Abstract
Can an agency of the federal administrative state enable productive engagement by citizens themselves to help solve public problems and thereby take a rightful, even noble place in a democratic theory and practice of self-governance for the twenty-first century? American founders—everyday revolutionaries as well as those who attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the state ratifying conventions that followed (Maier 2010)—invoked the ideal of republican self-government, though they never completely agreed upon what this meant, nor did the “multiple traditions” from which they drew—liberal, civic republican, Protestant, commonwealth, Scottish common sense (Kloppenberg 1987; Gibson 2006). Within a few short years, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were signaling support for nongovernmental Democratic-Republican “societies” (though they remained ambivalent) and then the first political “party” to restrain top-down “aristocratic” tendencies they saw at work in administrative agencies and policy designs, especially in the Treasury Department, headed by Alexander Hamilton (Brooke 1996). In effect, they were questioning policy feedback effects on the capacities, virtues, and interests of self-governing citizens. A very imperfect Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 cemented the ideal of a self-governing republic even further, though primarily for white males, and various kinds of civic associations began to flourish, thus further enriching and pluralizing a public sphere rhetorically linked to ideals of self-government . Soon associations were created by women as well as men, free blacks as well as whites, and they came to constitute the first antebellum social movements, such as antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights, in some cases with pragmatic, collaborative, and partnership practices (Boylan 2002; Robertson 2010). The creation of a broad array of associations, of course, is exactly what impressed 9 Bringing the State Back In through Collaborative Governance Emergent Mission and Practice at the US Environmental Protection Agency