What's the Civil in Civil Society? Robert Putnam, Italy and the Republican Tradition

Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work implies a conception of civil society with claims to republican ancestry. However, in four ways, he misses the more 'political' understanding of this Enlightenment category in republican writers, including his hero, Tocqueville. Where Putnam's civic community is spontaneous and voluntaristic, republicans emphasise the creation of civil society from above by state-building and broader political associations. Where his civic spirit is local, republicans stress polity-centred citizenship identification. Where Putnam's 'social capital' is a generalised, all-purpose resource with positive effects, modern republicans such as Tocqueville stress normative ambiguities of civic space and see the associational cradles of modern trust and solidarity as more demanding. Finally, where his civil society is a harmonious, 'functioning' place, republicans often stress conflict between citizens and between citizens and the state. A reconsideration of empirical and theoretical problems in his analysis suggests that a more republican conceptualisation of civil society would have facilitated different questions and more interesting answers.     

In remembrance of Robert D. Tollison

We discuss the mechanisms related to quadratic voting, from Vickrey’s counter-speculation mechanism and his second-price auction, through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, Goeree and Zhang’s mechanism, the Groves–Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland–Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that each mechanism that involves collective decisions has a quadratic aspect and that all of the mechanisms that we discuss are applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all parties involved must bear the marginal social costs of their actions.     

Robert D. Tollison and the economics of politics

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.