Publics in Action: The Self-Making of Civic Life

What does it mean for something to be public? It's not always clear what this ever-important word means. Are we using the same idea of "public" when we talk about public education, or public safety, or public works? And how should we think about ourselves as members of "the public"? Who belongs to the public? There are many different groups to consider: citizens and non-citizens who work and live together, the people of future generations, people in other countries who are affected by the gases we pump into our atmosphere. What "public" means can get messy. In Publics in Action, Christopher Kutz looks at how people should and do come together to create their shared institutions, and the lessons we can learn from one another. He argues that a healthy, dynamic public takes itself seriously as a subject of action, not just the passive beneficiary of a state institution. Kutz builds the book around an extended metaphor: we should understand ourselves as a public that improvises: listening to each other as we riff off shared standards and so creating something new, responsive to the scene and the moment. Publics in Action makes use of the author's extensive personal experience in public institutions, and in democracies around the world, with a particular focus on the U.S., represented primarily by California -- arguably the world's most successful multi-cultural democracy -- as well as France, and Norway, each of which provides instructive models of healthy publics in action (and some examples of dysfunction). Merging political philosophy and comparative politics, this book will leave both lay and professional readers not only with an enlivened sense of the possibilities of public life, but with new ideas about how we might build the shared future we desperately need.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Active Publics, Improvisational Politics Chapter 1: Public, Private: What's the Difference? Chapter 2: Public Resources: But Who Is the Public? Chapter 3: The Climate Crisis and the Global Public Chapter 4: The Public in Public Education Chapter 5: Public Safety, Public Freedom Chapter 6: Public Spheres: Talking and Acting Together Conclusion: Principles for Effective Publics Appendix A: Sources for Table 2.1

About the Author :
Christopher Kutz is the C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program and (by courtesy) Philosophy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held visiting professorships at Columbia, Stanford and Sciences-Po, Paris. His previous books include Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge, 2000) and On War and Democracy (Princeton, 2016).