Good Neighbors

The Democracy of Everyday Life in America

Nancy L. Rosenblum (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

312 Seiten

2018
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-18076-2 (ISBN)

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How our everyday interactions as neighbors shape-and sometimes undermine-democracy"Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral pr

How our everyday interactions as neighbors shape—and sometimes undermine—democracy

"Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings.

In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life—reciprocity, speaking out, and "live and let live"—comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant.

Nancy L. Rosenblum is the Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University. Her books include On the Side of the Angels and Membership and Morals (both Princeton).

Introduction: Good Neighbor Nation 1

Part I. The Lay of the Land 21

1. Who Is My Neighbor? 23

2. Narrative Threads: Settlers, Immigrants, and Suburban "Grotesques" 44

Part II. The Democracy of Everyday Life 69

3. Reciprocity among "Decent Folk" 71

4. Taking Offense, Speaking Out 91

5. What Anyone Would Do, Here 108

6. Live and Let Live 131

Part III. Holding Our Lives in Their Hands 151

7. Betrayal 153

8. Killing 174

9. Disasters 200

Part IV. Minding Our Own Business 217

10. Thoreau's Neighbors 219

Conclusion: Political Theory and the Democracy of Everyday Life in America 234

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 251

Index 293

Erscheinungsdatum	14.07.2018
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
ISBN-10	0-691-18076-8 / 0691180768
ISBN-13	978-0-691-18076-2 / 9780691180762
Zustand	Neuware