Danielle S. Allen's Talking to Strangers
Casey, Leo
TALKING TO STRANGERS: ANXIETIES OF CITIZENSHIP SINCE BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION by Danielle S. Allen University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2006 254 pp $25 cloth $16 paper DON'T TALK to...
...The capacity to "talk to strangers," to hold a dialogue, to reason, and to deliberate with one's fellow citizens in a context of civic trust, Allen tells us, lies at the heart of democracy...
...The democratic citizen as political friend seeks autonomy and participation for himself and all his fellows...
...The civil rights movement's tradition of nonviolent civil disobediII0 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 ence might be seen as a paradigmatic example of a democratic citizenship that has sacrifice at its center...
...He articulates what might be characterized as the theory of unanimity taken to its extreme, but logical, conclusion...
...From that first principle, Schmitt articulates a theory of the state that is antipluralist, opposed to the rule of law, and hostile to democratic discussion and debate: the sovereign is he who decides...
...Talking to Strangers begins with a meditation on the meaning of a powerful piece of American political iconography, the 1957 photograph of African American student Elizabeth Eckford as she was prevented from attending Little Rock's Central High School by a white mob screaming for her lynching...
...The theme of sacrifice is initially drawn from Ralph Ellison's reading of African American history, and especially from his response to Hannah Arendt's infamous misunderstanding of the civil rights movement (in an essay first published in these pages ["Reflections on Little Rock," Winter 1959]), but Allen gives it a broader political meaning...
...This is why, for Allen, civic virtue is not taught in the didactic way advocated by much of republican theory, but nurtured through discussion among citizens, through talking to strangers, in ways that build a culture of democratic reciprocity and trust...
...This insistence upon political unanimity is not unique to republican or communitarian thought...
...Like the archetypal citizen-soldier of classical republican theory, the democratic citizen of the civil rights movement was prepared to sacrifice his or her life for the greater good of the community But Allen's republicanism is unlike both classical and contemporary political thought in the republican tradition...
...It will provide an influential reference point for further developments in democratic political philosophy...
...When people break an unjust law, they challenge the majority that enacted that law to correct the injustice, and they do so in the name of democratic principle...
...Allen is distinctive among contemporary political philosophers in her focus on the actual practice of the democratic politics she advocates...
...Democracy can maximize political agreement and consent, but it can not universalize it...
...By bringing African American thought and democratic political theory into dialogue with each other, Allen is able to elaborate in political terms the concept of democratic citizenship that was implicit in the African American freedom struggle...
...Here, Allen's discussion provides a practical guide to actualizing the politics she advocates, with numerous specific suggestions...
...He describes an "ideal speech situation," in which a pure form of universal reason, unsullied by human emotions or particular interests, can reach perfect, unanimous agreement on what constitutes the common good...
...LEO CASEY taught in an inner-city school in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn for many years and now works for the United Federation of Teachers...
...Using Hobbes's Leviathan as the exemplar, Allen argues that the very same insistence appears in much of liberal political BOOKS theory...
...Allen makes a compelling case that the civil rights movement "founded" a new American constitution and brought into being a new American citizenship...
...At the same time, by accepting the penalties for their disobedience, they recognize the right of the democratic majority to enact law...
...In stark contrast, Allen elaborates methods for incorporating and embracing differences within the category of "friend...
...The civil rights movement—and the African American freedom struggle of which it was part—was built upon that civic ethic of sacrifice...
...Still, there are some central common themes...
...Here, Allen, who is herself a scholar of ancient Greek politics, draws upon Aristotle's idea of political friendship, which lay in the achievement of the golden mean between the extremes of acquiescence and domination...
...Her vision of politics and public life rests on a rich, robust view of political language, in which engagement and persuasion play a central role...
...In her Dissent essay, Hannah Arendt advocated the universal right of all parents to send their children to the school of their choice, but this was an empty, purely formal universality: in the Jim Crow South that right could only be honored for the white majority by disenfranchising the African American minority...
...Consequently, its import has generally been lost on political thinkers such as Arendt, who were, to put it charitably, unfamiliar with that tradition...
...they don't aim at a perfect unity...
...And in both cases, given their hope for rational unanimity, Habermas and Hobbes seek to banish rhetoric and the art of political persuasion from public life—because these engage the passions as much as they appeal to reason...
...Central to this transformation, Allen contends, was the willingness of African Americans to assume the burden of democratic citizenship, which she defines as sacrifice...
...And she makes this argument in an extraordinary philosophical text that is itself a conversation among different intellectual traditions and different approaches to race in America—traditions and approaches that rarely engage with each other...
...The conflict of different rights and the clash of different goods is an unavoidable feature of free political life, one that cannot be resolved into a perfect consensus...
...Drawing upon diverse intellectual currents, Talking to Strangers makes a signal contribution to our thinking on issues of democratic politics and race...
...In a way that prefigured the work of the civil rights movement, the photograph revealed a "public sphere" from which African Americans were excluded and showed how that exclusion was DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 1 O9 BOOKS enforced through the ever-present threat of violence...
...Chief among those methods is an art of political rhetoric designed to generate civic trust...
...For democracy to be a stable political order, Allen argues, it must find ways to address the interests and needs of both majorities and minorities...
...Democracy is made possible by the minority of citizens who accede to a majority decision, even though they do not benefit as fully as the majority does (or don't benefit at all...
...Rhetoric and persuasion assume the existence and even the permanence of political differences...
...These four simple words contain one of the first pieces of worldly wisdom American parents teach their children...
...To this end, Allen elaborates a theory of political friendship, a model of inclusive citizenship conceived in opposition to the exclusion from public life visited upon Ralph Ellison's "invisible man...
...The words may help protect children from physical danger, Danielle Allen writes in her book of the same name, but the political message they convey ill serves education for democratic citizenship...
...For Schmitt, the "friend" is a homogenous category, and anyone who diverges from that category—in political, cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial ways—is by definition the "enemy...
...The promise of democracy is that those who sacrifice do not constitute a permanent minority, a pariah caste, but that over time the burdens and benefits of citizenship are shared equally...
...What makes this guide all the more powerful is the way in which it is grounded in her own work with the University of Chicago (where she teaches) and the poor, largely African American communities that are its neighbors...
...From the Montgomery bus boycott and the mass campaigns of Birmingham and Selma to the voter registration drives and the Mississippi "Freedom Summer," immense personal and communal burdens were taken on to realize the promise of American democracy— liberty and justice for all...
...TALKING TO STRANGERS: ANXIETIES OF CITIZENSHIP SINCE BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION by Danielle S. Allen University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2006 254 pp $25 cloth $16 paper DON'T TALK to strangers...
...For the most part, classical and contemporary republicanism assume that there is a single, universal common good, and that the task of republican politics is to realize that common good...
...Allen's republicanism rejects the focus on unanimity that defines much of modern political philosophy and lays out an alternative vision that takes a pluralistic community as its starting point...
...Rather, there are always inequities in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of collective action, with some people losing out so that others can gain more...
...Sacrifice in the cause of democracy establishes a covenant of reciprocity between particular citizens and the people as a whole...
...By highlighting the importance of sacrifice for the common good, Allen advocates a republican conception of citizenship, ultimately dependent upon the habits of civic virtue...
...This is a counterintuitive argument, for in most respects, the political theories of Habermas and Hobbes represent polar opposites in modern political thought...
...In Hobbes's social contract theory, the state of nature functions much like Habermas's ideal speech situation: in both cases, human reason leads to unanimous agreement and universal consent to establish a singular state...
...Disagreement is woven into its warp and woof as much as consent and agreement...
...Actual democracies do not achieve a perfect common good of the sort that Rousseau described, where all citizens benefit equally from collective action...
...DISSENT I Fall 2006 n III...
...As the experience of the civil rights movement so powerfully illustrates, many political issues cannot be resolved within the terms of universal rights and unanimous consent...
...This conception of democratic citizenship as sacrifice was largely articulated through the language of African American Christian theology— one thinks here of emblematic notions such as "bearing the cross" and "bearing witness...
...Jurgen Habermas's concept of deliberative democracy provides a useful example of this view...
...Confronted with this ugly reality, Americans were shamed into seeking a new, more inclusive political order...
...Allen never discusses the famous friendenemy concept of political life put forward by the authoritarian German political thinker Carl Schmitt, but Schmitt provides an informative contrast to her own theory...
Vol. 53 • September 2006 • No. 4
