Shared sociable activity builds the civic bonds democracy requires.

Evidence

For theorists of the public sphere, moral and political understanding are not inert objects that people can carry around inside their own heads and implant in the heads of others. Rather, these theorists assume that people must learn how to understand the larger world by interacting and talking about social issues, in groups. In contemporary society, political life is, more and more, administered by forms, numbers, technicians, or the invisible hand of the market, which silently gives and takes away with no explicit considerations of morality or cultural integrity. Only plain talk, between citizens, can knit the bonds necessary for a more humane society, and can reveal the often morally unsavory assumptions hidden in the market and the bureaucracies (Habermas 1985). Without a vibrant public sphere, democratic citizenship is impossible; there are no contexts to generate the kinds of selfhood, friendship, power, and relations to the wider world that democracy demands. The point is dual: participation in the public sphere helps cultivate a sense of community, so that people care more, and think more, about the wider world; and second, participation becomes a source of meaning-making power. … Such sociable gatherings can be fertile ground for political life. While not exclusively or even primarily politically motivated, these gatherings offer the familiarity that is a necessary precondition for some kinds of public life. Sociable familiar gatherings can create an infinitely nuanced stock of common sense and feeling, common knowledge and myths, common style, rhythm, and manners; background knowledge for how to act and how to be. Every day, people go to work, get stuck in traffic jams, pay bills, become involuntarily entangled with anonymous strangers; in the sociable public sphere, in contrast, people affirm voluntary connections to particular people. Whether for reading poetry aloud, debating playfully, playing music, joking, putting on plays, dancing, bowling, playing soccer, these usually unpolitical grounds for common life and meaning-making often make political life possible. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 123

Categorization

• QUESTION: Eliasoph is laying out the public-sphere theory (Habermas) she’s testing against her ethnography — worth holding onto to check how her volunteers did or didn’t confirm each side of this dual claim, and whether these nonpolitical grounds actually produced political life in the groups she studied.
• XREF: Links to the public sphere / civil society literature thread (Habermas, Sennett, Dewey as filtered through Eliasoph) and to the reader’s broader mutual-aid and solidarity-formation research. — connects to: Unpolitical sociability supplies the familiarity that later enables civic engagement. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 126; Dense civic networks enable trust, reciprocity and collective action. — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 17; Contestatory democracy cultivates the civic virtue the state needs — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1292 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Dense civic networks enable trust, reciprocity and collective action. #expands (0.90) — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, 17
• Effective political action requires concert, confidence, and common bonds #expands (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2467
• Contestatory democracy cultivates the civic virtue the state needs #expands (0.80) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1292
• Civic participation transforms how adults perceive and treat local youth. #exemplifies (0.72) — David Sobel, Place-Based Education, 50