Trusted Space - de Toqueville

Harold Jarche and I have been talking today about the idea of the Commons. He quotes on hs blog John McKnight talking about de Toqueville's view of how America was exceptionally different from Europe.

Here is Harold's quote from McKnight - Does it not inform you as to the meaning of what a Trusted Space was and could be again? Does this not support the emerging idea that Public Radio can help Americans return home?

"The book, Democracy in America, is, I think, the most useful book I know to help understand who we are. And he says, if I can summarize him in a rather gross form, that he came here and he found a society whose definitions and solutions were not created by nobility, by professionals, by experts or managers, but by what he identified as little groups of people, self-appointed, common men and women who came together and took three powers: the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem - that is, the expert’s power - and then the power to solve the problem.

These little groups of people weren’t elected and they weren’t appointed and they were everyplace, and they were, he said, the heart of the new society - they were the American community as distinct from the European community.

And he named these little groups “associations”. Association is the collective for citizens, an association of citizens.

And so we think of our community as being the social space in which citizens in association do the work of problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and creation - that community, that space, in contrast to the space of the system with the box at the top and lots of little boxes at the bottom.

And I think it is still the case that the hope for our time is in those associations."