the need for what you felicitously call “cross-jurisdiction coordination.” One can’t address the needs of a species of birds, for instance, without coordination among the regions that represent a species’s migration routes.
I wonder also if village-states would transform what public infrastructure even looks like. I hope it would transform, for instance, how suburbs look. Speaking of birds, a bird’s-eye view of suburban streets suggests a hierarchical network leading to the primacy of individuals or private groups (families and the like). Everything serves the cul-de-sacs, and the focus—and value—is placed on individual cells. There are few mixed uses. Automobiles keep us isolated, too, as we move from one use to another. What would our environment look like if it valued the public life of small communities? Maybe more like Northeastern First Nations or like New England townships, with mixed uses and public buildings at the center.
In other words, perhaps the practice of public freedom would change what we value in our environment. Montessori’s educational insight that environment is stronger than will applies to our education in public freedom, too. A corollary to Montessori’s adage might be that a bad environment, as it stretches to the horizon, can filter out what’s possible from our notion of reality. I like to think that if we practice public freedom, we’d change enough as a culture to slowly change the infrastructure that currently reinforces our individualistic and commerce-focused culture.
JK, thanks. I hope the idea would help us decentralize even more. But I'm with you: I'm not sure how this would happen. It would take a lot of imagination and political will.
Martin Buber wrote one of my favorite lines about how great ideas, such as Jefferson's vision of adding a democratic element to our government based on the New England townships, can happen. Buber's book Paths in Utopia concludes (well, with only its epilogue to come) with this: "But I do believe in the meeting of idea and fate in the creative hour."
We must be practical. But to me, the best sports fans are both practical and impractical, modeling an approach to politics that I admire. When I visited Chicago last year, I went to a White Sox game near the end of their record-breaking losing season and spoke to a knowledgeable, realistic yet hardcore fan who was seated near us. Why does he pay good money and come out several nights a season for this? It was a wonderful conversation, and I've been wearing a Sox cap a lot ever since. Like Buber, I figure, ya gotta believe!
While I am a big supporter of moving government decisions making closer to the people (I live in Texas and the government in Austin seems very remote to me, let alone at the national level) but in addition to the earlier comments, limiting the size to around 100 people feels like it would put a lot of work on each person. A lot of people have busy lives already
I saw some research that people who were libertarian tended to share several personality traits - I may forget the details, but they tended to be conscientious, paid attention to details, enjoyed solving problems, etc. While there are a lot of them, that combination of traits is a minority. If you're design a government for the entire nation, you need to be able to find a mechanism that works with the bulk of the population. In one of your replies you mentioned not caring what paint a neighbor used, but... a lot of other people do. I would guess that none of us who take the time to read and write on these topics are actually typical
I need to hear everything you say. Life's gotten more complicated and time-consuming since Jefferson. I know we've gotten smarter about how to work in groups since then--or maybe I just think we have. Anyway, some flexibility could also help with time commitments. I can do five hours this week but four the next; I'd like to work on this but not that. Limiting the size so everyone gets to know one another in civil work I think would be important. But then for bigger jobs I could volunteer or be rotated in to work trans-locally with people from other village-states. Things generally would go with what work needs to be done and who has a passion for it. Less bureaucracy and more local care as much as possible. I think experts are great, but let them advise us so we are doing it ourselves. A lot of trial and error and flexibility for different locals and different people. No one size fits all.
I'm not libertarian myself: way too much weight on personal liberty for my taste. But that's just my taste. I wonder if this wouldn't attract others who think they fit under other political labels once people start small.
But there's no getting around priorities. Some people will have time for some, some for a lot, and some for none. This whole "republican virtue" emphasis was on not spending too much money and not working too much in order to have time to spend on public freedom.
Thank you for helping me to think harder. It helps. BTW, I was just in Austin for the first time earlier this month. It was different than I expected, though I enjoyed it. I'm in south-central Tennessee now. I've been spending the morning with neighbors cleaning up after a tornado last night that fortunately didn't kill anyone or tear down buildings. But it's a mess. Lots of volunteers from different walks of life. An impromptu, temporary village-state?
Interesting essay! I's say we we've likely gotten much dumber about working in group democratically because we havent done it in like around 80 years. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
It turns out that the 1930s USA remained a thoroughly politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system Both FDR and Taft were routinely overturned and most decision making occurred at the sub-federal level. I found this wonderful anecdote of Keynes being defeated by members of the general public (BTW, we did what he recommended in 2009 and it worked out just like they said it would, our derivatives markets are so big now they ay be in the quadrillions, their plan was better and worked great until it was undone in the 90s).
We remained thoroughly small "p" populist and decentralized in the 1930s and things were as complicated then as it is now, maybe much more so given the lack of computers and far less telecommunications
Thanks, Mike. Centralization, specialization, and lobbyists do make us citizens feel unimportant in what is supposed to be our own government. These dynamics tend to turn citizens into a disconnected mass, too. I think they also help to make us easy marks for populists who can make an emotional connection with the "masses."
The emotional connection between populists and masses is a cheap facsimile of real connections among citizens meeting frequently to conduct public business. I think that's Jefferson's point when he says that village-states will save us from the likes of a Caesar or a Bonaparte. Without these face-to-face encounters among citizens in public freedom, words like "democratic" and even "republican" as forms of government lose their meaning. Having been misled already by the promise of "representative democracy" (like Romeo's "cold fire" or "bright smoke"), we dismiss democracy before we've even tried it.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! Well I think you mean capital P" Populists, we avoided dictators for hundreds of years as populists, for example, the Jacksonians were actual small "p" populists, their war against the Second Bank wasnt merely rhetoric, it was a real structural battle against big power that held real control over capital and policy.
But it seems that your still envisioning representatives to the fed and state level?
Mike, correct on the representatives. My thought is that, perhaps, we'll trust those representatives under Jefferson's plan more than we do our representatives today not to be in the thrall of special interests or party loyalty. That because we'll tend to assume that they're having the same face-to-face experiences that we're having hyper-locally.
And, hopefully, with us citizens doing most of the government ourselves, our assumption won't be misplaced. Jefferson did teach us, though, that the citizens' watchful, jealous eye on our representatives is better suited for a republic than confidence in them. From his Kentucky Resolutions: ". . . confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism: free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Right now, we citizens overall are neither confident nor jealous. We're resigned, and we perceive ourselves as powerless. (We elect populists in part out of this perceived powerlessness: populists promise to be champions of us little people against the powerful.) I think village-states would at least develop in us Jefferson's foundation of free government--jealousy. Jefferson seemed to think so: "Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte."
For more on the representational aspect, you might look at my response to Annie Blackwell's interesting comment. (I think it's one of the first comments on this post.) Thanks again for your involvement here.
I fully support decentralization in American governance, but I think the village-state is too low a level of government for modern societies. It would also require a major rewrite of the constitution. Under the current constitution, the powers of the local government are derived from and can be amended by the state governments.
My preferred solution would be:
1) Transfer the vast majority of domestic programs and regulations to the states. This was the original intention of the constitution and the Tenth Amendment.
2) Turn all metro areas with a population over 2 million into their own states. I believe metropolitan government is the right level of decentralization in modern cities.
But your usually opposed to economic decentralization? For the first 200 of years of its existence the USA's decentralization was based around political AND economic federation, it operated with mild trade friction between the states, stronger but still limited interstate capital flow inhibitors, and economic regulatory variability
Michael, thank you for your feedback. I love the two articles. I think you're onto something about creating more states and putting federalism to work. It reminds me a lot of Elle's most recent post, the one about creating more states. I love the idea from your second article about using the Italian city states as model. This is so good: "individual city/states competing against each other and copying what works can lead to greater progress."
I think the benefits you write about in the two articles you cited would be augmented with Jefferson's concept. There would still be the healthy competition among more "laboratories," and laboratories that cover different demographics and different kinds of communities (village, urban, rural, suburban, etc.) But each state would be further divided to involve everyone who wants to take part.
I looked out the window this morning and saw neighbors cleaning up from last night's tornado. I don't know how to label what caused me to go out there--neighborliness, civic duty, friendship, peer pressure--all of the above? Of course, helping out after a tornado isn't the same thing as a village state, but a lot of same labels would apply to get me involved in one. If government stops at the county level, government--no matter how well designed in a constitution--would still tend to be too theoretical, too much a spectator sport for many, as it is now.
I love federalism. My favorite theorists include Johannes Althusius, Daniel J. Elazar, and Luke Bretherton -- all strong proponents of federalism. Elazar has a great account of American federalism, and his take on Israelite federalism extends down to the families and tribes. (You probably know all this--sorry!) Florence's big Renaissance political theorists, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both believed that Florence had to have a sufficient amount of the citizens directly involved in government to resist the occasional threats to public liberty.
You suggest that we "transfer virtually all federal domestic programs to the state governments." I agree with your characterization of this proposal as radical, maybe as radical as my modified Jefferson plan. If we stop at the state level, however, we run a risk--perhaps only a small one-- of recreating a "war between the states" that happened during the "court and party" nineteenth century (as Francis Fukuyama refers to it) where political parties were the only political game in town for most and the dynamics that took advantage of the citizens' lack of direct involvement fanned the flames of sectionalism. Even conservative theorist Harry V. Jaffa believed that we haven't put this more pernicious form of states' rights to bed.
States rights must be worked through under either of our proposals, I think. In pointed contrast with the Constitution’s “We the people,” the Confederate States’ constitution opens with “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent states." Lincoln responds by asking, “Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?” I think Lincoln had it right, but his "people" didn't have much teeth. Is "the people" just the federal government? Where is the government "of the people" and "by the people" that he celebrated at Gettyburg? Not in Washington. Not in Nashville (for me presently). This can't remain an abstraction, I don't think. We must be the government in some hands-on sense.
Anyway. I hope I haven't been too strident here. You've got me thinking, I love your articles, and I love your civil pushback.
This is the best thing I've read for a while. The national government should be used to protect the existence of the village-states, and that should pretty much be its only function. Maybe two or three others, but if we truly believe in limited government, and most conservatives these days don't really, then the strengthening of local village-states is a must. I'm a Jeffersonian at heart. Any true lover of liberty is.
Allen, wow! Thank you very much. Jefferson, as you suggest, wanted less and less responsibility given to layers of federalism more and more distant from village-states. When I was younger, I thought this kind of thought was strictly conservative. Now I think it straddles--and hopefully tends to break--the dualistic, two-dimensional model we tend to call politics today.
For its time, it was a very liberal idea. The term most often associated with this view, and similar views, today is "Classic Liberalism," which seems quite apt to me. :-)
I do wonder how feasible it would be to implement this with our current government order. I can’t see local municipalities willing to give up their current level of power to decentralized “village-states”. Although I do think it would create a solution to a wide range of problems in America today. I think starting these village-states in rural communities where local regulatory burdens are less restrictive could be a good way to start these projects without getting unnecessary backlash early on. Modern citizens are disconnected from civil participation, food creation, childcare/education, and elder care. We have to reconnect to our direct participation in the systems that keep us alive and thriving.
Kade, that's a great point that never occurred to me. Just as local food movements encourage us to get our hands on things we've delegated to grocery stores (and the likes of Amazon), so Jefferson encouraged us to get our hands on political freedom that we've delegated to representatives. As for feasibility, it will be tough, of course, unless we become desperate for it. I can choose to shop at a farmer's market, and it won't hurt Jeff Bezos or trigger his intervention. But my neighbors and I can't take direct responsibility and control for the things Jefferson wants in our hands without strenuous (and effective) objection from local municipalities. But you sound like Jefferson, who in one letter said, "“Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments.” Maybe we get authority to do a pilot project, beta test, trial run, feasibility study, old-style Google incubator project, what have you, for a limited purpose and, as you say, perhaps in a rural community.
You raise another great point: "Modern citizens are disconnected from civil participation, food creation, childcare/education, and elder care." We have to reconnect with our direct participation. Experts are great--I love to quote them and learn from them--but we can't let them be the jury, too, so to speak. Especially about "the systems that keep us alive and thriving," as you put it.
I suspect some of the resistance to attending to public freedom will be overcome when people realize that if they don't go to the "meeting" and speak up, they will lose out to that HOA harridan across the street, or its equivalent. Educational reforms that strengthen local control and input might also revitalize PTAs?
But just how many people are in such a village? One floor of a major high rise? A whole building of apartments in the urban areas or set of buildings that make up an apartment complex in less urban areas? Six to 12 blocks of a suburban neighborhood? Or the equivalent domain covered by the typical elementary school? No clue how much area a village of farmers and ranchers might require. Do we end up with commercial and industrial versions as well, to allow such firms representation as businesses?
Perhaps there is separation on other values, such as an LGBT enclave? Or a Catholic one? If people are restrained in some villages they may well be incentivized to form one of their own with different social and personal values? A fine grained "laboratory of the states"?
Isn't communism basically totalitarian vs. communalism being basically democratic? I try to avoid the word "collective" because it can be misconstrued, but "group" does not always work any better. I suspect no one ever pledged their sacred honor to communism.
ssri, such great points. Here I am, on fire for Jefferson's plan, but I hate HOA meetings. I like to think it's because the things that HOA's are empowered to do under restrictive covenants is pretty limited. I rarely care about whether some neighbor paints their townhouse some color not approved by the association, etc. But I think people will come out if they know they have real power commonly associated with local or state government. Hannah Arendt pointed out that Jefferson's plan meant that people were free to choose or not choose a life of public freedom, and she could live with that.
When you start dividing things differently than Jefferson proposed--and he proposed geography alone and (Hannah Arendt figures) about a hundred people per village--then things get really interesting and fun. I love your thoughts.
In the spirit of Jefferson’s flexibility, we could organize village-states not only geographically but also by taking the approach of the English pluralists--a wonderful political movement around the turn of the last century--some of whom argued that associations people enter into based on their interests and professions should make up our government. One of them, H. J. Laski, argued that “we must not think of federalism today merely in the old spatial terms. It applies not less to functions than to territories.”
Whether the associations foster our neighborhood lives; our social, recreational, or spiritual interests; or our professional pursuits, the associations should not serve merely to appoint representatives to more distant associations. Communities, in Martin Buber’s words, “must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s question, and nothing more.”
As for words like communism, communalism, and even totalitarianism and democracy, I think we usually have to balance what we think most people mean by them with what political theorists--at least the ones we think are best at what we're dealing with--mean by them. I recall that in "What Is Authority?", an often-cited essay by Arendt, she fusses that we need to be more precise about the differences among authoritarian, autocratic, and totalitarian. Fair enough. The trick for me is to finesse this balance each time I use a word like that. I get more fussy myself when people misuse a word I care about, such as democracy, with pleonasms like "direct democracy" or oxymorons like "representative democracy." Oh, I've gotten fussy again. :-)
The USA remained thoroughly economically and politically decentralized until the 1950s (we're lied to in the regards about the 1930s), and even then we didnt really take the big leaps until the 1970s/1980s,
I suspect that the USA's political economy is still quite complex, its just a latent complexity suppressed by the magic three of perpetual large trade deficits, perpetual large budget deficits, and perpetual high liquidity/low-rates all without inflation, if those fell that complexity might actualize and if so we'd probably get some re-decentralization
Jefferson certainly failed to get there, despite his exertions. Arendt's tone about Jefferson's idea in her somewhat lyrical close to On Revolution is hard to pin down, at least for me. She champions Jefferson's plan, but she saves her most beautiful language about it when she seems the most wistful.
It may take some kind of disaster to get us there, unfortunately. One of my favorite books about the civil (and arguably political) communities that arise spontaneously in natural disasters is Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell.
Arendt in the same On Revolution asserts that political communities arose spontaneously after every "genuine" revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (up to her book's writing). Even the soviets, she says, arose not because of Lenin but despite him. The Bolsheviks simply forced the soviets to become party organs and appropriated their name.
So we can get there, I think. We don't need a revolution, Arendt seems to say. We Americans already had one. We just need, as she put it, to finally provide the institution that would preserve it.
Arnold Toynbee writes in one of his books about cities that the Athenians believed they needed slaves to do a lot of the farming and other work so that the citizens had the leisure time to participate in their democracy. This may have influenced some of the founding fathers in excusing slavery. So today of course technology allows us, without slaves, to live better than Jefferson in Monticello with slaves. But the flip side is society and government are so complex now and there seem to be more and more demands on our time and attention such that mass direct participation in the minutia of governance of our local town or neighborhoods seems like it would be infeasible. But there is something to be said about learning democracy by doing it, and people coming together to solve local problems and how that would make our broader democratic society more healthy. And so why can’t we do that if we theoretically have more time and leisure today than in Jeffersons’s time due to advances in technology?
Really good point! The leisure time necessary for democracy was a big issue for Aristotle. He tended to categorize democracies in part by how much time people could spend tending to them. Republicans (small "r") at the time of the American Founding were aghast at the mercantile mindset that would cause republicanism to wither. Adams in 1776 marveled at ". . . so much Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America," causing him to "sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic."
I think Arendt found in Jefferson--and in all the Founders who participated in in the Continental Congress--people who loved public freedom because they did it. Jefferson, she thought, wanted all citizens to experience what he and his friends had experienced then. Jefferson's idea of heaven, he wrote in a particularly witty close to a letter to John Adams, was exercising public freedom in Congress.
I think Arendt and Jefferson were right: unless we practice what they called public freedom, we won't know what we're missing.
I love that post -- "Town Meeting, Revisited." There's the practice and love of public freedom for you. As far as some of the experienced tedium, I wonder if some stages of the town meetings might benefit from some aspects of sociocracy, which is kind of a modified democracy--consensus instead of majority vote, for instance, and good procedural guidelines. I've spoken to three or four people who have used it in their communities, and they love it. A good resource I have is Many Voices, One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy by Ted J. Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez.
The recent documentary Join or Die on Netflix speaks to this on a more basic level of looking at the decline in memberships to clubs. How could we govern ourselves when we don’t even bowl together any more?? Thanks for the essay and further evidence of the insights of our imperfect founding fathers.
Tocqueville found that civll associations and political associations are both either present or absent in a country, which I think is part of your point. But as for which appears first and encourages the other, he would think we moderns have it backwards: ". . . political life makes the love and practice of association more general; it imparts a desire of union, and teaches the means of combination to numbers of men who would have always lived apart." In other words, we need political associations, such as the ones Jefferson proposed, in part to get us bowling together again.
To see it Tocqueville's way is a big paradigm shift for us modern Americans, I think. His broader point may be that if we put public freedom before personal freedom, we'll have both. If we put personal freedom first, we may not get (or keep) public freedom. To my mind, it's a bit like "seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you."
There's an Indian example of this called Panchayati Raj (village rule). It's not perfect the village council has very few powers allocated to it because there's a hangover from the British era of collectors who wield most of the local powers. But something like this is possible only with greater allocation of powers to the people.
Thank you! I was't familiar with Panchayati Raj at all. It seems fascinating.
Some First Nations on Turtle Island have lived out something better, I think, than even Jefferson's proposal. One example is the Great Law of Peace and the internal governments of the nations that entered into the Great Law. A wonderful chapter on this makes up the coda to Charles C. Mann's book 1491. A few highlights: 117 codicils that limit and balance the great counsel's powers, female clan heads to balance the warriors' powers, and government by consensus. Mann thinks New Englanders, in adopting the town meetings, ignored Winthrop's vision and put Algonkian-like practices in place instead.
From the outside looking in, the issue to solve will always be who has the most money to throw at their own elevation or for those of their choice (with future influence implied). How may this be constrained to ensure positions are earned, not bought? One has only to look at the run-up to America's election last year to see this is patently not under control.
Plus, how do you justify having a Vice President without any mandate whatsoever bar the personal choice of the would-be President, no guardianship over their intent to work for the benefit of all the people of the country, and yet implicitly able to become President?
How will your proposed communal government sort out/approach that situation? And shouldn't this anomaly be addressed in any form of government?
Annie, thanks for your comment! Jefferson hated money, or I guess more specifically propertied families, in politics—the “pseudo-aristocracy,” he called them. I think the big answer to the problem of money being used for the donors’ “own elevation or for those of their choice” is to stop making money an effective means of elevation. Here Jefferson helps.
Jefferson thought that his village-states could coexist with general elections, though he wanted his village-states to run those elections. I think he thought that only those voluntarily active in village-states would vote for the more distant federal layers (county, state, and national governments). In this context, elections would be less likely to be purchased. In a single letter to James Madison, in fact, Jefferson advocated for both general elections and village-states.
In her book On Revolution, Arendt made Jefferson’s village-states her book's biggest claim of policy for her American audience. But unlike Jefferson, she explicitly found general elections to be inconsistent with village-states. I think she’s right. Elections are oligarchic and aristocratic institutions, Aristotle told us—and so have many political theorists since. (For an overview, see the third-to-last link in this article.) So long as elections are the sine qua non of citizenship, we’ll have (or come closer to having) an aristocracy or an oligarchy. I think the recent American experience bears this out.
The French political theorist Bernard Manin believes that rotation--think ancient Athens--instead of elections would be viable in America through a "multiple step procedure," moving from the local to regional and national levels. Manin’s outline is much like Jefferson's plan to create wards. I think rotation and sortition are much healthier means of selecting officeholders than are elections, which were used sparingly in ancient Athens.
I don’t think either Jefferson or Arendt was proposing a communal government. (Jefferson, I think, would say that he wasn't proposing a change in America's type of government at all. He was proposing, rather, that we extend the republican principle up to our neighborhoods.) Jefferson, however, was concerned enough about money and property in politics to tell another James Madison (the president of William and Mary) that “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property . . .”
People have grown increasingly dependent on systems. Would love this idea to revive again in our country. Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you very much!
One thing I feel is missing from this analysis is that each of us is not tied to place nearly as strongly as a citizen in a new England town would be. In the latter case the personal well being of each citizen was intimately tied to the success of the town. In other words the towns' economy was much more self contained than nearly any modern municipality is. Today, most individual success is tied to multiple communities at multiple scales: e.g. most companies serve non local markets, and job skills are highly transferrable across regions. This means the incentive to participate at a local level is dramatically lower than in a historical new England town.
Andrew, you raise a great point. If I’m onto something about the need for direct involvement in government (and of course I’m not the only one), I would take your point and suggest as a next step (or as a simultaneous step) involving pre-existing associations in government that are not place based. We might look to the English Pluralist model, which would have associations (trade associations, recreational clubs, places of worship, whatever) work at the level of Jefferson’s village-states on public business. To me, something like their model would be an improvement to what I’m suggesting here. And we'd need to update the idea only by one century instead of two!
I'm totally on the same page as you here. Are you aware of the pluralism movement?
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/
No! Where have I been? The great summary you sent me really is an update to the English Pluralists from the early twentieth century. The update makes up for their lack of concern for technology and other areas where their theory might be applied outside of Parliament and the then-existing forms of associations. Thank you for this overview. It's really helpful.
English Pluralists whom I've read include John Neville Figgis, G.D.H. Cole, and H. J. Laski. John Milibank, I think, would be sympathetic to English Pluralism (maybe he's written about it; I don't know) based on his essay in favor of what he calls complex, Gothic spaces. English Pluralism arises out of medieval structures of complex, overlapping associations that avoid the monism your article cites. I think that much of your article would find its analogue in medieval and modern political history, including the move toward absolute monarchy at the outset of modernity.
In arguing for intermediate associations, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet finds the same link between totalism and atomism that your article emphasizes. Closer to the left, Rebecca Solnit seems to argue for the same intermediate institutions.
Anyway, very exciting. Thank you for helping me get up to date. I don't know if the pluralists you cite would claim the English Pluralists among their inspirations (they're not named in the extensive footnote listing past influences), but it's wonderful to know that so many of their arguments are being advanced again along an even broader spectrum of applications than in the past.
So interesting. Have you read Citizens by Jon Alexander? He writes about the power inherent in all of us, as true citizens, in actively creating change and how we’ve been paralysed into forgetting we have this power by capitalism and consumerism. In small communities, it’s much much easier to exercise your power and create and participate in collaborative structures that truly uphold the community’s wellbeing. I wonder if village-states are truly the solution — it certainly feels exciting and a little bit uplifting even to think about 👀
Bea, I hadn’t heard of Jon Alexander’s Citizens book. Thank you for that reference: it looks great. I see that it pushes for citizen work at the level of neighborhoods, though it says the movement for that work isn’t where it should be. (Pages 209ff.) I agree.
Your suggestion inspires me to reference a few other books that flesh out more democratic notions of citizenship. These books have helped my thinking a lot. My favorite might be (1) Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. My close second is (2) Luke Bretherton’s Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life. There’s also (3) Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today; (4) Benjamin R. Barber’s Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, and (5) Richard L. Wood and Brad R. Fulton’s A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy.
You can see from the titles of three of these books that I believe minorities can lead us into local democracy because many practice it out of necessity. The titles of three of these books also suggest my interest in faith-based ways of modeling democracy locally.
Thank you, Bryce! These all look so interesting, I’ll be slowly checking them out for sure as I’m interested in learning more about citizenship, community-led organizing and democracy. I’m so glad I found this newsletter as well - your writing and work is incredible!
Bea, it is a fantastic newsletter with incredible writing, but it’s not mine! :-) I wrote only this article as a guest writer. The writing here is mostly that of Elle Griffin. I’m glad you like it as much as I do!
Oh no, forgive me! I didn’t realise at all🙈I just subscribed to yours too as I’ve enjoyed this piece a lot and look forward to reading more of your work :)
Bea, wow! Thank you! :-)
Thank you for the thoughts and ideas. You and other commenters have addressed national defense and the time needed for participation, but I also wonder how this would effect cross-jurisdiction coordination. It seems to me that village-states would have some kind of impact on how we build public infrastructure. For better or worse, I'm not sure.
Derek, thank you. I think our practice of public freedom would lead to our involvement in public infrastructure. Here’s how we might do it (only a sketch, and one that focuses on who does what). Like Ancient Athens, perhaps, we’d adopt a courtroom model (in their case, a standard but too-many-for-our-purposes 1,500 jurors per trial) as part of becoming educated in public freedom. We’d still need experts, such as civil engineers, but they would act mostly as expert witnesses. In other words, those experts wouldn’t call the shots but would “testify,” as it were, to trans-local village states, which would be formed for specific regional problems and projects.
The "permanent" village-states might select people to become the members of these trans-local village states based on the members' interests and available time. The more permanent village-states could also use sortition, election, or rotation to select these members.
I think nature teaches us something like the need for what you felicitously call “cross-jurisdiction coordination.” One can’t address the needs of a species of birds, for instance, without coordination among the regions that represent a species’s migration routes.
I wonder also if village-states would transform what public infrastructure even looks like. I hope it would transform, for instance, how suburbs look. Speaking of birds, a bird’s-eye view of suburban streets suggests a hierarchical network leading to the primacy of individuals or private groups (families and the like). Everything serves the cul-de-sacs, and the focus—and value—is placed on individual cells. There are few mixed uses. Automobiles keep us isolated, too, as we move from one use to another. What would our environment look like if it valued the public life of small communities? Maybe more like Northeastern First Nations or like New England townships, with mixed uses and public buildings at the center.
In other words, perhaps the practice of public freedom would change what we value in our environment. Montessori’s educational insight that environment is stronger than will applies to our education in public freedom, too. A corollary to Montessori’s adage might be that a bad environment, as it stretches to the horizon, can filter out what’s possible from our notion of reality. I like to think that if we practice public freedom, we’d change enough as a culture to slowly change the infrastructure that currently reinforces our individualistic and commerce-focused culture.
Thanks again for your stimulating comment.
Good idea in theory, although I’m not sure how this would work out with our decentralized and global our world is.
JK, thanks. I hope the idea would help us decentralize even more. But I'm with you: I'm not sure how this would happen. It would take a lot of imagination and political will.
Martin Buber wrote one of my favorite lines about how great ideas, such as Jefferson's vision of adding a democratic element to our government based on the New England townships, can happen. Buber's book Paths in Utopia concludes (well, with only its epilogue to come) with this: "But I do believe in the meeting of idea and fate in the creative hour."
We must be practical. But to me, the best sports fans are both practical and impractical, modeling an approach to politics that I admire. When I visited Chicago last year, I went to a White Sox game near the end of their record-breaking losing season and spoke to a knowledgeable, realistic yet hardcore fan who was seated near us. Why does he pay good money and come out several nights a season for this? It was a wonderful conversation, and I've been wearing a Sox cap a lot ever since. Like Buber, I figure, ya gotta believe!
While I am a big supporter of moving government decisions making closer to the people (I live in Texas and the government in Austin seems very remote to me, let alone at the national level) but in addition to the earlier comments, limiting the size to around 100 people feels like it would put a lot of work on each person. A lot of people have busy lives already
I saw some research that people who were libertarian tended to share several personality traits - I may forget the details, but they tended to be conscientious, paid attention to details, enjoyed solving problems, etc. While there are a lot of them, that combination of traits is a minority. If you're design a government for the entire nation, you need to be able to find a mechanism that works with the bulk of the population. In one of your replies you mentioned not caring what paint a neighbor used, but... a lot of other people do. I would guess that none of us who take the time to read and write on these topics are actually typical
I need to hear everything you say. Life's gotten more complicated and time-consuming since Jefferson. I know we've gotten smarter about how to work in groups since then--or maybe I just think we have. Anyway, some flexibility could also help with time commitments. I can do five hours this week but four the next; I'd like to work on this but not that. Limiting the size so everyone gets to know one another in civil work I think would be important. But then for bigger jobs I could volunteer or be rotated in to work trans-locally with people from other village-states. Things generally would go with what work needs to be done and who has a passion for it. Less bureaucracy and more local care as much as possible. I think experts are great, but let them advise us so we are doing it ourselves. A lot of trial and error and flexibility for different locals and different people. No one size fits all.
I'm not libertarian myself: way too much weight on personal liberty for my taste. But that's just my taste. I wonder if this wouldn't attract others who think they fit under other political labels once people start small.
But there's no getting around priorities. Some people will have time for some, some for a lot, and some for none. This whole "republican virtue" emphasis was on not spending too much money and not working too much in order to have time to spend on public freedom.
Thank you for helping me to think harder. It helps. BTW, I was just in Austin for the first time earlier this month. It was different than I expected, though I enjoyed it. I'm in south-central Tennessee now. I've been spending the morning with neighbors cleaning up after a tornado last night that fortunately didn't kill anyone or tear down buildings. But it's a mess. Lots of volunteers from different walks of life. An impromptu, temporary village-state?
Interesting essay! I's say we we've likely gotten much dumber about working in group democratically because we havent done it in like around 80 years. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
It turns out that the 1930s USA remained a thoroughly politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system Both FDR and Taft were routinely overturned and most decision making occurred at the sub-federal level. I found this wonderful anecdote of Keynes being defeated by members of the general public (BTW, we did what he recommended in 2009 and it worked out just like they said it would, our derivatives markets are so big now they ay be in the quadrillions, their plan was better and worked great until it was undone in the 90s).
We remained thoroughly small "p" populist and decentralized in the 1930s and things were as complicated then as it is now, maybe much more so given the lack of computers and far less telecommunications
Thanks, Mike. Centralization, specialization, and lobbyists do make us citizens feel unimportant in what is supposed to be our own government. These dynamics tend to turn citizens into a disconnected mass, too. I think they also help to make us easy marks for populists who can make an emotional connection with the "masses."
The emotional connection between populists and masses is a cheap facsimile of real connections among citizens meeting frequently to conduct public business. I think that's Jefferson's point when he says that village-states will save us from the likes of a Caesar or a Bonaparte. Without these face-to-face encounters among citizens in public freedom, words like "democratic" and even "republican" as forms of government lose their meaning. Having been misled already by the promise of "representative democracy" (like Romeo's "cold fire" or "bright smoke"), we dismiss democracy before we've even tried it.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! Well I think you mean capital P" Populists, we avoided dictators for hundreds of years as populists, for example, the Jacksonians were actual small "p" populists, their war against the Second Bank wasnt merely rhetoric, it was a real structural battle against big power that held real control over capital and policy.
But it seems that your still envisioning representatives to the fed and state level?
Mike, correct on the representatives. My thought is that, perhaps, we'll trust those representatives under Jefferson's plan more than we do our representatives today not to be in the thrall of special interests or party loyalty. That because we'll tend to assume that they're having the same face-to-face experiences that we're having hyper-locally.
And, hopefully, with us citizens doing most of the government ourselves, our assumption won't be misplaced. Jefferson did teach us, though, that the citizens' watchful, jealous eye on our representatives is better suited for a republic than confidence in them. From his Kentucky Resolutions: ". . . confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism: free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Right now, we citizens overall are neither confident nor jealous. We're resigned, and we perceive ourselves as powerless. (We elect populists in part out of this perceived powerlessness: populists promise to be champions of us little people against the powerful.) I think village-states would at least develop in us Jefferson's foundation of free government--jealousy. Jefferson seemed to think so: "Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte."
For more on the representational aspect, you might look at my response to Annie Blackwell's interesting comment. (I think it's one of the first comments on this post.) Thanks again for your involvement here.
I fully support decentralization in American governance, but I think the village-state is too low a level of government for modern societies. It would also require a major rewrite of the constitution. Under the current constitution, the powers of the local government are derived from and can be amended by the state governments.
My preferred solution would be:
1) Transfer the vast majority of domestic programs and regulations to the states. This was the original intention of the constitution and the Tenth Amendment.
2) Turn all metro areas with a population over 2 million into their own states. I believe metropolitan government is the right level of decentralization in modern cities.
I write more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/one-radical-reform-to-solve-all-our
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/an-american-republic-of-citystates
But your usually opposed to economic decentralization? For the first 200 of years of its existence the USA's decentralization was based around political AND economic federation, it operated with mild trade friction between the states, stronger but still limited interstate capital flow inhibitors, and economic regulatory variability
Why do you say "your usually opposed to economic decentralization?"
I don't understand what you mean.
Michael, thank you for your feedback. I love the two articles. I think you're onto something about creating more states and putting federalism to work. It reminds me a lot of Elle's most recent post, the one about creating more states. I love the idea from your second article about using the Italian city states as model. This is so good: "individual city/states competing against each other and copying what works can lead to greater progress."
I think the benefits you write about in the two articles you cited would be augmented with Jefferson's concept. There would still be the healthy competition among more "laboratories," and laboratories that cover different demographics and different kinds of communities (village, urban, rural, suburban, etc.) But each state would be further divided to involve everyone who wants to take part.
I looked out the window this morning and saw neighbors cleaning up from last night's tornado. I don't know how to label what caused me to go out there--neighborliness, civic duty, friendship, peer pressure--all of the above? Of course, helping out after a tornado isn't the same thing as a village state, but a lot of same labels would apply to get me involved in one. If government stops at the county level, government--no matter how well designed in a constitution--would still tend to be too theoretical, too much a spectator sport for many, as it is now.
I love federalism. My favorite theorists include Johannes Althusius, Daniel J. Elazar, and Luke Bretherton -- all strong proponents of federalism. Elazar has a great account of American federalism, and his take on Israelite federalism extends down to the families and tribes. (You probably know all this--sorry!) Florence's big Renaissance political theorists, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both believed that Florence had to have a sufficient amount of the citizens directly involved in government to resist the occasional threats to public liberty.
You suggest that we "transfer virtually all federal domestic programs to the state governments." I agree with your characterization of this proposal as radical, maybe as radical as my modified Jefferson plan. If we stop at the state level, however, we run a risk--perhaps only a small one-- of recreating a "war between the states" that happened during the "court and party" nineteenth century (as Francis Fukuyama refers to it) where political parties were the only political game in town for most and the dynamics that took advantage of the citizens' lack of direct involvement fanned the flames of sectionalism. Even conservative theorist Harry V. Jaffa believed that we haven't put this more pernicious form of states' rights to bed.
States rights must be worked through under either of our proposals, I think. In pointed contrast with the Constitution’s “We the people,” the Confederate States’ constitution opens with “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent states." Lincoln responds by asking, “Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?” I think Lincoln had it right, but his "people" didn't have much teeth. Is "the people" just the federal government? Where is the government "of the people" and "by the people" that he celebrated at Gettyburg? Not in Washington. Not in Nashville (for me presently). This can't remain an abstraction, I don't think. We must be the government in some hands-on sense.
Anyway. I hope I haven't been too strident here. You've got me thinking, I love your articles, and I love your civil pushback.
This is the best thing I've read for a while. The national government should be used to protect the existence of the village-states, and that should pretty much be its only function. Maybe two or three others, but if we truly believe in limited government, and most conservatives these days don't really, then the strengthening of local village-states is a must. I'm a Jeffersonian at heart. Any true lover of liberty is.
Allen, wow! Thank you very much. Jefferson, as you suggest, wanted less and less responsibility given to layers of federalism more and more distant from village-states. When I was younger, I thought this kind of thought was strictly conservative. Now I think it straddles--and hopefully tends to break--the dualistic, two-dimensional model we tend to call politics today.
For its time, it was a very liberal idea. The term most often associated with this view, and similar views, today is "Classic Liberalism," which seems quite apt to me. :-)
I do wonder how feasible it would be to implement this with our current government order. I can’t see local municipalities willing to give up their current level of power to decentralized “village-states”. Although I do think it would create a solution to a wide range of problems in America today. I think starting these village-states in rural communities where local regulatory burdens are less restrictive could be a good way to start these projects without getting unnecessary backlash early on. Modern citizens are disconnected from civil participation, food creation, childcare/education, and elder care. We have to reconnect to our direct participation in the systems that keep us alive and thriving.
Kade, that's a great point that never occurred to me. Just as local food movements encourage us to get our hands on things we've delegated to grocery stores (and the likes of Amazon), so Jefferson encouraged us to get our hands on political freedom that we've delegated to representatives. As for feasibility, it will be tough, of course, unless we become desperate for it. I can choose to shop at a farmer's market, and it won't hurt Jeff Bezos or trigger his intervention. But my neighbors and I can't take direct responsibility and control for the things Jefferson wants in our hands without strenuous (and effective) objection from local municipalities. But you sound like Jefferson, who in one letter said, "“Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments.” Maybe we get authority to do a pilot project, beta test, trial run, feasibility study, old-style Google incubator project, what have you, for a limited purpose and, as you say, perhaps in a rural community.
You raise another great point: "Modern citizens are disconnected from civil participation, food creation, childcare/education, and elder care." We have to reconnect with our direct participation. Experts are great--I love to quote them and learn from them--but we can't let them be the jury, too, so to speak. Especially about "the systems that keep us alive and thriving," as you put it.
I suspect some of the resistance to attending to public freedom will be overcome when people realize that if they don't go to the "meeting" and speak up, they will lose out to that HOA harridan across the street, or its equivalent. Educational reforms that strengthen local control and input might also revitalize PTAs?
But just how many people are in such a village? One floor of a major high rise? A whole building of apartments in the urban areas or set of buildings that make up an apartment complex in less urban areas? Six to 12 blocks of a suburban neighborhood? Or the equivalent domain covered by the typical elementary school? No clue how much area a village of farmers and ranchers might require. Do we end up with commercial and industrial versions as well, to allow such firms representation as businesses?
Perhaps there is separation on other values, such as an LGBT enclave? Or a Catholic one? If people are restrained in some villages they may well be incentivized to form one of their own with different social and personal values? A fine grained "laboratory of the states"?
Isn't communism basically totalitarian vs. communalism being basically democratic? I try to avoid the word "collective" because it can be misconstrued, but "group" does not always work any better. I suspect no one ever pledged their sacred honor to communism.
ssri, such great points. Here I am, on fire for Jefferson's plan, but I hate HOA meetings. I like to think it's because the things that HOA's are empowered to do under restrictive covenants is pretty limited. I rarely care about whether some neighbor paints their townhouse some color not approved by the association, etc. But I think people will come out if they know they have real power commonly associated with local or state government. Hannah Arendt pointed out that Jefferson's plan meant that people were free to choose or not choose a life of public freedom, and she could live with that.
When you start dividing things differently than Jefferson proposed--and he proposed geography alone and (Hannah Arendt figures) about a hundred people per village--then things get really interesting and fun. I love your thoughts.
In the spirit of Jefferson’s flexibility, we could organize village-states not only geographically but also by taking the approach of the English pluralists--a wonderful political movement around the turn of the last century--some of whom argued that associations people enter into based on their interests and professions should make up our government. One of them, H. J. Laski, argued that “we must not think of federalism today merely in the old spatial terms. It applies not less to functions than to territories.”
Whether the associations foster our neighborhood lives; our social, recreational, or spiritual interests; or our professional pursuits, the associations should not serve merely to appoint representatives to more distant associations. Communities, in Martin Buber’s words, “must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s question, and nothing more.”
As for words like communism, communalism, and even totalitarianism and democracy, I think we usually have to balance what we think most people mean by them with what political theorists--at least the ones we think are best at what we're dealing with--mean by them. I recall that in "What Is Authority?", an often-cited essay by Arendt, she fusses that we need to be more precise about the differences among authoritarian, autocratic, and totalitarian. Fair enough. The trick for me is to finesse this balance each time I use a word like that. I get more fussy myself when people misuse a word I care about, such as democracy, with pleonasms like "direct democracy" or oxymorons like "representative democracy." Oh, I've gotten fussy again. :-)
Interesting essay. I did not know that Jefferson admired the New England townships so much.
But I cannot see its practical and importance because I see no way to get there from here.
The USA remained thoroughly economically and politically decentralized until the 1950s (we're lied to in the regards about the 1930s), and even then we didnt really take the big leaps until the 1970s/1980s,
I suspect that the USA's political economy is still quite complex, its just a latent complexity suppressed by the magic three of perpetual large trade deficits, perpetual large budget deficits, and perpetual high liquidity/low-rates all without inflation, if those fell that complexity might actualize and if so we'd probably get some re-decentralization
Jefferson certainly failed to get there, despite his exertions. Arendt's tone about Jefferson's idea in her somewhat lyrical close to On Revolution is hard to pin down, at least for me. She champions Jefferson's plan, but she saves her most beautiful language about it when she seems the most wistful.
It may take some kind of disaster to get us there, unfortunately. One of my favorite books about the civil (and arguably political) communities that arise spontaneously in natural disasters is Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell.
Arendt in the same On Revolution asserts that political communities arose spontaneously after every "genuine" revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (up to her book's writing). Even the soviets, she says, arose not because of Lenin but despite him. The Bolsheviks simply forced the soviets to become party organs and appropriated their name.
So we can get there, I think. We don't need a revolution, Arendt seems to say. We Americans already had one. We just need, as she put it, to finally provide the institution that would preserve it.
Arnold Toynbee writes in one of his books about cities that the Athenians believed they needed slaves to do a lot of the farming and other work so that the citizens had the leisure time to participate in their democracy. This may have influenced some of the founding fathers in excusing slavery. So today of course technology allows us, without slaves, to live better than Jefferson in Monticello with slaves. But the flip side is society and government are so complex now and there seem to be more and more demands on our time and attention such that mass direct participation in the minutia of governance of our local town or neighborhoods seems like it would be infeasible. But there is something to be said about learning democracy by doing it, and people coming together to solve local problems and how that would make our broader democratic society more healthy. And so why can’t we do that if we theoretically have more time and leisure today than in Jeffersons’s time due to advances in technology?
Really good point! The leisure time necessary for democracy was a big issue for Aristotle. He tended to categorize democracies in part by how much time people could spend tending to them. Republicans (small "r") at the time of the American Founding were aghast at the mercantile mindset that would cause republicanism to wither. Adams in 1776 marveled at ". . . so much Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America," causing him to "sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic."
I think Arendt found in Jefferson--and in all the Founders who participated in in the Continental Congress--people who loved public freedom because they did it. Jefferson, she thought, wanted all citizens to experience what he and his friends had experienced then. Jefferson's idea of heaven, he wrote in a particularly witty close to a letter to John Adams, was exercising public freedom in Congress.
I think Arendt and Jefferson were right: unless we practice what they called public freedom, we won't know what we're missing.
Check out this conversation I had with Country Gentleman https://thecountrygentleman.substack.com/p/town-meeting-revisited/comment/100945837?r=25s8w1&utm_medium=ios
I love that post -- "Town Meeting, Revisited." There's the practice and love of public freedom for you. As far as some of the experienced tedium, I wonder if some stages of the town meetings might benefit from some aspects of sociocracy, which is kind of a modified democracy--consensus instead of majority vote, for instance, and good procedural guidelines. I've spoken to three or four people who have used it in their communities, and they love it. A good resource I have is Many Voices, One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy by Ted J. Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez.
Thanks for this book recommendation I will check it out.
The recent documentary Join or Die on Netflix speaks to this on a more basic level of looking at the decline in memberships to clubs. How could we govern ourselves when we don’t even bowl together any more?? Thanks for the essay and further evidence of the insights of our imperfect founding fathers.
Thanks for the encouragement! I haven't seen Join or Die yet, but a couple of weeks ago I read a great article by Marcie Alvis Walker about it. ( https://open.substack.com/pub/blackeyedstories/p/join-or-die-is-an-awful-title?r=2xryfr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false )
Tocqueville found that civll associations and political associations are both either present or absent in a country, which I think is part of your point. But as for which appears first and encourages the other, he would think we moderns have it backwards: ". . . political life makes the love and practice of association more general; it imparts a desire of union, and teaches the means of combination to numbers of men who would have always lived apart." In other words, we need political associations, such as the ones Jefferson proposed, in part to get us bowling together again.
To see it Tocqueville's way is a big paradigm shift for us modern Americans, I think. His broader point may be that if we put public freedom before personal freedom, we'll have both. If we put personal freedom first, we may not get (or keep) public freedom. To my mind, it's a bit like "seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you."
There's an Indian example of this called Panchayati Raj (village rule). It's not perfect the village council has very few powers allocated to it because there's a hangover from the British era of collectors who wield most of the local powers. But something like this is possible only with greater allocation of powers to the people.
Thank you! I was't familiar with Panchayati Raj at all. It seems fascinating.
Some First Nations on Turtle Island have lived out something better, I think, than even Jefferson's proposal. One example is the Great Law of Peace and the internal governments of the nations that entered into the Great Law. A wonderful chapter on this makes up the coda to Charles C. Mann's book 1491. A few highlights: 117 codicils that limit and balance the great counsel's powers, female clan heads to balance the warriors' powers, and government by consensus. Mann thinks New Englanders, in adopting the town meetings, ignored Winthrop's vision and put Algonkian-like practices in place instead.
From the outside looking in, the issue to solve will always be who has the most money to throw at their own elevation or for those of their choice (with future influence implied). How may this be constrained to ensure positions are earned, not bought? One has only to look at the run-up to America's election last year to see this is patently not under control.
Plus, how do you justify having a Vice President without any mandate whatsoever bar the personal choice of the would-be President, no guardianship over their intent to work for the benefit of all the people of the country, and yet implicitly able to become President?
How will your proposed communal government sort out/approach that situation? And shouldn't this anomaly be addressed in any form of government?
Annie, thanks for your comment! Jefferson hated money, or I guess more specifically propertied families, in politics—the “pseudo-aristocracy,” he called them. I think the big answer to the problem of money being used for the donors’ “own elevation or for those of their choice” is to stop making money an effective means of elevation. Here Jefferson helps.
Jefferson thought that his village-states could coexist with general elections, though he wanted his village-states to run those elections. I think he thought that only those voluntarily active in village-states would vote for the more distant federal layers (county, state, and national governments). In this context, elections would be less likely to be purchased. In a single letter to James Madison, in fact, Jefferson advocated for both general elections and village-states.
In her book On Revolution, Arendt made Jefferson’s village-states her book's biggest claim of policy for her American audience. But unlike Jefferson, she explicitly found general elections to be inconsistent with village-states. I think she’s right. Elections are oligarchic and aristocratic institutions, Aristotle told us—and so have many political theorists since. (For an overview, see the third-to-last link in this article.) So long as elections are the sine qua non of citizenship, we’ll have (or come closer to having) an aristocracy or an oligarchy. I think the recent American experience bears this out.
The French political theorist Bernard Manin believes that rotation--think ancient Athens--instead of elections would be viable in America through a "multiple step procedure," moving from the local to regional and national levels. Manin’s outline is much like Jefferson's plan to create wards. I think rotation and sortition are much healthier means of selecting officeholders than are elections, which were used sparingly in ancient Athens.
I don’t think either Jefferson or Arendt was proposing a communal government. (Jefferson, I think, would say that he wasn't proposing a change in America's type of government at all. He was proposing, rather, that we extend the republican principle up to our neighborhoods.) Jefferson, however, was concerned enough about money and property in politics to tell another James Madison (the president of William and Mary) that “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property . . .”
Thank you again for your stimulating comment.