What Should We Do?

Book excerpt: "Active and responsible citizens form or join and sustain functional groups in which they ask the fundamental civic question: What should we do? In these groups, they characteristically face problems of collective action (such as free-riding), of discourse (e.g., propaganda and ideology), and of exclusion. Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of political economy demonstrate that collective-action problems can be solved and suggest "design principles" that increase the odds of success. Jürgen Habermas argues that people can deliberate; experiments with deliberative democracy offer insights about what makes these conversations go well. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. offer models of nonviolent social movements that indicate how to address problems of exclusion. Good civic action requires insights from these three traditions of theory and practice. This book concludes with a synthesis of the three traditions that also addresses the challenge of scale: how to preserve intentional, ethical, collective action when millions or billions of people are involved. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-6 and the current Black Lives Matter movement provide detailed examples. This book also proposes an alternative approach to political theory that focuses on individuals in voluntary groups rather than governments or whole societies"--