What next?: The civic populist commonwealth
Harry C. Boyte
Platypus Review 191 | November 2026
Louis Althusser’s notion of humans as träger [carriers of larger forces] "sought exactly to impose this structure upon the working class, and, at the same time, to convince them that they were powerless to resist these 'immutable' laws."
— E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory [1]
TODAY, “POPULISM” AND “POPULIST” are mostly used pejoratively to mean demagogic political rhetoric that inflames mass hatred. I discovered a different meaning of populism on a hot day in St. Augustine in 1964. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., for whom I was working, told me he identified with populism after I recounted a conversation with a group of Ku Klux Klansmen who had caught me outside the jail and accused me of being a “communist Yankee.” I countered by saying I was a “southern populist,” believing poor whites should make common cause with blacks, and it got me out of trouble. King was expressing the view of populism he had gained from leaders and organizers like Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and A. Philip Randolph. Rustin and Randolph were democratic socialists shaped by the little-theorized populist movements of the 1930s. I used the phrase for self-preservation. It took me years to develop a deeper understanding. The following tells this story.
Socialism is advanced as the answer to today’s challenges. It claims adherents among young people and has achieved some electoral victories. Socialism has elements to commend it, including measures to tame unbridled markets and reverse growing concentrations of wealth. But the Democratic Socialists of America advances an us-versus-them politics, far from the inclusive spirit of “We the People” democracy. Like other strands of partisan politics, socialism has contributions to make as part of a tapestry of views, but it is unlikely to lead a process of broad social and economic change.
Here, I explore these problems by analyzing a recent socialist book widely read among today’s young activists: Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn’s The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism.[2] It is written with passion and verve, and describes the destructive forces shaping modern life that require attention. It raises relevant questions about how much electoral strategies can make substantial change alone and points to building a larger civic culture.
But it also suffers from the reductionist view of human beings at the heart of the socialist tradition: a form of “scientific” rationalism (understood narrowly) that strips people of their roots, spirituality, and relational grounding in living communities and traditions. As the book’s title suggests, it divides the people into “us” and “them” not only through uniform hostility to the wealthy but also by sorting people into ideological categories. This neglects the capacious alternative to socialism: civic populism. Such populism incorporates the strengths of democratic socialism into a pluralist, decentralizing, culturally grounded, democratic politics with a compelling vision of commonwealth.
Socialism
Tutt and Varn propose the concept of lumpenization, using The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies to describe this situation of large numbers: “the cumulative vulnerability of some groups of workers, combining precarious employment conditions with harmful physical and psychological working conditions.”[3] In a chapter relevant to today’s knowledge societies, they detail the predicament of knowledge workers whose “livelihoods rest not on the ownership of property but on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.” Tutt and Varn argue that this social grouping is “formed around an interest in avoiding proletarianization at all costs.”[4]
Finally, they argue that popular power is only weakly developed by electoral activity. They recall earlier socialist parties like the German Social Democratic Party which functioned “to break the worker out of the narrow economic struggle and teach [workers] the total scientific reality of capitalism” by connecting with “massive infrastructures — libraries, schools, sports clubs.” The party functioned “to create a distinct proletarian culture informed by socialist theory,” implying a range of education and organizing efforts beyond elections.[5]
These themes relate both to contemporary challenges and the approach needed to change them. The problem in Tutt and Varn’s approach is what Thompson called “the poverty of theory.”[6]
In 1981, I made this case in an essay for the journal Democracy, edited by the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, the historian of populism Lawrence Goodwyn, and the social critic and philosopher Christopher Lasch. The essay, “Populism and the Left,” compared populism and socialism.[7] My aim was not to dismiss Marxism as a tool of analysis but to surface an ironic contradiction at the heart of the socialist project.
The Left’s basic category, the working class, was one valuable way to describe the uprooting, the brutal conditions, and the dehumanizing experiences of people in modern society. Karl Marx called that “class in itself.” But Marx and other socialists also advanced a theory for changing society cloaked in the language of science — “class for itself.” It detached agency from culture, taking the anti-traditionalist legacy of the Enlightenment to new extremes. They assumed that uprooting in capitalist society is a tragic necessity and the precondition for emancipation. “Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the full-blown proletariat, it follows that the proletariat can and must free itself,” said Marx. For Friedrich Engels, “tradition is the great retarding force . . . but being merely passive is sure to be broken down.”[8]
Hostility toward cultural roots continues in progressive thought. There are exceptions, such as William Morris, a socialist who believed that traditions are full of democratic richness and was a leader in the arts and crafts movement. But their very rarity illustrates the broader pattern.[9] More generally, anti-traditionalism lay behind Michael Harrington’s vision of a “rational, humanist moral code” to replace traditional moral values. Ralph Miliband, leading socialist theorist in Great Britain and father of David Miliband and Ed Miliband, both foreign secretaries of the British Labour Party, expressed this view when he said, “The Marxist notion of a ‘most radical rupture’ . . . signifies a break with all forms of tradition and must expect to encounter the latter not as friend but as foe.”[10] To move from “class in itself” to “class for itself” requires intellectuals who teach uprooted cosmopolitanism as the “New Socialist Man” (later also Woman) alongside their dismissal of “the people” as an agent of democratic change.
The People Are Not One advances this view. Tutt and Varn signal their theory and strategy immediately, setting the stage for the book: “Marx identifies a profound disjunction between inherited political traditions and the exigencies of the present class struggle,” they argue. “Let the dead bury the dead . . . the task of socialist practice is not the ritual repetition of received formulas but a ruthless critique of those traditions that ‘weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’” Among the symptoms they see in today’s dysfunctional politics, “the most egregious is the growing tendency to conceive class struggle almost exclusively through a populist framework.”[11]
Tutt and Varn propose an effort to “guard against contamination” by professionals and their champions, who “will steal, plagiarize, and mimic” ideas from those building what they see as authentic class-for-itself consciousness.[12] For the working class to achieve more than trade union consciousness they advocate a “coherent and rigorous application of the merger thesis,” bringing together socialist intellectuals and civic institutions. “The merger between these two movements [intellectuals and civic institutions] is necessary for the revolution to succeed. . . . The socialist party acts as the laboratory where this fusion occurs.”[13]
The supposedly scientific theory of “class for itself” is something removed from the lives of everyday people, imposed on them by intellectuals. It does not use the language of the commonwealth, the main resource for Americans imagining a future beyond state-centered socialism and rapacious capitalism.
The strategy of “class for itself” is mobilizing, not organizing. As the sociologist William Kornhauser put it, “the people who become atomized readily become mobilized.” Frances Piven and Richard Cloward’s book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail is a widely cited statement of this position.[14]
Civic populism is a contrasting approach based on organizing people in their complexity. Civic populists like Jane Addams, the settlement house leader; Father Geno Baroni, a pioneer of community organizing; and black organizers and educators like Ella Baker saw every tradition as having both democratic and authoritarian elements. Organizing, not mobilizing, discerns and develops democratic possibilities. It creates a bottom-up politics skeptical of expert claims and different from know-nothing anti-intellectualism.[15] Baroni’s work illustrates this argument.[16]
Geno Baroni grew up in the “Catholic New Deal” of Western Pennsylvania. He was passionately concerned with bridging the racial gap between blacks and white ethnics. He knew how to organize for power and had deep respect for the democratic potentials of American cultures. Baroni became a Catholic priest in 1956 and served in ethnic working-class parishes before being transferred to an inner-city African American parish in Washington. He was the Catholic coordinator for the 1963 March on Washington. In the late sixties, Baroni argued for a third way in politics: “the new populism.” The new populism was to be different from universalist liberalism, which focused on rights and redistribution and was contemptuous of white ethnics and neo-conservatism’s Burkean perspective. This is how Baroni described organizing:
The organizer has to believe that ordinary people can build bridges across racial and ethnic lines. The organizer has to get ordinary people in touch with their roots, their heritage, their best. The organizer has to give ordinary people hope.
Baroni organized the Campaign for Human Development in the Catholic Church, the leading funder of organizing work to empower poor and working people. He founded the National Center of Urban Ethnic Affairs, which worked with ethnic groups. He understood that the government, with policies advanced by both main parties, can be an empowering partner for communities and lay citizens, acting as neither the enemy nor the solution. Baroni was instrumental in policies like the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required banks to make public their lending practices, and Community Development Block Grants.
The differences between socialism and civic populism are clear in their approaches to large public issues like climate change and the Great Depression.
The Green New Deal
On February 7, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey introduced a resolution in Congress for a “Green New Deal.”[17] Its state-centered politics reflects the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. It also reflected a top-down approach. It argued that World War II and the New Deal were “Federal Government-led mobilizations.” It proposed “a new national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” As Bruce Porter puts it in his book War and the Rise of the State, war produces a process of centralization with the aim of crushing internal opposition impeding mobilization. It deepens divisions, generates policy gridlock, and disempowers the people.[18]
The alternative
The alternative paradigm of politics draws on the language and vision of the commonwealth. In American history, democratic movements have regularly expressed capacious and pluralist visions in this language, again and again inspiring an inclusive democratic alternative to state-centered socialism and unbridled capitalism alike. In America, the term combines popular government with creation and care of local “commons.” This resonates across American history.[19]
The movements of the Great Depression serve as examples. The most far-reaching commonwealth proposals for change differed from socialist platforms. In Minnesota, for instance, the 1934 “Commonwealth Platform” of the Farmer-Labor Party called for replacement of capitalism with a cooperative commonwealth including a state-owned bank and public utilities. But it also placed a strong emphasis on protecting small farms and small businesses.
The New Deal passed legislation like the Wagner Act, which protected the right of workers to organize unions. It included measures that decentralized power and authority, like the Farm Security Administration, winning support from advocates of decentralization and evolving through interactions with self-organized movements among workers, rural communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and educators.
In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) and the cross-partisan educational and cultural Farmer-Labor Association (FLA) were at the heart of the movement that illustrated pluralism and cultural roots.[20] The association grew out of the Nonpartisan League across the upper Midwest.[21] It had parallels with local networks which formed the base of earlier socialist movements, but participants in the FLA were far more diverse, including Scandinavian socialists, rural populists, trade unionists, temperance activists, and conservative German Catholics. Educational and cultural activities were designed to intentionally encourage common purpose.
The FLA organized an enormous network of ward and neighborhood clubs which met regularly to study issues like monopolies, taxation, banking reform, and public ownership of utilities; they also studied the dangers of the rising fascist movements. At its peak, almost 40,000 dues-paying members were in the FLA, and tens of thousands more participated in its activities. It ran workshops on cooperatives, fighting evictions, counteracting foreclosures, and organizing the unemployed. The FLA sponsored dances, rallies, and multi-ethnic gatherings. Music was a constant presence. Local clubs staged theatrical performances which dramatized the struggles of Iron Range miners, timber workers, and farm families fighting corporate monopolies. The FLA brought traditions of Minnesota's immigrant populations into Minnesota’s political culture.
Popular movements like the FLA set the pace for democratic reform in the 1930s. As Eric Foner argued in The Story of American Freedom, “It was the Popular Front, not the mainstream Democratic Party, that forthrightly sought to popularize the idea that the country’s strength lay in diversity and tolerance, a love of equality, and a rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege.”[22] Meanwhile, government programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps emphasized not only jobs and tangible public outcomes but also the participation of the people in the public work of the New Deal. This participatory quality of public work programs generated the conviction that average citizens helped to “make it,” as Lizabeth Cohen details in Making a New Deal.[23]
My path to civic populism
In 1971, I co-founded an organization called the New American Movement, aimed at advancing a democratic socialist politics and bringing the student movement “back home” to the country. Previously working with people in a mill village in Durham, North Carolina for seven years was a formative influence. After my encounter with the KKK, Reverend King encouraged me to organize in a poor white community. I was heartened by their interests in allying with blacks and struck by how much they shattered the stereotypes about “rednecks” which I regularly heard from Left-wing faculty and students at Duke. The contrast produced my abiding skepticism about ideological politics on the Left as well as the Right. I saw the power when community organizing became not simply about bread-and-butter issues — schools, housing, jobs — but also expanding the meaning of “We the People.”
In 1972, I published “Revolution and Democracy,” co-authored with Frank Ackerman. The pamphlet was described as an unofficial manifesto for NAM.[24] We challenged the interest in Leninism spreading among many veterans of the 1960s. The text was printed and distributed by the New England Free Press — a Boston-based radical publishing collective — and published in the journal Socialist Revolution in 1973. We explicitly rejected the rigid, highly centralized Leninist model of organization, arguing it was radically inappropriate for late 20th-century America. Instead, we advocated for a decentralized, open, and democratic alternative. The piece sought to refocus the American Left on the material interests, daily struggles, and cultural lives of the domestic working class rather than aligning with Third World liberation movements.
Two themes continued to shape my thinking. First, I was convinced that radicals need to have deep respect for the intelligence, talents, and civic commitments of everyday people regardless of their partisan views. We wrote, “To understand other people, we understand ourselves not as ‘outside cadre,’ but as people with the same kinds of lives and problems as those we would ‘organize.’”[25]
We also used the concept of “free spaces,” which I had conceived when studying the lack of unionization among Southern textile workers. I realized almost all social spaces — schools, civic groups, and even churches — were controlled by the owners. This contrasted dramatically with what I had read in E.P. Thompson’s book about the development of the English working class. “The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all,” wrote Thompson. “But the chapel, the tavern, and their home were their own. In the ‘unsteepled’ places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments.”[26] Sara Evans and I saw many parallels with spaces we had experienced in the Civil Rights Movement, such as churches, community groups, and beauty parlors, where there was “room for free intellectual life and democratic experiences.” People learned public skills and habits, developed confidence, and drew on democratic themes in American culture to develop a broad vision of commonwealth democracy.[27]
Marxist critics, such as Marlene Dixon of the League for Proletarian Socialism, attacked us for trying to synthesize revolutionary spirit with reformist democratic systems. They argued that NAM’s stance turned its members into “sideline critics” rather than disciplined revolutionary leaders.[28] Academic Marxists criticized us for “vulgar” class mapping. They contended that grouping a massive, diverse percentage of the population into the working class masked deep structural differences and hindered proletarian consciousness.
But we could see that a broad, flexible, democratic approach was bearing fruit. Local NAM chapters organized community coalitions, became active in neighborhoods, started cooperatives, began small publishing companies, and became involved in union organizing. NAM also had a vital cultural and intellectual life.
I began to write about neighborhood organizing, environmental activism, working women’s groups, and citizen action spreading across the country, calling this “the new populism.” My book on organizing in the 1970s, The Backyard Revolution, incorporated conservative criticism of top-down, technocratic government interventions and argued that some “mediating institutions,” a widely used conservative term, had or could develop free space qualities.[29]
I asked how democratic socialists could be involved in the populist ferment; in July 1978, I wrote a piece for Socialist Review in which I proposed NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) merge. DSOC was organized by Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America, and colleagues. They had broken away from the old Socialist Party. NAM was from the 1960s “New Left” movement and opposed to Old Left groups like DSOC which had developed a strong relationship with trade unions and a strategy of working within the Democratic Party. Years of debate and controversy ended when both merged into Democratic Socialists of America.[30]
I was puzzled about the resistance I found among progressive editors and intellectuals toward community efforts. Some were convinced that electoral politics was the singular path to change. Others were skeptical about white ethnics — Poles, Irish, Italian, German, and others — and religious groups in community organizations. They could not believe my stories about cross-racial, cross-partisan alliances.
It seemed to me that a paradigmatic skepticism about “traditional communities” was at work. I had long conversations with Lawrence Goodwyn about his reconceptualization of American populism, Democratic Promise,[31]and convinced him that the free spaces in farmers’ cooperatives were the foundations of the Populist Party. He convinced me that the democratic populist tradition in America represented an indigenous American “third way,” neither state-centered socialism nor unbridled capitalism.
By the time of the NAM-DSOC merger, I was a civic populist, again rattling my colleagues on the Left and opening a new stage of my career around the question: How do we organize free spaces, democratic culture, and populist politics in a radically changing world?
Rebuilding the commonwealth
The People Are Not One suggests useful ideas, like organizing in local communities to build centers of power. But it assumes that rupture is inevitable. By contrast, a civic populist movement today is a cultural politics that brings people together. The concept of civic organizing emerged during the early years of our civic engagement through the Humphrey Institute. We began in 1987 with the aim of revitalizing the public spirit, free space qualities, and civic identity of local institutions — qualities which I had seen in the Civil Rights Movement.[32]
We used the idea of everyday “citizen politics,” cross-partisan problem solving, and the creation of common goods that required negotiating differences — a politics different from partisanship. Citizen politics was adapted from the most effective community organizing I studied: the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) network.[33] We saw in practice that such politics could revitalize the free spaces in local institutions and the civic identities of professionals.
I was especially taken with the effort of a black church-based community organization in New York: East Brooklyn Churches (EBC), affiliated with IAF. They built thousands of homes and found support across the region when they named their effort “the Nehemiah Project.” It is noteworthy that the new encyclical by Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, calls for the Nehemiah way as the path to taming the dangers of artificial intelligence and other threats. It contrasts the bottom-up, pluralist approach of Nehemiah with the Biblical story of Babel, a top-down effort that sought to impose uniformity on a multitude of peoples.[34] Magnifica Humanitas lays out the challenge before us.
We will join as a pluralist “We the People” to reclaim and rebuild our commonwealth, or we will see increasingly centralized power in tech companies and governments marginalizing the people.
In the words of the Civil Rights song: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Nobody else is going to rescue us.” |P
[1] E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 147.
[2] Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn, The People Are Not One (Oulu, Finland: Revol Press, 2026).
[3] Tutt and Varn, The People Are Not One, 49.
[4] Ibid, 20, 29.
[5] Ibid, 54.
[6] Thompson, The Poverty of Theory.
[7] Harry Boyte, “Populism and the Left,” Democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, Vol. 2, (April, 1981), 53-66. I had extensive interaction with the editors. Lasch wrote to say he was shifting from socialism to populism because of my essay. See the Lasch archives at the University of Rochester.
[8] Marx’s “abstraction of all humanity” quoted from David McClellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 19730, p. 96; Karl Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1956), 52-53; Friedrich Engels, On Historical Materialism,” in “On Historical Materialism,” in Lewis Feuer, Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 66.
[9] For another exceptional case, Eric Lee, The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co, 2025).
[10] Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 291; Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 44.
[11] Tutt and Varn, People Are Not One, 3-4.
[12] Ibid., 66.
[13] Ibid., 53.
[14] William Kornhauser, “The Politics of Mass Society,” ed. Marvin E. Olsen, Power in Societies (New York: Macmillan, 1970, 406. Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
[15] I wrote a working paper for the Kettering Foundation, “Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert” (Kettering, 2009) out of my experience of the “knowledge war” during the 2008 election when I served as the co-chair of the Civic Engagement Policy Subcommittee of the Obama campaign. Our subcommittee enlisted a cross-partisan group of intellectuals, community organizers, and civic leaders. <https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED510128>.
[16] This treatment of Baroni is adapted from Harry Boyte, “Civic Populism – The People’s Politics of Geno Baroni,” The Solutions Journal (February 22, 2016), <https://thesolutionsjournal.com/civic-populism-the-peoples-politics-of-geno-baroni/>.
[17] U.S. Congress, House, Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, H. Res. 109, 116th Cong., 1st sess., introduced February 7, 2019, <https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109>.
[18] Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994).
[19] For treatments as well as different formulations, see Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989); Boyte, “Higher Education and the Commonwealth,” The Good Society Vol. 33, No. 1 (2024), 9-24; Boyte, “Revitalizing the American Commonwealth,” National Civic Review Vol. 114, No. 2 (Summer, 2025).
[20] For a good short treatment of the party and FLA see Thomas O’Connell, “Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party,” Minnesota Historical Society (July 8, 2016); also Harry Boyte, The Citizen Solution,Chapter Four, “A History of Adventurous Experiment,” (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2009).
[21] For a detailed account of the populist Nonpartisan League, see Michael Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[22] Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,1998), 212-13.
[23] Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[24] Tiago Mata, “Radical Economics as Journalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics Vol 5, No. 2 (1918).
[25] Harry Boyte and Frank Ackerman, “Revolution and Democracy,” Socialist Revolution No. 16 (1973), 65, 67.
[26] I first developed the idea of what I called “autonomous social spaces” in Harry Boyte, “Textile Industry: Keel of Southern Industrialization,” Radical America Vol. 6, No. 2 (1972), 4-49. Thompson quoted from E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class (New York: Penguin Random House 1963), 156.
[27]Sara Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2nd edition with response to critics, 1992).
[28] Marlene Dixon, In Defense of Leninism: A Critique of Social Democracy, pamphlet (San Francisco: League for Proletarian Socialism, 1977).
[29] Harry Boyte, Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple Press, 1980).
[30] Harry Boyte, “Building the Democratic Movement: Prospects for a Socialist Renaissance,” Socialist Review 1978. Here is an account by Richard Healey, co-chair of the NAM Negotiating Committee:
In July 1978, Socialist Review ran a major article by Harry Boyte, in which he urged that NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) merge. This idea had surfaced before, but this was more serious: Boyte was one of the founders of NAM and a long-time national leader. Even more, he put his money where his mouth was — he became a member of both organizations, and also a member of DSOC's National Board. Nonetheless, few of us took the idea of merger with DSOC seriously; we were too different. . . . Imagine our surprise when Jack Clark, DSOC National Director, called us at our National Office in January of 1979 to say that he and Jim Chapin and others in their leadership had decided to offer a resolution "to explore the possibility of merger with NAM" at their National Convention in February.
Richard Healey, “Toward Merger,” Moving On: Newsletter of New American Movement, September 1981, pp 11-12.
[31] Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
[32] This history is detailed in Albert Dzur, “Professions, Democracy, and Civic Engagement: A Conversation with Harry Boyte,” National Civic Review Vol. 8, No. 1 (2019); see also the detailed account in Harry Boyte and Nan Kari, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
[33] See Harry Boyte, CommonWealth.
[34] Leo XIV, “Introduction, section 8,” Magnifica Humanitas (May 15, 2026), <https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html>.
