Why Big Civics?
In his Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans were, in today’s language, highly communitarian. They were lightly governed, but the absence of a ubiquitous government to manage their affairs did not result in chaos or despair born of having no one in charge. This fostered a free-thinking culture in America because Americans got used to making their own choices and speaking their minds. Of their own volition, our free-thinking American ancestors did what had to be done out of concern for each other and not because they were told to do so by government officials.
Big Civics helps students avoid the mistake of equating “society” with “government” by showing how in America, for a very long time, citizens voluntarily worked together to do most of the hard, meaningful, and rewarding work of society. They organized volunteer fire stations paid for with bake sales and church dances; took care of the orphaned, the sick, and the elderly through fraternal organizations; and created most of our early schools. They did all of this and much more.
Starting with the idea of civil society helps students see how good government works. In addition to obvious things like national defense, good government provides indispensable support for the behavior that fills the private realm of civil society. Government does this by, for example, enforcing property rights, enforcing contracts, combatting criminal behavior, and otherwise providing order not through power wielded by elected kings but through the rule of law.
In the non-government (private sector) part of civil society, two very important things were and are at work that are overlooked in conventional civic education, but not in Big Civics. The market system led to decentralized activities in the private sector being efficient from society’s point of view by forcing free-acting persons to pay the full social opportunity cost of resources. At the same time, entrepreneurs directed behavior instead of government, but that meant such direction had to be voluntary in nature, and therefore entrepreneurs could only organize activities if they could benefit everyone involved. How great is that!
This is all very interesting but very complicated. The Big Civics approach doesn’t shy away from this critical material, however. Instead, it employs what we call a natural history approach. Content is introduced along the timeline of social development beginning with hunter-gatherer bands. This makes everything easier, more engaging, and more comprehensible because the farther we go back in time, the simpler societies are and therefore the easier it is to understand how they work. Complication is overcome by adding it bit by bit, just as in history institutions and organizations didn’t poof into existence. They were built in small steps overtime.