Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of
American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the
twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one
hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta challenges the
conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose
but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements
have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for
political change.
Polletta traces the
history of democracy in early labor struggles and pre-World War II
pacifism, in the civil rights, new left, and women’s liberation
movements of the sixties and seventies, and in today’s faith-based
organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the
process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic
inspiration—Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting
registration workers, among them—as well as practical strategies of
social protest. But Freedom Is an Endless Meeting also
highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their
democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as
friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. Doing so has brought
into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of
those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter
to democracy, such as exclusivity and an aversion to rules, and these
have been the fault lines around which participatory democracies have
often splintered. Indeed, Polletta attributes the fragility of the
form less to its basic inefficiency or inequity than to the gaps
between activists’ democratic commitments and the cultural models
on which they have depended to enact those commitments. The
challenge, she concludes, is to forge new kinds of democratic
relationships, ones that balance trust with accountability, respect
with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness.
For anyone concerned
about the prospects for democracy in America, Freedom Is an
Endless Meeting will offer abundant historical, theoretical, and
practical insights.