Civic Renewal: The City on a Hill Revisited

The current shift from public to private, and from national to state-local initiative, is the latest in several such swings of the pendulum that can be traced through 350 years of American civic history. Those fluctuations have been sustainable in part because they were guided by important civic values, including a widely shared faith in progress and sense of responsibility. The dilution of those common values and the failure to replace them or to give them contemporary meaning have created a brittleness in the modern texture of community. A potential source of civic renewal lies in the experimentation by states and local communities seeking to improve public services, build consensus, and strengthen regional and local economies. Those efforts are likely to be most successful that supplement the rational techniques of conventional civic reform with a recognition of the importance of personal character and the spiritual dimension in civic life.