What Should We Do?: A Theory of Civic Life

Peter Levine's book "What Should We Do?" provides a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. It draws from research on collective action, deliberation, and nonviolent social movements and offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world.

Format: Hardback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 12 June 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

People who aspire to improve the world must confront the fundamental civic question: What should we do? While the specific issues and challenges individuals face are immensely diverse, they frequently encounter problems of collective action (how to unite many individuals to act in concert), discourse (how to engage in productive conversations about contentious matters), and exclusion. To achieve their goals, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, through which they can develop skills and virtues that enable them to be effective and responsible civic actors. In his book, What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America's foremost scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront those who ask the citizens' question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his objective is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively grapple with these problems, preventing them from destabilizing movements.

A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? shifts from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. It offers pragmatic guidance for individuals who seek to improve the world.

Weight: 478g
Dimension: 165 x 243 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197570494