The origins of organizing: an intellectual history

Book section : Chapter

We begin by excavating the philosophical and historical origins of community organizing. Giving this chapter the subtitle “an intellectual history” is something of a conceit, as community organizing is a set of practices rather than ideas. Nevertheless, the different sections of this chapter identify and discuss the key traditions out of which community organizing emerged and which directly shaped its practice and political vision. These traditions are populism, Judaism, the labor movement, and Christianity, with crucial insights being formulated through interaction with urban sociology, organized crime, Communism, and later, a broadly Aristotelian conception of politics. It was not just a relationship with different traditions of belief and practice that was important, but also how these traditions interacted with each other in a particular context: that of modern urban life and the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization that shaped it. The central character in this history is the figure of Saul Alinsky [Figure 1.1]. The main thesis is that Alinsky’s approach to community organizing represents one of the most important forms of contemporary democratic politics available for two reasons. The first is that it addresses a primary problem apparent in most other forms of political mobilization and political theory; that is, it prioritizes social relationships and refuses to subordinate these relations to political or economic imperatives. The second is it constitutes a means of enabling ruled and rulers to arrive at political judgments together.

Authors: Bretherton, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Host title: Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life
• Pages: 21 - 56
• Chapter number: 1
• Place of publication: New York, USA
• Publication date: 2014-12-18
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139343442.003
• EISBN: 9781139343442
• ISBN: 9781107641969
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter