Nancy L. Rosenblum

Harvard Book Store welcomes NANCY L. ROSENBLUM, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University, for a discussion of her latest book, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America.

About  Good Neighbors

"Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings.

In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life—reciprocity, speaking out, and "live and let live"—comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant.

Praise

"Nancy Rosenblum is singular among philosophers in using her formidable analytical gifts to help us understand the gritty, personal questions we ordinary humans face every day--and she thereby respects what is extraordinary in all of us. Good Neighbors and its elevation of 'the democracy of everyday life' is a balm and a tonic but also a challenge at a moment when our politics is the antithesis of neighborliness." —E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Why the Right Went Wrong and Our Divided Political Heart

"Good Neighbors explores conditions of decency and its opposite, boundaries of membership, and crucial elements of order and disorder in ways that surprise, inform, and enlighten. In so doing, this fascinating, beautifully realized consideration of neighborliness offers a fresh vantage from which to consider key strengths and vulnerabilities in American democratic life." —Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time