is is because he tends to avoid the question of power--who possesses it and what can be and has been done with it.
Kemmis calls for a return to the ideal form of republicanism, derived from the words res public or "public thing" which is the public sphere that, in Hannah Arendt's words, "gathers us together and yet prevents our falling all over each other" (quoted in Kemmis 5). But American society and government have cut the people off from this republican approach and rendered public life ineffective or nonexistent. Kemmis traces the lack of an appropriate public life back to the essential conflict between those who, like Thomas Jefferson, believed that a common good could be identified and arrived at by people working in cooperation and those who, like James Madison, held that people would pursue their own ends and that governments should be in place specifically to supply a set of procedures that would keep conflict in check and allow the common good to simply emerge.
The procedural republic favored by Madison was embodied in the Constitution and the cooperative public sphere envisioned by Jefferson fell by the wayside. In Jefferson's republican vision of society public life consisted of "the common choosing and willing of a common world" and this "common unity," or community, was the public sphere (Kemmis 15). But the federalists held that it was preferable to carry on the public business without the attempt to create any common world. In their view, "individuals would pursue their private ends, and the structure of government would balance those pursuits so cleverly that the highest good would emerge without anyone having bothered to will its existence" (Kemmis 15). In the state created by the Constitution the citizens were placed at a distance from the procedures whereby conflict was regulated and the notion of the public resolution of problems, arrived at by participating citizens, was nowhere to be found. The pro...