Community and the Politics of Place

by Daniel Kemmis

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of citizens deeply involved in public life. Today Americans are lamenting the erosion of his ideal. What happened in the intervening centuries? Daniel Kemmis argues that our loss of capacity for public life (which impedes our ability to resolve crucial issues) parallels our loss of a sense of place. A renewed sense of inhabitation, he maintains —of community rooted in place and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way—can shape politics into a more cooperative and more humanly satisfying enterprise, producing better people, better communities, and better places.

The author emphasizes the importance of place by analyzing problems and possibilities of public life in a particular place— those northern states whose settlement marked the end of the old frontier. National efforts to “keep citizens apart” by encouraging them to develop open country and rely upon impersonal, procedural methods for public problems have bred stalemate, frustration, and alienation. As alternatives he suggests how western patterns of inhabitation might engender a more cooperative, face-to-face practice of public life.

Community and the Politics of Place also examines our ambivalence about the relationship between cities and rural areas and about the role of corporations in public life. The book offers new insight into the relationship between politics and economics and addresses the question of whether the nation-state is an appropriate entity for the practice of either discipline. The author draws upon the growing literature of civic republicanism for both a language and a vantage point from which to address problems in American public life, but he criticizes that literature for its failure to consider place.

Though its focus on a single region lends concreteness to its discussions, Community and the Politics of Place promotes a better understanding of the quality of public life today in all regions of the United States.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urbanism, Environment

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1990

Reviews

[Julie Moronuki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging book, to be sure, not so much in terms of how difficult it is to read but in the practical implications of it's argument. How would one who fully accepts this vision of politics, as I think I do, begin to practice citizenship of this nature; can one do it in a place where no one else has read this book or shares this vision? In the decades since this book has been published, I feel like many places in the West have lost most of their remaining sense of shared purpose and inhabitation. Perhaps too many of the hardship opportunities are gone. Perhaps the inhabitants are too old or itinerant. Perhaps the politics has become too stalemated and polarized. I want to enact a politics like this, but it's very difficult to know where to begin. Sorry, I know this isn't a proper book review but all I can ever do at the moment Goodreads asks me to review a book is just write down the thoughts I have of it when I just finished it, and this is that. I will add that I love the breadth of sources Kemmis brings to bear on this topic, from Hegel and Pedagogy of the Oppressed to Wendell Berry and After Virtue; I feel it is a kind of practicing what he's preaching.

[Ben Harrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this one of the best books on improving local governance out there. It captures and identifies the heart of problems in local enterprises that more modern texts like City Power and The New Localism fail to address.

The chapter “Stalemate” is a must read for any local elected, City Manager, Main Street Director, and staff member in Community Development.

[Mitch Friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which I read maybe 20 years ago, had huge impact on my thinking about the nature of democracy and the obligations of advocates to attend to broad public objectives even as we push narrow ones.

[Hung · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite understand, but some points were really intriguing.
Save for later reading again, maybe long long time.

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

[Russell Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty-five years ago, "civic republicanism" and "communitarianism" were enjoying an (unfortunately, rather short-lived) philosophical and political hey-day. Much of this partook of a sort of "Third Way" attitude to politics; in the wake of the Cold War, with the presumed triumph of Western liberal democracies and their market economies, the Republican and Democratic parties seemed equally out of touch and irrelevant, and the focus on community and civic virtue seemed like a way to escape platforms and ideologies that felt exhausted. That attitude was, frankly, both simplistic and, as it happened, premature. But some of those communitarian writings really were informed by a serious engagement with ideas about self-government and collective freedom which America's liberal consensus had mostly left behind, and many important and thoughtful works of political theory came out of it. Daniel Kemmis's short book--Community and the Politics of Place--was not recognized as one of those works...but it should have been. Reading it now, not only in light of how those civic republican arguments from a generation ago have developed and been (mostly) set aside, but also in light of current pre-occupations about national dysfunction, state and social fragmentation, and the re-emphasis upon localism, allows me to see it as the small, powerful statement of ideas which it truly is.

Kemmis wrote this book as a Montanan--and not just a resident of Montana, but as one of its civic leaders (at the time of its publication, he was serving as mayor of the city of Missoula). As such, and as benefits a book that is filled with references to Alsadair MacIntyre, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Wendell Berry, and Robert Bellah, Kemmis's arguments about "territoriality" and the need to see, through the prism of their mutually shared space, the civic resources which abide in the inter-relationship of rural and urban interests are shot through with invocations of local knowledge. He speaks wisely (though not particularly originally) about the "procedural republic" brought about by Madison's idea of an extended nation which defeated factions by multiplying them and forcing them to contend with each other, but his clearest and most original insights come when he talks about town meetings over dairy product regulatory policies, or the disposal of waste-water from industrial plants, or other matters that so often pitted Montana's corporate and local inhabitants against each other. His model for economic and political renewal is in fact exactly that: a push to recognize that the fate of communities (especially those in the rural West) depends upon a practice of citizenship which gets away from the conflict-centered town meeting--which he ruefully describes as "public hearings" where no hearing takes place--and instead holds tightly to "re-inhabitation." There are, he recognizes, major obstacles, both political and economic, to getting all of those invested in the health of communities--which includes both a divided and distrustful citizenry (thank you, bureaucracy!) and those capital providing "colonizing" corporations upon whom, like it or not, much of the functioning of people-poor but resource-rich communities depend--to really be able to respect "place-centeredness" (and his comments here on the lost opportunity which the populists presented America with more than a century ago are exactly on point). But failing that, democratic stalemates, and thus continuing withdrawal from the blessing of community, will only continue.

I shouldn't end this review negatively, because this isn't a negative book; Kemmis is genuinely hopeful. But he doesn't sugarcoat the difficulties built into the individualistic understandings of America's political culture--and reading his suggestions and hopes today, in a context where I can see his suggestions as both reflecting some small improvements, as well as pointing out areas for new action, provides for a bracing, realistic combination of the ideal and the practical. Very much worth reading.

[Ginna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I picked it up by chance in an Idaho bookstore in 2000 and have been enjoying mapping Kemmis' ideas onto the world ever since. The onetime mayor of Missoula, MT writes clearly and with with authority about how the governing documents of a place should match the needs of its people. He starts off with an analysis of Madisonian vs. Jeffersonian democracy that I found most instructive. He uses his own life experience to illuminate concepts that are integral to western government, a construct that historically organized (non-indigenous) people who had mostly come from somewhere else and were seeking to redefine the idea of "roots." (Many of them valued the west because there weren't very many people at all). What are our responsibilities to our neighbors? What does it mean to live in a litigious society? What are we willing to give up for the common good? Beyond the idea of human community, what do we owe the natural community we inhabit? Great ideas. They're worth percolating.

Read it.

[Tattered Cover Book Store]

Both author Teresa Jordan and rancher/poet/author Linda Hasselstrom recommended this as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration".

[Kai Markle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book and I think that anyone who finds interest in American politics and the development of community's will also enjoy this book. The book is filled with interesting anecdotes about his time a mayor in Montana, mixed with American political history.

[Matthew Selvaggio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Communities of practice are formed from perception of physical space and ones sense of duty to them.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

read first 6/8 chapters. very repetitive, not very mind boggling. but interesting enough