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The Politics of Civic Agency

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Abstract

Harry C. Boyte argues that both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement, despite their obvious differences, express aspirations for civic agency, which are widespread around the world, and which confound conventional political categories. Both are animated by the conviction that citizens must be at the centre of democracy. Yet both also have limits, defining the world as a Manichean struggle between good and evil in ways that vastly oversimplify the challenge of democratization and that ignore insights of the other camp. The author advocates for a civic agency politics, which teaches skills of work across partisan and other divisions, incorporates insights of both camps, and aims at democratizing the cultural and institutional life of modern societies.

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Notes

  1. For ongoing updates and discussions, see the website and associated social media, DemocracyU, at http://democracyu.wordpress.com/

References

  • Brownell, Baker (1950) The Human Community, New York: Harper & Row.

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  • Foner, Eric (1998) The Story of American Freedom, New York: W.W. Norton.

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  • Kimmelman, Michael (2011) ‘In Protest, the Power of Place’, The New York Times 15 October.

For works related to civic agency politics

  • Boyte, Harry C. (2009) ‘Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert’, Kettering Foundation Working Paper based on experiences in the Obama Campaign of 2009, Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Press.

  • Boyte, Harry C. (2011) ‘We the People Politics: The populist promise of deliberative public work’, Kettering Foundation Working Paper, Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Press.

  • Cotton, Dorothy (2012, forthcoming) If Your Back’s Not Bent: The citizenship education program, foundation of the civil rights movement, New York: Simon & Schuster.

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  • Spragens, Thomas (2009) Getting the Left Right the Transformation, Decline and Reformation of American Liberalism, Kansas: Kansas University Press.

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Outlines how politics needs to change the fabric of everyday institutional life

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Boyte, H. The Politics of Civic Agency. Development 55, 205–207 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2012.2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2012.2

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