Community & American Public Life
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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
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of civic dispute, therefore, the belief in the paramount importance of individual values results in "shrillness and indignation," in the blocking of opponents' initiatives (which carries over to other, unrelated, matters), and then in "the ever more frequent withdrawal of people from all public involvement" (Kemmis 62).
Kemmis demonstrates, however, the ways in which public life can be reconstituted in the context of small communities. He offers several examples of situations, specific to Missoula or to Montana as a whole, in which solutions were either worked out or could have been worked out if the parties involved had only reconceived their roles in public hearings or in the voting booth. One example is a stock company designed to reinvest locally generated capital in the region--which folded because of regulatory difficulties imposed by the federal government whose regulations are based on the notion that the investors in such a company must "act as if they were strangers to one another" (57). In Kemmis' view this type of regulation, the triumph of procedure over community, would have required citizens "to have to act as if they were isolated selves, unencumbered by any sense of responsibility to one another" and they wer
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2991
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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