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Community & American Public Life

Daniel Kemmis' Community and the Politics of Place presents a carefully reasoned, well ordered and convincingly supported case for the necessity of a sense of place in the re-creation of American public life. Kemmis contends that it is only when Americans adopt the idea of inhabitation--the concept of the cooperative identification of the common good by those who live in a particular place--that true public life can emerge. His arguments are convincing as far as they go. But they also raise many questions that, while they are, perhaps, beyond the scope of his book, are not easily answered. In part this is because his demonstrations are all related to life in Montana, with its special set of problems, and cannot always, as he acknowledges, be generalized to the rest of the country (though many times they can be). But other aspects of the problem of public life are too easily glossed over. While Kemmis specifically acknowledges, for example, the powers (persuasive and coercive) of corporations, the importance of cities as economic centers, and the fact that the 'colonialized' West has a unique set of circumstances, he fails to acknowledge, for example, the real power and the extent of the indifference of corporations, the range of social conflict in culturally less homogeneous sections of the nation, or the breakdown of sociocultural systems such as the family and the education system. Kemmis does not, of course, pretend that his ideas are complete, easy, or soon to be realized. His emphasis on place, which leads him to concentrate on the region he knows best, produces convincing evidence that, at least on a small scale, the politics of inhabitation could be extremely effective if people only see the need for them. But Kemmis does not adequately consider the possibility that the entrenched interests that flourish in this setting are not quite so susceptible to voluntary or even forced change as, in his theory, they must be. Th...

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Community & American Public Life. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:53, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694179.html