Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education [Paperback]

Danielle Allen seems to be everywhere these days. From writing in academic journals such as POLITICAL THEORY to composing magazine pieces for THE NATION and THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR to various media appearances to reading personal works of poetry, Allen has rapidly become one of the leading young scholars in North America. Though young in age, her wisdom transcends any youthful categorizations. I resist labeling Allen a public intellectual as that phrase carries with it the aura of elite narcissism. Against the narcissistic tendency unfortunately prevalent among prominent academics, Allen represents what I call a "people's intellectual." A people's intellectual is an individual determined to take political theory, thought, and engaging ideas to the streets. This commitment to exposing theorists in academia as well as citizens in general to original thought-work is why I and many others are excited about Allen's current endeavors. Toni Morrison, Bonnie Honig, and Earl Shorris correctly point out that Allen is a worldly Rawls who meditates on our most pressing domestic and global questions by composing works that are part how-to-manuals, part political theory, and wholeheartedly possessing the goal of achieving Copernican insight by shifting our gaze regarding how we conceive of issues such as citizenship, race, trust, sacrifice, recognition, cosmopolitanism, and the future of democracy in these dark times.

Allen's first book dealt with the politics of punishing in democratic Athens. In TALKING TO STRANGERS, Allen bridges her expertise in ancient political thought with modern and contemporary political theory in order to address the role and anxieties of citizenship in the wake of the 1954 US Brown v. Board of Education decision. Specters of the late Ralph Waldo Ellison hover around the text as does the thought of thinkers such as Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and James Baldwin. Interestingly, like Ellison in INVISIBLE MAN, Allen begins her work with a "Prologue." Unlike Ellison's unnamed narrator who reflects from the underground on the question of one's invisibility in society while physically being hyper-visible, Allen writes from above the ground and goes into the messy recent past of America to think about why people who see one another day to day simultaneously distrust one another and refuse to talk to one another in the mode of friends.

Drawing upon the prominent 1957 case of Elizabeth Eckford and school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, the author argues the US was reconstituted at that moment. That moment of reconstitution serves as the foundation upon which the ensuing discussions about distrust, trust, and political friendship occur. For Allen, the dilemmas of race and citizenship should be viewed as issues of distrust and trust. By calling for a "politics of friendship," the author thinks those in the American polity and elsewhere can overcome perennial states of distrust. By building up states of trust, the fabric underneath which democracy rests will be strengthened. We must talk to strangers if we desire truly to work through our most pressing problems. Rejecting the call for talking to strangers as mere utopianism is simply not good enough. Talking to strangers is hard work, and it ironically goes against the advice of "Don't talk to strangers!" given to children by their parents and other adult figures. But the hard work of talking to strangers holds the promise of societal transformation.

So what does this book provide the reader with? I believe Allen's book offers seven major contributions to political theory, critical race theory, and democratic politics: (1) a theory of political friendship; (2) a novel concept of sacrifice; (3) rethinking of the meaning of constitutionalism; (4) original analysis of the benefits and limitations of Habermas's theory of communicative action in terms of trust; (5) brilliant critique of Thomas Hobbes; (6) critique of the police state; and (7) resuscitation of the art of Rhetoric. I do not have the space to explain each of these points. However, I do want to address briefly a selection of them. Sacrifice occupies a central place in the text and in Allen's current theorizing. She contends loss and sacrifice are fundamental to democratic life. Understanding what we must sacrifice to achieve political and social transformation allows us insight into understanding to what extent we must fight to preserve democracy. In Chapter 3, Allen turns to the important debate between political theorist Hannah Arendt and the novelist Ralph Ellison. By describing Ellison's critique of Arendt's position on Little Rock desegregation, Allen highlights the vital role of sacrifice and why one should not separate political and social issues. That chapter is a gem. Allen's discussion of Hobbes in Chapter 6 provides a very unique reading of the English social contract theorist. Hobbes supported the idealization of unanimity and the repudiation of rhetoric in his theory of the Leviathan. Sovereignty for Hobbes rests in the figure of an all powerful Sovereign as opposed to the People. The Sovereign for him settled issues of distrust, not the masses. Allen questions Hobbes's way of imagining the People, yet she recognizes that Hobbes does put forth the question of how to overcome distrust.

This leads me to my last point on the topic of rhetoric. Chapter 10 as well as the Epilogue advance Allen's claim that we must return to the use of the art of rhetoric, an art form repudiated for centuries. Allen's reading of Aristotle's highly neglected text, THE ART OF RHETORIC, delineation of how to use rhetoric to garner heightened trust, and Epilogue discussion in which the reader witnesses the author composing a letter to members of the Faculty Senate of the University she resides in now compel even the skeptic of rhetoric to consider its possible benefits. For those interested in how I have utilized Allen's theorizing on rhetoric for Caribbean political thought, see the end of my 2003 lecture entitled, "Walter Rodney's Heresy" (...)

I shall leave it to you the reader to judge the text for itself. In closing, if you are committed to transforming democracy, then I urge you to pick up this book.

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education concerns the importance of trust and vulnerability in a functional democracy, and how these two qualities manifest in the extra-legal customary habits of citizenship.

The author, Danielle Allen, takes a fifty year old iconic picture, the picture of young black Elizabeth Eckford being shouted down by a angry white mob as she entered Central High School in 1957 Arkansas, as the point of departure for her treatment of the extra-legal habits of citizenship. Allen's point was that though this picture was taken five years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the difference between the changing of a law and the changing of the attitudes of a people is strikingly important.

Allen's main argument is that we need to rethink the importance of our political habits of speech and friendship, and think carefully about how casual we are with the losing side of any political debate. The "winner-take-all" mentality is antithetical to the virtues of democracy, and breeds anger and resentment that's not easily or rightfully assuaged. If nothing else, the book got me to realize the importance of saying, "Hello" to people on the street.

It's an important; best read and discussed with a friend. Don't miss this if you are concerned about the state of democracy, schooling, or our climate of civility. Deborah Meier

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