Seeds of a Different Politics

Abstract

The splendid achievement of Carmen Sirianni and Lew Friedland in Civic Innovation in America is both to demonstrate and to analyze a cumulative process of civic learning. In recent decades, citizens and civic institutions of many kinds have devel oped sophisticated, nuanced strategies for addressing tough prob lems that are not subject to remedy by expert intervention or simple appeal to government. Through an innovative methodol ogy?including engagement with a wide range of contemporary political and social theory, in-depth case studies and network analysis, and hundreds of qualitative interviews?Sirianni and Friedland create an American case study in an emerging inter national pattern. Their book illustrates the stirrings of a new democracy and is also a textured, rich treatment of some of its key foundations, language, and themes. As David Bornstein suggested in The New York Times in 1999, this movement, if it can be called that (and one of Sirianni and Friedland's arguments is that it is, indeed, a movement-in-forma tion) is an international phenomonon. Citizen initiatives have been growing at remarkable rates, with large impacts all across the in th spirit of advancing discussion I will here focus on three limits I see in their work. All have to do with the authors' insuf