Publics in Action: The Self-Making of Civic Life (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Abstract: What does it mean for something to be public? It’s not always clear what this ever-important word means. Are we using the same idea of “public” when we talk about public education, or public safety, or public works? And how should we think about ourselves as members of “the public”? Who belongs to the public? There are many different groups to consider: citizens and non-citizens who work and live together, the people of future generations, people in other countries who are affected by the gases we pump into our atmosphere. What “public” means can get messy.

In Publics in Action, Christopher Kutz looks at how people should and do come together to create their shared institutions, and the lessons we can learn from one another. He argues that a healthy, dynamic public takes itself seriously as a subject of action, not just the passive beneficiary of a state institution. Kutz builds the book around an extended metaphor: we should understand ourselves as a public that improvises: listening to each other as we riff off shared standards and so creating something new, responsive to the scene and the moment.

Publics in Action makes use of the author’s extensive personal experience in public institutions, and in democracies around the world, with a particular focus on the U.S., represented primarily by California – arguably the world’s most successful multi-cultural democracy – as well as France, and Norway, each of which provides instructive models of healthy publics in action (and some examples of dysfunction). Merging political philosophy and comparative politics, this book will leave both lay and professional readers not only with an enlivened sense of the possibilities of public life, but with new ideas about how we might build the shared future we desperately need.