On Rekindling the Light of Public Space
| Date | 01 September 2009 |
| Author | Frank E. Scott |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2009.02051.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2009 |
988 Public Administration Review • September | October 2009
On Rekindling the Light of Public Space
Frank E. Scott is an associate professor
of public administration at California State
University, East Bay, where he teaches
organizational theory, ethics, and political
philosophy.
E-mail: frank.scott@csueastbay.edu
Frank E. Scott
California State University, East Bay
Camilla Stivers, Governance in Dark Times: Practical
Philosophy for Public Service (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2008). 166 pp. $24.95
(paper), ISBN: 9781589011977.
If the crucial distinction between modern democ-
racy and the ancient forms that inspired it is, as
Chantal Mouff e (1996) argues, pluralism not
merely as a fact but as constitutive of its “very nature,”
then the successful functioning of modern democracy
depends on its ability to give “positive status” to our
diff erences, on its refusing appeals to the sort of objec-
tive unanimity that is “always revealed as fi ctitious and
based on acts of exclusion” (246). Yet as the events of
September 11 led us to confront what appeared as a
threat of destruction by some incomprehensible and
radically foreign other, American fl ags went up every-
where, there was much talk about “our way of life,”
and concerns for the valuing of diff erence gave way
to the clear diff erentiation of us and them. ose who
looked, acted, or even thought diff erently came under
suspicion amid a new war on terror pitting the light of
our own goodness against the “forces of darkness and
evil” (Bush 2005).
Times have changed. Much sobered by events such as
those at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and struggling
through a series of economic crises, Americans now
face a growing awareness of our limits. Public opinion
polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of us
now believe the country to be headed in the wrong
direction. Perhaps, then, we may be ready to look
beyond the stark contrasts of light and dark, good and
evil, true and false, that have recently come to pervade
our national consciousness, and to discern a kind of
darkness other than that of terrible events: a “darkness
that comes when the light of the public realm goes
out” (53).
It is this darkness, this extinguishing of the public
conversation so essential to genuinely democratic
process, that is the principal concern of Governance
in Dark Times. In this book, Camilla Stivers invites
us into serious refl ection on the taken-for-granted
assumptions that underpin the status quo of contem-
porary American governance. She then off ers us an
alternative conception, one that seeks to renew the
public space by embracing rather than minimizing
our diff erences.
In the fi rst of three sections, Stivers begins the “search
for the truth about public life” by locating terrorism,
as well as our response to it, within the context of the
modern experience. Our leadership was quick to cast
the reaction against terrorism in the familiar language of
a war between our forces “of good, of light, of civiliza-
tion,” and the “barbarians, evildoers, [and] sons of
darkness” arrayed against us. Yet that struggle is itself an
analogue of the modern tension, she argues, between
the reassuringly rational “daylight” of ordinary life and
the ever-threatening “night side” irrationality of death.
us, terrorism is on one level a “radical alteration” of
the modern world, but on another level, it is a “power-
ful indicator” of that world’s inherent duality (20–21).
e goal of modernity, such as was given to us by Max
Weber and Karl Marx, was to disenchant the world,
to free it from the reliance on magic and superstition
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